Hi All, I have been trading full time for 2 years now and still in the learning curve and have in the last 6 months found a trading plan that suits me using Supply and Demand as a fundamental to my trading and is showing a steady profit all be it on a modest 5k account.
I would like to increase my trading knowledge and trading accuracy and develop another plan by adding in volumes to where market consolidates(also known as ranges/accumulation/distribution etc). In Forex my understanding of volume is that we only know how many trades not how much has been traded, also can see divergence but is generally hit and miss. I have read Wycoff and understand the spring theory and the volumes associated with that particular set up. Although with this theory can also mislead you into a wrong direction, have seen to many times where a spring has returned to consolidation area only to keep going in the same direction.
If anyone can tell me or point me in the right direction of understanding volumes to help me give an indication of market direction would be helpful, all of my studies and testing has shown this to be unhelpful in using as an indicator at this moment in time and do feel I am missing some knowledge.
Beware of depending on brokers’ volume figures in forex. Brokers may issue real-time data on trades taken by their clients, but that’s the problem, its just their clients’ trades.
Assuming most of their clients are private retail traders, and knowing that most active private retail traders are losing money, then its hard to see this data as being very helpful.
I have cross reference different brokers to check for inconsistencies and they are generally similar however that could work for or against me.
If brokers clients are retail and losing maybe that could be a clue as to which way the market could go? But then again maybe just to random.
It is easy to see that if the tick volume was high and the candle was bullish that it would indicate more buyers and the reverse could also be true. However how does this help knowing that?
i agree completely
this is one of the reasons i trade currency futures rather than spot forex, because volume isn’t available for spot forex
it’s a decentralized market, so the only so-called “volume figures” a broker can give you are their own volume, as mentioned by Tommor just above - and that’s useless to me and doesn’t relate to any real market
what you’re missing is some information - namely volume, as it doesn’t exist in the spot forex market! 
it doesn’t help me
Private retail trader volume data is also displayed by some brokers as “client sentiment” or suchlike. If you go to somewhere like Dailyfx.com they completely frankly say they use client sentiment as a negative indicator for trading - so if there is a high majority of clients long, Dailyfx recommend considering going short…
So maybe this is useful evidence - but - just not in the textbook way.
Bear in mind almost every basic rule in trading came from stock trading, not forex.
Thanks your answer did make me smile about the missing knowledge, sometimes the answer is that their is no answer and maybe I have gone as far as I need to go down this road.
Are you able to advise how difficult the transition would be to change to futures knowing I trade using supply and demand?
Thanks Tommor it would seem that I am in the wrong market if I want to use Volume as an indicator.
i don’t see any reason why it should be difficult, but you need to be aware that futures require more capital available, mostly because of the position-sizing considerations
there are micros available for the US indices futures, but not for currencies, so you need to be able to trade a full lot, within good risk-management parameters, to switch to futures
with currency futures, the only “smaller” one realistically available is a half-sized Euro/USD one, but its liquidity is poor
so “available capital” is the main consideration, i’d say - the rest doesn’t produce problems; when i made the switch, i regretted not having done so earlier than i did, and i see many people saying the same
the “constant factor” in the game is that (as far as i know) nobody who switches from spot forex to currency futures ever switches back - but you do need a bigger account-size to do it
i can make no helpful or specific comment in response to your “supply and demand” observation, really, because long experience has taught me that in the context of forex trading, different people mean very different things by this (the imbalance between “buying pressure” and “selling pressure” is, to my mind, a much better way of looking at that, because “supply and demand” are not strictly speaking relevant to betting against a counterparty anyway)