Tick bars versus time bars
Posted: Sat Oct 31, 2026 10:07 pm
A tick bar closes after a fixed number of ticks, regardless of how much time passes. A 100-tick bar might take two seconds in a busy market and five minutes in a quiet one.
The effect is similar to range bars but based on activity. Busy periods compress into many bars, quiet ones into few. Statistical properties of tick bars are often better behaved than those of time bars, with returns closer to a normal distribution.
For scalpers, tick bars offer a sharper view of the moments that matter. When a burst of activity arrives, the chart responds immediately with several bars. A time chart would show one bar with a long wick.
There's a catch. Tick counts depend on the feed. Different brokers deliver different numbers of ticks for the same market moment, so a 100-tick bar on one platform is not the same as on another.
Another is that quote flicker, discussed elsewhere, inflates tick counts without real trading. A chart can fill with bars that carry little information.
A cleaner variant is volume-weighted or price-change-filtered bars, which require a minimum price movement to count a tick.
Do tick bars hold up across different brokers, or does each feed produce a different picture?
The effect is similar to range bars but based on activity. Busy periods compress into many bars, quiet ones into few. Statistical properties of tick bars are often better behaved than those of time bars, with returns closer to a normal distribution.
For scalpers, tick bars offer a sharper view of the moments that matter. When a burst of activity arrives, the chart responds immediately with several bars. A time chart would show one bar with a long wick.
There's a catch. Tick counts depend on the feed. Different brokers deliver different numbers of ticks for the same market moment, so a 100-tick bar on one platform is not the same as on another.
Another is that quote flicker, discussed elsewhere, inflates tick counts without real trading. A chart can fill with bars that carry little information.
A cleaner variant is volume-weighted or price-change-filtered bars, which require a minimum price movement to count a tick.
Do tick bars hold up across different brokers, or does each feed produce a different picture?