What $9.51 trillion of currency trading measures

The final count of the world’s currency trading is slightly smaller than the first. The Bank for International Settlements’ final tables put average daily over-the-counter foreign-exchange turnover in April 2025 at about $9.51 trillion. The preliminary release had put it at $9.6 trillion. The final tables supersede that preliminary estimate. Their observation period remains April 2025; the update supplies no measure of this October’s trading.

The much larger interpretive problem is what the total represents. A dealer can intermediate a customer’s transaction, offset the exposure with another dealer and subsequently rearrange its funding. Each step can add to activity around the same underlying customer need. Treating the daily total as new savings moving between countries would count that activity as though it all served the same purpose.

Repeated needs, repeated trades

The final survey records about $2.95 trillion a day in spot trading and $4.02 trillion in foreign-exchange swaps. Outright forwards account for another $1.75 trillion. All three rounded figures come from the same April 2025 sample.

The BIS’s explanation of the instruments describes an FX swap as combining an exchange of currencies with an agreement to reverse that exchange later. Such transactions are widely used for funding and hedging. Their short maturities also mean that a position can require repeated replacement. Renewing access to dollars can create substantial recorded turnover without repeatedly expanding the borrower’s underlying business.

A simple hypothetical illustrates the distinction. A firm that rolls the same funding need several times can generate several transactions around essentially the same requirement. A firm making one longer transaction may generate less turnover while maintaining exposure for longer. The amount still owed, the date it falls due and the collateral supporting it describe the exposure that remains.

That is why the BIS collects turnover and outstanding amounts separately. Turnover measures business done over a period; outstanding amounts describe obligations remaining at a point in time. Assessing potential losses also requires information about the terms of those positions.

A currency appears on both sides

Currency shares need equally careful reading. The dollar appears on one side of roughly 89% of surveyed turnover by value in the final table. Every currency exchange involves two currencies, so adding all currency shares produces 200%, not 100%.

A transaction selling dollars contributes to dollar turnover just as a purchase does. Even a hypothetical wave of transactions reducing dollar exposure could leave the currency heavily represented in the activity statistics. The statistic cannot establish the direction of the flow without information about which parties were acquiring or shedding the exposure.

Nor does the location of a sales desk tell readers the nationality of the ultimate investor. The survey’s methodology attributes activity according to reporting arrangements, and its country totals use different double-counting adjustments from the global total. Treating a financial centre’s dealing activity as purchases by that country’s households would confuse intermediation with ownership.

A busy month is still one month

The preliminary BIS commentary says April 2025 coincided with elevated volatility and trading following trade-policy announcements. That historical setting matters. The survey gives a broad and unusually detailed cross-section, but multiplying one daily average by all the trading days in a year would add an assumption about how representative the month was.

The final data also retain distinctions among dealer transactions, other financial institutions and non-financial customers. Those groups do different things. An increase in market-making, portfolio hedging or corporate payments can all contribute to turnover while implying different risks and different demand for currency.

The final tables are most useful when those categories are kept intact. Growth in short-term swaps raises questions about funding renewals; changes in customer transactions raise different questions about hedging and payments. The $9.51 trillion total establishes the scale of the market surveyed. Identifying new investment or a directional shift requires tracing the purpose and ownership of the exposures behind it.