Tick charts build a new bar after a set number of price updates. In spot FX, that number depends entirely on your broker's feed, which makes tick charts less portable than many traders assume.
Why tick counts differ:
Each broker aggregates prices from different liquidity providers and filters updates differently.
Some feeds send every change, others throttle updates to a maximum rate.
During news, one broker may produce three times as many ticks as another.
Consequences:
A 233-tick setup shared on a forum may correspond to a quite different time span on your feed.
Backtests on one broker's tick data do not transfer directly to another.
Indicators on tick bars (e.g. moving averages) shift accordingly.
A practical fix: calibrate by time. Find the tick count that produces bars of roughly one minute during your session on your broker, then build from there.
Does anyone here use tick charts in FX, and how did you choose the tick count?
FXS Prop Desk wrote: During news, one broker may produce three times as many ticks as another.
Which is also why tick volume as an indicator should be read relative to its own average on your feed and not compared across brokers. If someone posts a 233-tick setup, a rough way to translate it is to check how many minutes a 233-tick bar takes on their feed in a quiet hour versus yours, then scale the count until your average bar duration matches. It won't be exact because the ratio shifts during news, but it gets you closer than copying the number. Backtests are the bigger issue. Historical tick data from one provider can be filtered very differently from what your live feed sends, so a tick chart strategy can behave differently live for reasons that have nothing to do with the strategy.
