Major pair

### What "major" actually means A major is the US dollar against one of seven other major currencies: the euro, yen, sterling, Canadian dollar, Australian dollar, Swiss franc and New Zealand dollar. The dollar is not in every one of them by accident. In the BIS Triennial Central Bank Survey of April 2025, the world traded **$9.6 trillion** of foreign exchange per day, and the US dollar was on one side of **89.2%** of all trades. BIS also states plainly that the ten most traded currency pairs on earth all involve the dollar. When you trade a major, you are standing in the deepest part of the deepest market there is. ### The seven, by real daily volume From Table 5 of that survey (daily averages, April 2025): - EUR/USD: $2,033 billion a day, 21.2% of all FX turnover - USD/JPY: $1,372 billion, 14.3% - GBP/USD: $731 billion, 7.6% - USD/CAD: $505 billion, 5.3% - AUD/USD: $467 billion, 4.9% - USD/CHF: $467 billion, 4.9% - NZD/USD: $118 billion, 1.2% Just under 60% of everything traded, in seven pairs. Our primary pair, EURUSD, sits at the top of that list: the most traded pair in the world, more than two trillion dollars changing hands a day, over a fifth of all FX turnover on its own. It is the biggest major there is, and the depth is the whole point. Your order is a rounding error in a market that size, which is exactly what you want. There is a second reason the system runs on it. EURUSD is the pair we read against **DXY**, the US Dollar Index, and that read is unusually clean because the euro is by far the heaviest weight in the dollar basket. The two trade as near mirror images of each other, so DXY either confirms your EURUSD bias or vetoes it, with very little ambiguity in between. When DXY does not line up with the bias, you fall back to euro-side fundamentals, the ECB and eurozone data, to break the tie. ### Why your costs stay survivable here Spread is not a fee your broker invents out of spite. It is the price of finding someone to take the other side of your trade right now. Thousands of banks, funds and market makers quote EUR/USD and AUD/USD continuously, so the gap between the bid and the ask closes to almost nothing. Thin markets have to pay someone to stand there, and you fund that. Deep markets do not. That depth also shows up as fewer nasty surprises: fills closer to the price you clicked, and less of a gap between your stop level and where you actually get out. ### The regulator draws the same line This is not just trader folklore. The CFTC's final retail forex rules set a minimum security deposit of 2% of notional for *major* currencies and 5% for all other currencies, and the NFA sets the specific levels inside those parameters. NFA Financial Requirements Section 12 names the 2% list: sterling, Swiss franc, Canadian dollar, yen, euro, Australian dollar, New Zealand dollar, plus the Swedish krona, Norwegian krone and Danish krone. That list is currency-level and slightly wider than our seven pairs, but the logic is identical. Some currencies are treated as safe enough to finance cheaply. Everything else costs more to hold, because the regulator has already judged it riskier. ### The mistake beginners make Pair hopping. Chasing whatever moved yesterday means never learning how anything behaves. Every pair has its own rhythm, its own session, its own news calendar. EURUSD is a London and New York pair, which is why our prime window is the London session into the New York overlap. AUD/USD is a perfectly good major, but it does its real work in the Asian session, which is a different day and a different set of habits. Learn one deeply before expanding.