Those sudden bursts of dozens of ticks with no price progress

[Amanhasnoname]

Every so often a chart shows a stretch where tick volume goes vertical for a second or two, yet price barely changes, and the bid just flickers by a tenth of a pip. Forum posts love to call it quote stuffing or an algo "testing liquidity". Sometimes the real cause is duller.

Common non-sinister explanations include a liquidity provider rebuilding its quote ladder after a position change, a feed catching up after a brief network stall and delivering buffered updates in one lump, or a platform reconnecting. In that last case a burst of ticks can arrive with timestamps compressed into the same second even though they were generated over a longer stretch.

What matters for a scalper is whether the burst precedes a move or is isolated. Check this by tagging every burst where the tick count exceeds, say, five times the recent average while the range stays under half a pip, then see what the next sixty seconds did. If results look random, the pattern is not worth building a rule around.

One caution: a burst followed by a spread jump can mean quotes are being withdrawn, which is the one version worth respecting, since fills afterwards can be poor.

Which explanation fits the bursts seen most often on your own platform, and has any trade rule come from them?