Who actually moves the forex market?

When the pound drops 60 pips in four minutes, it is tempting to picture somebody doing it to you: a desk somewhere that saw your stop and went hunting. It is a satisfying story and a useless one, because it gives you nobody to learn from and nothing to change.

The people who move currencies are known. They are counted every three years, and their reasons are mostly ordinary. By the end of this you will know who the main participants are and roughly how much of the market each accounts for, why each of them trades, which of their actions are scheduled in advance, and what all of that means for how you plan a demo session.

There is no forex exchange. Currencies trade over the counter, through a network in which large dealing banks quote prices to each other and to everyone else, increasingly over electronic platforms. The price on your chart is a summary of that network, passed to you by your provider, rather than the record of one central order book.

That network gets counted. Every three years the Bank for International Settlements runs its Triennial Central Bank Survey with central banks and other authorities around the world. The 2025 edition covered 52 jurisdictions and put average daily turnover at $9.6 trillion in April 2025. It also splits that turnover by who sat on the other side of each trade, which is the closest thing there is to a head count of the market.

Read the bottom of that table before the top. Retail-driven trading, everything placed by individuals through providers, came to roughly $240 billion a day in the survey: about 2.5% of the market. Companies buying and selling currency for their business were 5%. Roughly nine-tenths was banks, funds and investors moving money for reasons that mostly have nothing to do with your chart.

One label needs translating. In the survey, proprietary trading firms means firms trading their own capital, much of it by algorithm. It does not mean the challenge businesses advertised to retail traders.

Central banks are a sliver of turnover and the largest single influence on where a currency goes over months. They set interest rates, and money tends to move towards currencies that pay more relative to the risk of holding them. A rate decision, or a change in the language around one, can reprice a currency in seconds, and almost all of those decisions are scheduled and published in advance.

Occasionally they trade directly. Japan's Ministry of Finance disclosed in May 2024 that it had spent ¥9.79 trillion, about $62 billion, buying yen between 26 April and 29 May 2024, its first intervention since October 2022. Further back, on 15 January 2015, the Swiss National Bank abandoned the minimum exchange rate of 1.20 francs per euro it had been defending, and the franc strengthened sharply against the euro.

You cannot predict an intervention, and nobody honest will tell you they can. What you can do is know the calendar. Rate decisions, inflation figures and employment data for both currencies in your pair are published in advance, and the minutes around them belong to the largest participants, not to you.

Most of the market's volume is plumbing. A dealing bank fills a client's order, ends up holding currency it did not want, and passes it to another dealer. A pension fund buying American shares has to buy dollars to pay for them, and may hedge the currency risk on top. A British manufacturer paying a German supplier sells pounds for euros whatever the chart looks like.

None of these participants is trying to beat you, and most are not trying to forecast the price at all. They need a currency at a particular time, and the price is a cost of doing business. That is why currencies can drift in one direction for weeks on the back of investment and trade flows, and why the busiest hours of the day are the hours when the big banking centres are at their desks.

Hedge funds and proprietary trading firms, at 8% of turnover, are the participants closest to what you do, because they speculate. Many trade by algorithm, at speeds no individual can match. The answer is not to compete on speed. It is to trade on a timescale where milliseconds do not decide the result.

At about 2.5% of turnover, spread across a great many accounts, retail traders do not move the major pairs. That sounds like a disadvantage and is mostly the opposite. Your orders are too small to move the price you are trading, so you can enter and exit unnoticed. You are also never forced to trade: no client order, no fund mandate, no supplier invoice. You can stand aside on any day you choose, a freedom most of the market does not have.

It also retires the hunting story. Stops cluster at obvious places, such as round numbers and recent highs and lows, because a great many people put them there, and price reaching a cluster can set off a burst of orders. That is crowd behaviour, not a desk watching your account. The useful response is to know where your stop sits relative to the obvious places.

The market does not know you are there, and that is the most useful thing to understand about it. Nobody is coming for your stop, and nobody is coming to rescue your position either. What you control is when you show up, how much you put at stake, and whether you stand aside while the largest participants do their business. Plan for them. Don't argue with them.