Stats › Currencies and commodities › FX volatility
How much currencies actually move
Currencies move far less than shares do. That's the single most useful fact on this page and almost nobody states it plainly, because the leverage available in retail FX is built precisely to hide it.
A major currency pair runs at somewhere around 4% to 8% annualised volatility on current model estimates. The S&P 500's implied volatility index sat at 17.09 on 30 Jul 2026, and that was a quiet reading. A pegged currency like the Hong Kong dollar runs at 0.25%. So the same nominal position size means completely different things in different corners of this market.
The awkward part of writing this page was finding numbers at all. There used to be free, public, daily FX volatility indices. Most of them have been discontinued, moved behind a terminal, or are published only through a visualiser tool that doesn't render to a fetcher. What survives, what doesn't, and where I gave up is all set out below.
On NYU Stern's V-Lab GARCH estimates, annualised volatility runs from 0.25% for the pegged Hong Kong dollar and 1.54% for the Chinese renminbi, through 3.95% for the Canadian dollar and 5.53% for the euro, to 7.33% for the yen and 11.09% for the Brazilian real. Cboe's EuroCurrency Volatility Index peaked at 30.66 on 31 Oct 2008, against the VIX's record close of 82.69 on 16 Mar 2020, so even at its worst, euro implied volatility topped out at about 37% of the equity index's worst. The free FX volatility index a retail reader could actually get is gone: FRED's copy of EVZ is marked discontinued and ends at 10.68 on 11 Mar 2025. Deutsche Bank's CVIX and J.P. Morgan's VXY indices are quoted constantly and I could not find a current level published by either firm.
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