At 7:30 on a Tuesday, the screens glowing behind Canary Wharf’s windows already belong to the largest marketplace for money anywhere, though few commuters give it a thought. Currency turnover now runs near $7.5 trillion a day, according to the latest Basel tally. Roughly 38 pence of each pound in that heap ends up on trading books kept by banks across Britain.
That share has barely moved in a decade, despite Brexit, the pandemic and a steady push from Asian rivals. Part of the story is the sheer variety of people in the market: central banks, pension funds, importers hedging invoices and individuals who follow short price swings, a style whose order types and jargon this explainer on Day trading walks through piece by piece. Big ticket or small, many of those orders touch a City dealer at some stage before settling.
The Numbers Behind the City’s Currency Share
Once every three years the BIS picks a single April and has about 1,200 dealing banks across more than 50 jurisdictions report their volumes. In the 2022 round the UK reported 38.1% of global foreign exchange turnover. The United States came second with 19.4%, so London handled close to double the volume of New York.
The Bank of England publishes its own twice-yearly snapshot, and the picture rarely shifts. Average daily turnover through UK desks sat around $3.7 trillion in recent rounds, and the euro-dollar pair alone accounts for a big slice of it. The 2025 survey, released last autumn, again left London comfortably ahead of everyone else.
Why the London Time Zone Works So Well
Geography does a lot of quiet work here. When a dealer in London starts at 7am, Tokyo and Singapore are still open, and by 1pm New York traders are logging on. For about four hours each afternoon the two largest pools of liquidity overlap, and spreads on major pairs tend to be at their tightest during that window – so corporate finance teams often hold big transfers until lunchtime.
How London Compares With Other Currency Hubs
The gap between the top centre and everyone else looks striking when laid out side by side. These figures come from the BIS 2022 survey, the latest round with a full country-by-country breakdown in the published tables.
| Centre | Share of global FX turnover | Typical strength |
| United Kingdom | 38.1% | Euro, dollar and sterling pairs, FX derivatives |
| United States | 19.4% | Dollar pairs during New York hours |
| Singapore | 9.4% | Asian currencies, regional corporate flows |
| Hong Kong | 7.1% | Renminbi and Hong Kong dollar trading |
| Japan | 4.4% | Yen pairs, Japanese institutional investors |
What Keeps the Trading Desks in the City
Time zones alone cannot explain the lead, since Frankfurt and Paris share almost the same clock. Two other factors carry more weight.
English Law, Skilled Staff and the 4pm Fix
Pick up an ISDA master agreement between two banks from different continents and odds are it names English law, with the London Commercial Court as referee. A Stuttgart carmaker hedging revenue with a Tokyo lender wants to know how disputes end. Add a deep pool of experienced quants, salespeople and compliance officers, and the cost of relocating a whole desk starts to look steep.
Then there is the WM/Reuters benchmark, widely known as the 4pm London fix. Index providers and fund managers use it to value trillions in global portfolios, so a huge volume of orders is timed to that window every afternoon. Moving the benchmark elsewhere would mean rewriting thousands of fund mandates, and nobody has a serious appetite for that job.
Brexit, Singapore and the Next Survey
Plenty of forecasters in 2016 expected euro trading to drift to Frankfurt or Paris once Britain left the EU. Some bankers relocated, and Amsterdam scooped up a big chunk of share dealing. Currency dealing hardly budged, partly because FX spot trading was never governed by EU passporting rules in the first place.
The more credible long-term challenger sits in Asia. Singapore has climbed steadily, helped by the growth of regional trade and its own time-zone advantage over Hong Kong. For now, though, London’s share is roughly four times Singapore’s, and the next Triennial Survey in 2028 will show whether that gap has started to narrow or simply held firm once again.
