The foreign exchange (FX) market is the largest and most liquid financial market in the world. Every day, banks, funds, corporates and non-bank financial institutions exchange currencies to support international trade, investment, hedging and financial stability.
At the heart of this activity sits FX market data. FX data helps market participants understand market positioning and sentiment as well as how currencies are traded, how liquidity behaves and how market conditions change over time. Used correctly, it supports better decision-making, stronger risk management and greater transparency across the FX ecosystem.
This page describes FX market data, different types used in the market, and how market participants use it to analyze activity and manage risk.
FX market data refers to information that describes activity within the foreign exchange market. It can include details such as:
• How much currency is being traded
• When trades are executed
• Which currency pairs are most active
• How buying and selling behavior changes over time
• How positions accumulate across different tenors
• Positioning of different market participant types.
FX data is used by a wide range of participants, including banks, asset managers, hedge funds, central banks and regulators. Each group relies on data to better understand liquidity conditions, assess market risk, evaluate execution quality, and gain other insights.
FX market data is not a single dataset. It typically falls into several broad categories, each offering a different view of market activity.
Price data shows the exchange rate between two currencies at a given point in time. This can include spot rates, forward rates, and derived pricing benchmarks such as volume-weighted or time-weighted averages. It can be based either on quoted prices or actual executed trade prices.
Price data is widely used for:
• Valuation and benchmarking
• Transaction Cost Analysis (TCA)
• Risk and portfolio monitoring
• Price formation in market making
Volume data describes how much currency is traded over a specific period. It helps market participants understand liquidity conditions, trading intensity and changes in market participation.
Volume data is often used to:
• Identify periods of high or low liquidity
• Analyze market depth across currency pairs
• Support execution strategy design
• Benchmark own activity vs the whole market
Flow data focuses on buying and selling behavior within the market. Rather than looking only at prices or volumes, it provides insight into how different segments of the market are trading.
Flow data can help participants:
• Detect shifts in market sentiment
• Understand directional pressure
• Analyze activity across different participant types
Positioning and outstanding data looks beyond executed trades to assess open positions in forwards and swaps. This data provides insight into how risk is distributed across the market and how exposures evolve over time.
This type of data supports:
• Forward-looking risk analysis
• Market structure assessment
• Liquidity and stress analysis
• Visibility of positioning across different forward tenors
FX market data can be sourced in a number of ways, each with different features.
Some FX data is generated by electronic trading venues and platforms. This data often reflects real-time activity occurring on a specific venue and may not represent the broader market.
Banks and brokers produce internal data based on their own trading activity and client flows. While valuable, this data typically reflects only a subset of the market.
Certain datasets are built using surveys or statistical estimation techniques. These can be useful for high-level analysis but may lack the granularity or timeliness required for detailed market insight.
Executed trade data is derived from executed FX transactions. Because it reflects actual trades rather than quotes or estimates, it can provide a more accurate view of market behavior when available at sufficient scale. However, due to the fragmented nature of the FX market, trade data is likely to be limited to trades reported by a particular source.
Despite the importance of FX data, analyzing the market can be complex.
Common challenges include:
• Fragmentation across venues and counterparties
• Partial or delayed visibility into market activity
• Inconsistent methodologies between data sources
• Limited insight into traded volumes and flows at scale.
As a result, no single dataset can answer every market question on its own. Market participants often combine multiple sources to build a more complete picture.
CLS occupies a unique position within the global FX market. As a systemically important financial market infrastructure, CLS provides payment-versus-payment (PvP) settlement for FX transactions, helping to reduce settlement risk and support financial stability.
Through its settlement services, CLS receives executed FX trade data directly from settlement members across a broad range of currencies and counterparties. In this central role, CLS is the largest single source of FX executed data available to the market, with datasets derived from over 3 billion trades executed since 2011.
CLSMarketData is built using executed trade data that flows through CLS’s settlement infrastructure. By applying data science techniques to this information, CLS creates datasets designed to provide insight into how the FX market functions in practice.
Rather than relying on estimates or venue-specific views, CLSMarketData reflects executed activity across a significant portion of the global FX market. This allows market participants to analyze market dynamics, trading behavior and risk with greater confidence.
CLSMarketData consists of the following four main datasets across 17 different delivery frequencies:
• FX Volume
• FX Flow
• FX Pricing
• FX Outstanding
Together, these datasets can be analyzed to offer perspectives on market activity, helping users understand not just when and where trades were executed, but ultimately help market participants understand market dynamics and improve decision making.
With access to over 50% of global FX traded volumes in the market for the 18 currencies settled in CLSSettlement, market participants use CLSMarketData for a wide range of analytical and operational purposes, including:
• Understanding liquidity conditions across currency pairs and tenors
• Analyzing market behavior during periods of stress or volatility
• Supporting execution analysis and transaction cost assessment
• Enhancing risk management and exposure monitoring
• Informing research, modelling and regulatory reporting
• Supporting design of execution strategies.
By combining scale, consistency and executed trade insight, CLSMarketData supports a deeper understanding of FX market structure and behavior.
Reliable FX market data plays a critical role in promoting transparency, supporting risk management and enabling informed decision-making across the FX ecosystem.
By providing insight derived from executed FX transactions, CLSMarketData contributes to a clearer, more consistent view of market activity, helping participants navigate the complexities of the global foreign exchange market.