Tick Volume vs Real Volume on Gold in MT5: What Those Volume Bars Really Show

The short answer

On a XAUUSD chart in MT5, the volume bars are almost always tick volume: the number of times the price changed during each bar. They do not count ounces, lots or dollars traded. Spot gold has no central exchange, so there is no complete record of real volume for your platform to show. MT5 has a separate “real volume” field, but for spot gold it is usually empty.

That does not make tick volume useless. More activity usually means more quote changes, so tick volume rises and falls with how busy gold is. Used as a rough activity meter, inside one feed, it can help you see when a move has energy behind it and when the market is asleep. Used as “how many people are buying”, it will mislead you.

Tick volume and real volume: what each one is

A tick is one change in the price quote. If XAUUSD moves from 4,115.20 to 4,115.25, that is one tick (see our tick glossary entry). Your platform builds every candle from these ticks.

MT5 stores two volume numbers for every bar. The MQL5 reference for the bar structure lists a tick_volume field (“tick volume”) and a separate real_volume field (“trade volume”). The MetaTrader 5 help says that for the forex market, the Volumes indicator is “the number of price changes” in each period, and that for stock symbols it shows actually traded volumes. In the indicator settings you choose which of the two it draws.

Our gold symbol names guide explains why the same “gold” can be a spot symbol on one platform and a futures contract on another. Only the futures contract carries exchange volume.

Why spot gold has no real volume

Most spot gold is traded over the counter (OTC): banks, bullion dealers and trading platforms deal with each other directly, mainly in London, instead of sending every order to one exchange. Nobody sees all of those trades in one place, so nobody can print a single “volume” figure for XAUUSD in real time.

Gold futures are different. The main contract, COMEX gold (GC), trades on an exchange, which reports every contract traded. That is why our volume profile lesson and volume profile tool use futures data, not tick volume.

So when your MT5 chart shows a green bar of 2,400 on a 15-minute XAUUSD candle, it means “the quote changed about 2,400 times in those 15 minutes on this feed”. Another feed might show 1,100 or 5,000 for the same 15 minutes. Both are correct for their own feed.

What our own data says: when gold really trades

To see whether the daily rhythm of activity is real, we looked at real exchange volume: hourly bars of COMEX gold futures (GC=F) from Yahoo Finance, the same hourly series our gold event pages use. The sample covers the 52 weekdays with recorded volume between 24 August and 4 November 2026 (1,144 hourly bars). Hours are in UTC. For most of that period New York was on daylight time, so 13:00 UTC was 9:00 am in New York and 18:30 in India.

Three things stand out:

1. The busiest hours (13:00 and 14:00 UTC) had about seven times the median volume of the quietest hours (20:00 and 23:00 UTC). Gold is not equally “alive” all day.
2. Volume and range move together. Across all 1,144 bars, the correlation between an hour’s volume and its high-low range was about 0.83. Busy hours are wide hours.
3. The Shanghai open at 01:00 UTC stands out in Asia, with more volume than the hours on either side.

Tick volume on a spot XAUUSD chart usually shows the same rhythm, because quotes change more when more trades hit the market. That is the useful part of tick volume: it tells you when the market is busy. Our when does gold move most tool shows the same pattern from two years of hourly ranges, in your own time zone.

How to read tick volume on a gold chart

Treat tick volume as a “how busy is it” meter. These readings are reasonable:

• Rising tick volume on a breakout bar. The price is changing fast and often. The move has activity behind it, so it is less likely to be a quiet drift through a level. It still does not tell you who is “winning”.
• Falling tick volume into a slow drift. Fewer updates while the price creeps in one direction often means a thin, quiet market. Moves like this can reverse easily when the busy hours return.
• A spike at a fixed time. A sudden tower of tick volume at 13:30 UTC on a data day is the release, not a big player. Our CPI event page shows how wide those release hours get.
• High tick volume with a small candle. Lots of price changes but no net progress: buyers and sellers are fighting. This often happens at important levels.

Common mistakes and the better way

A worked example

Say you trade a 15-minute XAUUSD chart. At 07:00 UTC (London open) the bars show tick volume of about 1,500 each, and gold breaks above the Asian high by $4 on a bar with tick volume of 3,200. At 20:00 UTC another break of $4 happens on a bar with tick volume of 600.

Both breaks moved $4. The London one came with more than double the normal activity of its session, in an hour that in our futures data has a median range of about $14. The late New York one came in one of the quietest hours, with a median range of about $9. Neither is a signal on its own, but the London break happened when the market was awake, so it deserves more attention. That is the realistic job tick volume can do. (The tick volume numbers in this example are made up for illustration; your feed’s numbers will differ.)

Tick volume and volume indicators

Many indicators use volume as an input: OBV, the Money Flow Index, volume-weighted average price (VWAP) and volume profile. On a spot XAUUSD chart in MT5 they all quietly use tick volume. Our test of OBV on gold used COMEX futures volume and still found that volume added little to a plain price rule, so be careful about expecting more from tick volume.

If volume is central to your method:

• Build your volume profile or VWAP from futures data (see our VWAP lesson and Wyckoff on gold), and use the futures-to-spot difference to map levels onto your chart.
• Keep tick volume as a session filter: avoid setups that need momentum in the hours when activity is lowest.
• Check the spread together with volume. MT5 bars also store a spread value, and the spread widens in thin hours and around news. Our guide to spread widening on gold explains when.

How to set it up in MT5

1. Open a XAUUSD chart and go to Insert, Indicators, Volumes, Volumes.
2. In the parameters, check which volume it uses. For spot gold choose tick volume; if you choose real volume and the histogram is empty, your feed has no exchange volume for that symbol.
3. On the mobile app, the chart settings have separate switches for volume and tick volume; MetaTrader’s help notes that real volume depends on the provider and is usually only there for exchange instruments.
4. Add a short moving average of volume in your head, or with an indicator, so you can tell “busy for this hour” from “quiet for this hour”. A bar is only high or low compared with what is normal at that time of day.
5. Note the hour of every trade in your trading journal together with whether volume was rising or falling. After 30 or more trades you will see whether volume actually helps your method.

What to do now

• Remember the one-line rule: tick volume = how often the price changed, not how much gold traded.
• Use the when does gold move most tool to see the busy and quiet hours in your own zone, and line them up with the market hours tool.
• If you want real volume, learn volume profile on gold, which is built on exchange data.
• Read spot gold vs gold futures to understand why the two charts differ.
• New to MT5? The MT5 gold errors guide covers the other things that confuse traders on day one.

Sources

• MQL5 Reference: MqlRates structure (tick_volume and real_volume fields)
• MetaTrader 5 Help: Volumes indicator
• MetaTrader 5 iPhone/iPad Help: chart settings (volume and tick volume switches)
• XAUUSD Global analysis of COMEX gold futures (GC=F) 1-hour bars via Yahoo Finance, weekdays with recorded volume, 24 August to 4 November 2026 (1,144 bars; medians of contracts per hour and high-low range by UTC hour; Pearson correlation of hourly volume and range)

Educational content only, not financial advice. Trading gold with leverage carries a high risk of loss.

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