"Trading de divisas" is Spanish for currency trading, and that is all it is. There is no separate market, product or account behind the phrase, so the useful question is not what the term means but how the foreign exchange market actually functions, who trades in it, and what a person sitting at home is really signing up for.
The Bank for International Settlements runs a survey of this market every three years, and the 2025 edition, published on 30 September 2025, collected data from more than 1,100 banks and dealers across 52 jurisdictions. It put average daily turnover in over-the-counter foreign exchange at 9.6 trillion dollars in April 2025, up 28% from the 7.5 trillion recorded in 2022.
That number is the headline everyone quotes, and almost nobody breaks down. The counterparty split is where the picture changes. Trading between dealers accounted for 46% of global turnover, and trading with other financial institutions, meaning banks, hedge funds, asset managers and principal trading firms, accounted for 50%, or about 4.8 trillion dollars a day. Non-financial customers, the bucket that contains corporate treasuries and individual traders, sit outside those two blocks.
Read that again when an advertisement tells you that you will be trading against "the market". You will be trading against a dealer who sees your order.
Foreign exchange is not evenly distributed across the planet. Sales desks in four locations, the United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore and Hong Kong SAR, handled 75% of total trading in April 2025. The Bank of England's own release puts UK daily turnover at 4,745 billion dollars, a 37.8% global share, and Singapore reached 11.8%, up from 9.5% three years earlier.
Liquidity follows the clock. London dominates the European session, New York takes over in the afternoon, and the Tokyo and Sydney hours run thinner books where the same order size moves price further. Concentration has a practical consequence. The price on your screen is a quote from one dealer's desk in one of those centres, assembled from that dealer's own book and its own liquidity providers. It is not a single global price that everyone sees.
A currency pair names two things in order. The first is the base currency, the second is the quote currency, and the price tells you how many units of the second one buys one unit of the first. At 1.1050, EUR/USD means one euro buys 1.1050 dollars.
Most pairs quote to four decimal places, and the smallest standard increment, 0.0001, is a pip. On a standard lot of 100,000 units, one pip on a dollar-quoted pair is worth about 10 dollars. That arithmetic is the whole basis of position sizing: if you cannot say what one pip costs you before you open the trade, you are not sizing a position, you are guessing.
Currency shares from the same survey explain which pairs are cheap to trade. The dollar was on one side of 89.2% of all trades, the euro 28.9%, the yen 16.8%, sterling 10.2%, the renminbi 8.5% and the Swiss franc 6.4%. Depth concentrates in those names, and spreads widen as you move away from them.
Beginners assume the market is spot, because spot is what brokers sell. The survey says otherwise. Spot turnover was about 3 trillion dollars a day, or 31% of the total, up from 28% in 2022. Foreign exchange swaps remained the largest instrument at roughly 4 trillion a day, a 42% share, even though that share fell from 51%. Outright forwards rose 60% to a 19% share, options more than doubled to 7%, and currency swaps stayed near 2%.
The distinction matters because swaps and forwards are mostly plumbing. Corporates use them to hedge receivables, and banks use them to fund in one currency and lend in another. A large share of that 9.6 trillion is risk transfer and funding, not directional speculation, and quoting the total as evidence of opportunity misreads the data.
The April 2025 figure also carries a warning about using one month as a baseline. The BIS notes the survey ran during elevated volatility following trade policy announcements early that month, and the Reserve Bank of Australia made the same point in its own write-up. Turnover spikes when volatility spikes, which is precisely when retail losses concentrate.
Four costs, and only one of them is advertised.
Add deposit and withdrawal charges and any currency conversion on the way in, because funding an account in one currency to trade another is itself a foreign exchange transaction.
Regulators cap retail leverage for a reason you can check with a calculator. The European Securities and Markets Authority set tiered limits in 2018: 30:1 on major currency pairs, 20:1 on non-major pairs, gold and major equity indices, 10:1 on other commodities and non-major indices, 5:1 on individual equities, and 2:1 on crypto. In the United States the CFTC and the National Futures Association limit retail forex to 50:1 on major pairs and 20:1 on everything else.
At 30:1, a move of roughly 3.3% against you erases the margin behind the position. At 50:1 it takes about 2%. Those are ordinary daily ranges in a volatile month, not tail events, which is why the caps exist and why offshore entities advertising 500:1 are advertising something a tier-one regulator has already decided is unsafe.
Leverage does not improve your odds. It compresses the time it takes to find out whether you were right.
Interest rate differentials sit underneath most sustained moves, because capital follows yield. Data releases move rates to the extent that they change expectations of the next decision by the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank or the Bank of Japan, which is why a strong US payrolls report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics can weaken the dollar if it arrives with softening wage growth, and why euro-area inflation prints from Eurostat move EUR/USD more than most speeches do.
Positioning and hedging flows explain a lot of the short-term noise. When exporters rush to hedge a currency that has already moved, the hedging itself pushes the rate further, and that is visible in the surge in outright forwards the BIS recorded in April 2025.
What does not move rates is any indicator printed on a retail chart after the fact. Technical levels matter because enough participants watch them, not because the market is obliged to respect them.
A joint investor alert from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the North American Securities Administrators Association states the position plainly: off-exchange retail forex trading is at best extremely risky, and at worst outright fraud.
The pattern behind the fraud cases is repetitive. Unregistered individuals solicit clients, promise high returns with low risk, offer to trade on the client's behalf, and then withdrawals become difficult. Two checks remove most of the risk: verify the firm and the individual on the register of the relevant regulator, and never hand control of an account to someone who contacted you first. In the United States that register is the National Futures Association's BASIC system, and in the United Kingdom it is the FCA register.
How big is the market really? About 9.6 trillion dollars a day in April 2025 on the BIS measure, though only about 31% of that was spot.
Is it open around the clock? Trading runs continuously through the business week across the major centres, but liquidity is not constant. The quietest hours carry the widest spreads.
Can leverage make a small account viable? It makes a small account faster to lose. The European and American caps were set precisely because high leverage accelerated retail losses.
Do I need a broker? You need a registered counterparty to access interbank pricing. Check its registration before you fund anything, and check whether client money is held in segregated accounts under that regulator's rules.
Every figure in this piece has a primary home. The BIS publishes the Triennial Central Bank Survey results on bis.org, including the April 2025 turnover release and the instrument breakdown, and national central banks such as the Bank of England publish their own jurisdiction's results alongside it. ESMA publishes its product intervention measures with the leverage tiers, and the CFTC and NFA publish the American limits and the registration lookup.
Spend an hour on those four sources and you will be harder to sell to than most people who have been trading for a year. That is the return on reading primary data instead of broker marketing.