Key Takeaways
- • Binance data for Monday 19 October shows spot BTCUSDT traded 12,792 BTC across 2.63M trades, while perpetual futures traded 128,211 BTC across 2.86M trades, roughly a tenfold volume gap despite near-identical trade counts.
- • Hourly correlation between trade count and traded volume was 0.80 on spot and 0.94 on the perpetual, so trade count is a loose proxy for real volume.
- • Spot example: the 03:00 UTC hour printed 2.3x more trades than the 13:00 hour but traded 18% less bitcoin (692 BTC vs 566 BTC).
- • Tick volume carries no aggressor side; spot delta was +1,374 BTC and perpetual delta +2,919 BTC, agreeing on direction in only 16 of 24 hours.
- • The author's conclusion for CFD traders: tick volume suits gauging busy versus quiet periods and session timing, but not absorption, delta divergence, or big-lot footprint analysis.
Summary
An educational piece published on TradingView by the account AKORDERFLOW2 argues that the volume bar shown beneath XAUUSD and other CFD or spot-FX instruments is typically tick volume, which counts the number of price changes at a given broker rather than contracts or units actually traded. Exchange-traded futures, such as CME Gold (GC) and Micro Gold (MGC), and crypto exchanges publish real traded volume along with the side of the aggressor.
To illustrate the gap without access to a CFD feed, the author used Binance's per-candle trade count as a stand-in for a tick counter and compared it with real traded volume for BTCUSDT on 19 October, using 1-hour UTC candles. Spot recorded 12,792 BTC across 2.63 million trades, while perpetual futures recorded 128,211 BTC across 2.86 million trades. The author notes that counting prints would suggest the two markets were roughly equal, whereas real volume shows the perpetual market was about ten times larger.
The relationship between trade count and volume was positive but imperfect. Hourly correlation measured 0.80 on spot and 0.94 on the perpetual. In one spot example, the 03:00 hour traded 692 BTC in 82,475 trades, while the 13:00 hour traded 566 BTC in 193,276 trades, meaning 2.3 times more prints but 18% less bitcoin. Average trade size ranged between roughly 0.003 and 0.008 BTC through the day.
The author also highlights that tick volume contains no information on trade direction. Real delta, defined as taker buys minus taker sells, requires exchange data. On the day, spot delta was +1,374 BTC and perpetual delta +2,919 BTC, and the two agreed on direction in only 16 of 24 hours; at 15:00, for instance, spot showed +167 BTC while the perpetual showed -493 BTC. For CFD users, the author concludes that tick volume is useful for distinguishing busy from quiet trading and for session timing, but should not be used to read absorption, delta divergence or big-lot footprints. For gold, the recommended approach is to derive levels such as point of control, value area and VWAP from futures volume and map them onto the CFD price, treating the difference between GC and XAUUSD as a carry-driven basis rather than a structural change. The piece is presented as education rather than a trading signal, and references a free TradingView indicator for BTCUSDT built on Binance volume.
To illustrate the gap without access to a CFD feed, the author used Binance's per-candle trade count as a stand-in for a tick counter and compared it with real traded volume for BTCUSDT on 19 October, using 1-hour UTC candles. Spot recorded 12,792 BTC across 2.63 million trades, while perpetual futures recorded 128,211 BTC across 2.86 million trades. The author notes that counting prints would suggest the two markets were roughly equal, whereas real volume shows the perpetual market was about ten times larger.
The relationship between trade count and volume was positive but imperfect. Hourly correlation measured 0.80 on spot and 0.94 on the perpetual. In one spot example, the 03:00 hour traded 692 BTC in 82,475 trades, while the 13:00 hour traded 566 BTC in 193,276 trades, meaning 2.3 times more prints but 18% less bitcoin. Average trade size ranged between roughly 0.003 and 0.008 BTC through the day.
The author also highlights that tick volume contains no information on trade direction. Real delta, defined as taker buys minus taker sells, requires exchange data. On the day, spot delta was +1,374 BTC and perpetual delta +2,919 BTC, and the two agreed on direction in only 16 of 24 hours; at 15:00, for instance, spot showed +167 BTC while the perpetual showed -493 BTC. For CFD users, the author concludes that tick volume is useful for distinguishing busy from quiet trading and for session timing, but should not be used to read absorption, delta divergence or big-lot footprints. For gold, the recommended approach is to derive levels such as point of control, value area and VWAP from futures volume and map them onto the CFD price, treating the difference between GC and XAUUSD as a carry-driven basis rather than a structural change. The piece is presented as education rather than a trading signal, and references a free TradingView indicator for BTCUSDT built on Binance volume.
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