Metals contracts, led by gold, made up about 69% of retail CFD trading volume in the third quarter of 2026, preliminary FM Intelligence data show. That was down from 78% in the second quarter, while currency pairs rose to 16% from 10%.
The figures, published on Thursday, come from the brokers that have reported so far, and FM Intelligence's early reading of the quarter puts total volume about 8% above the second quarter.
Even at that pace, the market would not be back to where it started the year. Monthly retail volume fell 9.3% to $30.4 trillion in the second quarter, and an 8% rebound on that level leaves it about 2% short of the first quarter, by FinanceMagnates.com's calculation.
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Metals Still Lead by a Wide Margin
The mix moved in one direction, though the ranking held. Metals lost nine percentage points and still came out more than four times larger than FX, the second-biggest category, with gold again the main instrument.
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That dominance is more than a year old. Metals CFDs made up more than 60% of global broker volume in the first half of 2025, nearly 80% of it in gold, FM Intelligence data showed last October.
Read together with the 8% estimate, the new shares imply metals volume about 4% lower than in the second quarter and FX volume roughly 70% higher, by FinanceMagnates.com's calculation. That holds only if the early sample matches the brokers behind the second-quarter shares.
A Quarter of Yen Intervention and Rate Hikes
The currency gain came in a quarter with three official moves on the dollar and the yen. Japan's Ministry of Finance bought yen on July 30, and the US Treasury joined the next day in the first coordinated intervention between the two governments since 2011.
In September the Federal Reserve raised rates for the first time since 2023, and the Bank of Japan followed two days later. Cboe FX's USD/JPY volume rose 45.3% that month, the fastest gain among its five largest pairs.
The yen also moved more from day to day. Annualized volatility in USD/JPY was 9.0% in the third quarter against 5.4% in the second, by FinanceMagnates.com's calculation from daily closing prices.
FX Starts From a Low Base
Before this quarter, the trend ran the other way. FX made up 13.7% of the monthly volume FM Intelligence tracked across a wider broker set in the second quarter, down from 26.8% a year earlier. The preliminary sample puts the same quarter at 10%.
The largest brokers trade even less of it. EC Markets, the top name in FM Intelligence's broker volumes tracker, booked about $0.06 trillion of its $2.1 trillion in average monthly second-quarter volume in currency pairs.
Listed brokers' own reports do not all follow the preliminary mix. At XTB, commodity CFDs generated 70.8% of the gross result on financial instruments in the third quarter, up from 60.5% in the second, its results showed last week. That figure measures revenue, not volume.
The full preliminary analysis also splits volume between mobile and desktop platforms, where the shift was larger than in the instrument mix. FM Intelligence will publish its final quarterly report once the remaining brokers submit their data.
