How to read your German trading volume
Most CEOs check Frankfurt, see little and move on. Where German investors actually trade your stock, which number to look at, and what belongs in a board report.
Ask a CEO of a Canadian or Australian junior how their stock trades in Germany, and the answer is often: “We checked Frankfurt. Nothing much happens there.” In many cases that is the wrong conclusion, drawn from the wrong number.
German private investors do trade resource stocks, but not where most people look. This article explains where to find your German volume, which figure tells you whether German investors are really engaged, and what belongs in a report to your board.
German investors trade on more than one exchange
A German private investor buys your stock through an online broker. Depending on the broker, the order goes to one of several venues:
- Tradegate in Berlin, open from 8:00 to 22:00 CET
- Frankfurt, the classic floor exchange
- Stuttgart
- gettex in Munich
- LS Exchange, run by Lang & Schwarz
- Munich
Frankfurt is the best-known name, but often not where most of the trading happens. For Prismo Metals, a CSE-listed client of ours, the last six months looked like this: 58 % of German volume on Tradegate, 22 % on LS Exchange, 13 % on gettex, and only 5 % in Frankfurt.
A single venue can be badly misleading
In the third quarter of 2024, the Frankfurt line of Sitka Gold showed no trading at all. Anyone looking only at Frankfurt would have concluded that German investors had no interest in the stock. Across all German venues, 564,014 shares changed hands in the same quarter.
The rule is simple: always add up all German venues. A single venue tells you which broker your investors use, not how many of them there are.
What the exchange data does not show
Part of German retail trading never reaches an exchange. Brokers can execute orders directly with market makers such as Lang & Schwarz or Baader Bank, and those trades do not appear in exchange statistics. Your true German volume is therefore somewhat higher than the sum of the six venues. For reporting, that is no problem: if you always use the same venues, the figures stay comparable over time, and they err on the conservative side.
Why volume alone is not enough
Trading volume in resource stocks moves with the market. When gold or silver rally, volume rises everywhere, in Toronto, Sydney and Frankfurt alike. A higher German volume after a few months of coverage may simply reflect the market.
When we started covering Silver Tiger Metals in June 2025, German volume rose from 2.0 to 34.3 million shares within six months. Impressive, but volume in Toronto nearly tripled in the same period. The number that separates the two effects is the German share of trading:
German share = German volume ÷ (German volume + volume on your home exchange)
If the German share rises, Germany is growing faster than your home market. At Silver Tiger, it went from 3.1 % to 16.4 %. That is the effect of German investors, not of the silver price.
A worked example
Here are two recent months for Prismo Metals:
| Aug 2026 | Sep 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| German volume (all six venues) | 177,744 | 463,327 |
| CSE volume | 1,852,348 | 1,463,038 |
| German share of trading | 8.8 % | 24.1 % |
In September, almost one in four Prismo shares traded changed hands in Germany, while trading on the CSE was lower than in August.
What belongs in a board report
A useful monthly report on your German investor base contains five things:
- German volume across all German venues, per month.
- Volume on your home exchange for the same period.
- German share of trading, month by month, so the trend is visible.
- Venue mix, which shows where your German investors trade.
- Before and after: the same figures for the six months before your German investor relations started, as a baseline.
Put the coverage you published next to it, articles, interviews and newsletter features, and your board can see what moved the numbers.
Where to get the data
The daily volumes per venue are public. Financial portals such as onvista publish them for every German venue, and your home exchange data is available from your listing venue or the usual market data services. Collecting and adding them up by hand takes time, but it is not difficult.
If you would rather see your numbers right away, request a free German trading check. We send you your German volume, your German share of trading and the monthly trend, prepared exactly as described here.
Disclosure: Prismo Metals, Sitka Gold and Silver Tiger Metals are clients of GOLDINVEST. More on how we are paid and how we handle conflicts of interest: Conflict of interest. Volume data: onvista (German venues), Yahoo Finance (home exchanges), as of 1 Oct 2026.
Editor-in-chief of GOLDINVEST.de and a business journalist for more than 15 years, covering precious, base and battery metals. He has conducted 570 CEO interviews and visits exploration and mining projects on site.
