Is gas in a car tank useless? Volume is activity. Volume is $$. Therefore it shows where money is being put. While it can't be completely trusted ..because of brokers...data feeds...dark pools..etc it can be useful in showing the larger footprints of institutional money. In the end some volume is shown and it is generally good enough to be useful. The real first problem is most traders do not know how to interpret it. The second problem is it can complicate trading on a small TF and cause one to miss a good trade trying to correlate price and volume.