How can I find out how much a currency is traded?
"This is actually a fairly hard question to answer well as much of the currency trading that is done in financial markets is actually done directly with banks and other financial institutions instead of on a centralized market and the banks are understandably not always excited to part with information on how exactly they do their business.  Other methods of currency exchange have much, much less volume though so it is important to understand the trading through markets as best as possible. Some banks do give information on how much is traded so surveys can give a reasonable indication of relative volume by currency.  Note the U.S. Dollar  is by far the largest volume of currency traded partially because people often covert one currency to another in the markets by trading ""through"" the Dollar.  Wikipedia has a good explanation and a nicely formatted table of information as well."
I think it depends where you live in the world, but I guess the most common would be: Major Equity Indices I would say major currency exchange rate: And have a look at the Libors for USD and EUR. I guess the intent of the question is more to see how implicated you are in the daily market analysis, not really to see if you managed to learn everything by heart in the morning. It depends on the currency pair since it is much harder to move a liquid market like Fiber (EURUSD) or Cable (GBPUSD) than it is to move illiquid markets such as USDTRY, however, it will mostly be big banks and big hedge funds adjusting their positions or speculating (not just on the currency or market making but also speculating in foreign instruments). I once was involved in a one-off USD 56 million FX trade without which the hedge fund could not trade as its subscriptions were in a different currency to the fund currency. Although it was big by their standards it was small compared with the volumes we expected from other clients.  Governments and big companies who need to pay costs in a foreign currency or receive income in one will also do this but less frequently and will almost always do this through a nominated bank (in the case of large firms).  Because they need the foreign currency immediately; if you've ever tried to pay a bill in the US denominated in Dollars using Euros you'll know that they aren't widely accepted. So if I need to pay a large bill to a supplier in Dollars and all I have is Euros I may move the market. Similarly if I am trying to buy a large number of shares in a US company and all I have is Euros I'll lose the opportunity. That's a very interesting article, and something that I hadn't considered, but I have a hard time believing that the value of the dollar is really 1/4 of what it was just 15 years ago. Ounces of gold don't appreciate in ounces of gold, and you can't buy anything with them. Like it or now, gold isn't used as a currency, so its price at this time is primarily dictated by how much more that people expect its value to rise in USD. You will most likely not be able to avoid some form of format conversion, regardless of which data you use since there is, afaik, no standard for this data and everyone exports it differently. One viable option would be, like you said yourself, using the free data provided by Dukascopy. Please take into consideration that those are spot currency rates and will most likely not represent the rate at which physical and business-related exchange would have happened at this time. Venezuela is a command economy, and one that isn't doing terribly well right now, with rampant inflation in the several hundred percent range.  As such, they've tried to limit or eliminate exchanges between their currency and foreign currencies. Currently, they allow a limited amount of exchange at fixed rates (according to a Bloomberg article, those vary between 6.3, 13.5, and 200) for certain purchases, and then otherwise disallow exchange between the currencies.  However, there is a black market (illegal in Venezuela, but legal in the US) which allows the price to float, and is much higher - 800 or so according to that article from last year.  A recent Valuewalk article lists the black market rate at closer to 900, and slightly different official rates.  It's worth a read as it explains the different official rates in detail: Currently there are four exchange rates: First is the official one,   called CENCOEX, and which charges 6.30 bolivars to the dollar. It is   only intended for the importation of food and medicine. The next two exchange rates are SICAD I (12 bolivars per dollar) and   SICAD 2 (50 bolivars per dollar); they assign dollars to enterprises   that import all other types of goods. Because of the fact that US   dollars are limited, coupons are auctioned only sporadically; usually   weekly in the case of SICAD 1 and daily for SICAD 2. However, due to   the economic crisis, no dollars have been allocated for these foreign   exchange transactions and there hasn’t been an auction since August   18, 2015. As of November 2015, the Venezuelan government held only $16   billion in foreign exchange reserves, the lowest level in over ten   years, and an amount that will dry up completely in four years time at   the current rate of depletion. The last and newest exchange rate is the SIMADI, currently at 200   bolivars per dollar. This rate is reserved for the purchase and sale   of foreign currency to individuals and businesses. "Finding statistics is exceedingly hard, because the majority of traders lose money. That is, not only they don't ""beat the markets"", not only they don't ""beat the benchmark"" (S&P 500 being used a lot as reference): they just lose money. Finding exact numbers, quality statistics and so on is very difficult. Finding recent ones, is almost impossible. With enormous effort I have found two references that might help make an idea. One is very recent, Forex ""centered"" and has been prepared by a large finance group for the the Europen Central Bank (ECB). It's available on their website, at an obscure download location. The document is stated to be confidential, but its download location has been disclosed to the public by CNBC. I can't post CNBC's link because I have just joined this Stack Exchange portal so I don't have enough reputation. You can find it by looking for their article about FXCM Forex broker debacle due to the Swiss Central Bank removing the EUR/CHF peg at 1.20. The second is a 2009-ish paper about Taiwanese retail traders profitability statistics published by Oxford University Press and talks about stocks. Both documents focus on retail traders. I strongly suggest you to immediately save those documents because they tend to disappear after a while. We had a fantastic and complete statistics report made by a group of German Banks in 2011... they pulled it off in 2012." There are lots of good answers on here already.  There are actually lots of answers for this question.  Lots.  I have years of experience on the exchange feed side and there are hundreds and thousands of variables.   All of these variables are funneled into systems owned by large financial institutions (I used to manage these - and only a few companies in the world do this so not hard to guess who I work for).  Their computers then make trades based on all of these variables and equations.  There are variables as whacky as how many times was a company mentioned in an aggregate news feed down to your basic company financials.  But if there is a way to measure a company (or to just guess) there is an equation for it plugged into a super computer at a big bank. Now there are two important factors on why you see this mad dash in the morning: Now most of the rest of the day is also automated trades but by the time you are an hour into market open the computers for the most part have fulfilled their calendar buys.  Everyone else's answer is right too.  There is futures contracts that change, global exchange info changes, options expiring, basic news, whatever but all of these are amplified by the calendar day changing. There are various exchanges around the world that handle spot precious metal trading; for the most part these are also the primary spot foreign exchange markets, like EBS, Thomson Reuters, Currenex (website seems to be down), etc. You can trade on these markets through brokers just like you can trade on stock markets.  However, the vast majority of traders on these exchanges do not intend to hold any bullion ownership at the end of the day; they want to buy as much as they sell each day.  A minority of traders do intend to hold metal positions for longer periods, but I doubt any of them intend to actually go collect bullion from the exchange.  I don't think it's even possible. Really the only way to get bullion is to pay a service fee to a dealer like you mentioned.  But on an exchange like the ones above you have to pay three different fees: So in the end you can't even get the spot price on the exchanges where the spot prices are determined.  You might even come out ahead by going to a dealer. You should try to find a reputable dealer, and go in knowing the latest trade prices.  An honest dealer will have a website showing you the current trade prices, so you know that they expect you to know the prices when you come in. For example, here's a well-known dealer in Chicago that happily shows you the spot prices from KITCO so you can decide whether their service fee is worth it or not. "In practice, most (maybe all) stock indices are constructed by taking a weighted average of stock prices denominated in a single currency, and so the index implicitly does have that currency - as you suggest, US dollars for the S&P 500. In principle you can buy one ""unit"" of the S&P 500 for $2,132.98 or whatever by buying an appropriate quantity of each of its constituent stocks. Also, in a more realistic scenario where you buy an index via a tracker fund, you would typically need to buy using the underlying currency of the index and your returns will be relative to that currency - if the index goes up by 10%, your original investment in dollars is up by 10%." On 2012/05/18 at 15:34:00 UTC (11:34:00 EDT) FB was in chaos mode.  The most recent public US trade at that moment was at $40.94, but in the next one second (i.e. before the clock hit 15:34:01) there were several dozen trades as low as $40.76 and as high as $41.00. On 2012/05/30 at 17:21:00 UTC (13:21:00 EDT) the most recent public US trade for FB was at $28.28. No, there is nothing on the sidelines.       Currency is an investment. There is no such thing as uninvested wealth.       If you had a million in USD at the beginning of 2017, you would currently be out about sixty grand.        There is no neutral way to store wealth. Robert Shiller has an on-line page with links to download some historical data that may be what you want here. Center for the Research in Security Prices would be my suggestion for another resource here. The exchange rate between two currencies is simply the price that the most recent market participants were able to agree on, when trading. ie: if the USDCAD is 1.36, it's because the last trade that happened where someone bought 1 USD cost 1.36 CAD. There is no one person/organization which 'decides' the rate between two currencies. The rate moves you see is just the reality of money changing hands as people in various situations trade currencies for various reasons. Just like with stocks or any other market product, foreign exchange rates can fluctuate wildly based on many things. It is very difficult to forecast where rates will go, because the biggest changes in rates can often be unpredictable news events. For example, when Brexit happened, the value of the GBP plummeted relative to other currencies, because the market traders had less faith in the UK economy, and therefore weren't willing to pay as much to buy GBP. See more here: https://money.stackexchange.com/a/76482/44232. There is a very high level of risk in the foreign exchange market; for your sake, don't get involved in any trading that you do not well understand, first. An alternative to paying thousands of dollars for historical prices by the minute:  Subscribe to real time data for as low as USD$1.5/month from your broker, then browse the chart. Something like cost = a × avg_spreadb + c × volatilityd × (order_size/avg_volume)e. Different brokers have different formulas, and different trading patterns will have different coefficients.