Someone emailed me today to ask if I thought tick charts offered any advantages over regular charts. Here’s my reply:

In this context a tick is a trade execution. So instead of dividing your chart based on time periods, you’re dividing on number of trades.

A possible advantage of this method is that you will see a more regular representation of activity during slow and fast periods.

To take an extreme example, in a slow moving market with very few trades occurring, you could potentially have five minute bar representing just a couple of trades. Using a tick chart, the bar would not complete until the required number of trades had passed.

In other words, in a tick chart, all bars are equal. Tick charts smooth out fast and slow periods of trading to give a kind of ‘quantized’ view.

Whether that’s *actually* an advantage or not depends entirely on your trading method though…

Trying to figure out if a tick chart is “better” is a bit like trying to figure out if a 10 minute chart is “better” than a 5 minute chart. They both show the same data, just formatted differently (although you could argue a 5 minute chart shows more data points than a 10 minute chart, but for the sake of illustration, they essentially show the same thing). It’s not the chart itself that matters, it’s how you interpret it and act on that interpretation that counts.

Tags: Advantage, Extreme Example, Illustration, Reply, Sake, Slow Periods, Smooth, Time Periods, Trade Execution, Trades