Tick arrival rate is a better tempo gauge than ATR

[Amanhasnoname]

ATR tells how far a pair moved over past bars. It says nothing about how busy the last ten seconds were, and for a scalper that is the part that matters. A cheap alternative is the tick arrival rate: ticks per second or per ten seconds, pulled straight from the feed.

On a major in London hours the rate might run at several ticks per second with bursts well above that. Overnight it can drop to one every few seconds. When the rate climbs sharply with the spread unchanged, activity is genuinely rising. When the rate climbs and the spread widens at the same time, quotes are being refreshed defensively, which is a different state and a worse one to be entering in.

A simple use: record the median ticks per ten seconds for each hour over a couple of weeks, then flag setups that fire when the rate is below, say, half of that hour's median. Those tend to be the stale, slippy fills, though the exact threshold depends on the pair and the broker's feed.

This only works if the feed is not throttled, so check whether your platform drops ticks under load by comparing counts across two sessions of the same time period.

Anyone logging tick rate already, what pattern shows up at the minutes just before major news?