Metatrader 4 - Tick Charts

[jack]

Tick charts... I've been using this indicator for a while now and I can't live without it.

It's a modified version of an indicator given to me by a friend (who I hope will join us in the forum soon )

Tick charts come in two main incarnations: Line charts and candlesticks. Unlike time based charts, they only progress once a tick (an update in price for FX or time and sales activity for futures and stocks) is made regardless of how much time passes between ticks.

This has the advantage of taking time out of the equation when evaluating price action.

In this thread, I'm sharing a line based tick chart indicator for MT4. Since the line progresses with each price update, this won't be very useful for people who are trading off daily and monthly charts... However, if you want to visualize the volatility around a news release (where second-by-second the momentum and direction can change,) then tick charts can be very useful.

It looks a like this:

Attached you'll find the indicator.

Once attached to a chart, stretch the lower indicator window up to the top of the chart window (as seen in the picture.) Then edit the chart's preferences to make the color for all but the foreground and background set to "none". You can add textual or other chart based indicators to the main window if you'd like (as seen in the image where a spread indicator is running.)

You will need to let the indicator collect ticks, since it must paint the chart from when it starts (no way of getting tick level history from your broker's MT4 quote server,) so leave it running for a while to let the chart populate. (This doesn't take long at all during a volatile move in the markets.)

I'm planning on cleaning up the code and adding more features, and as I do, I'll provide the updates here.

Hope you enjoy!

 

[TopFroxx]

hi jack, thanks for that. always wanted to have a look at those.

any recommendations for sources about how to approach these? or could you elaborate youself?

cheers

 

[jack]

hi jack, thanks for that. always wanted to have a look at those.

any recommendations for sources about how to approach these? or could you elaborate youself?

cheers

Do you mean how to use a tick chart in a strategy?

One of the first things I used this very indicator to do was setting it up before the open of the London session and NYC session and watching price action (not trading, just watching) unfold. Doing this for a few weeks gave me a really solid understanding of short term consolidation, continuation, and nature of the Euro during the first hour of each market. In a way, I felt I understood the personality of the Euro a bit better during these times.

I was then able to develop a trading strategy around catching reversal from a consolidation point, combined with a trailing stop, and for a while I had it working with as tight as a 2 pip initial and trailing stop and this would sometimes catch 10+ pip spikes in the Euro during more volatile London opening ranges (but also get stopped out for a scratch trade quite often, but that's the nature of such tight scalps.) Basically, I was timing the literal high and low tick of a given short term move, a move that most people would just call 'noise', but I was able to identify these points thanks to watching the tick chart and documenting what repeating patterns I saw.

DISCLAIMER: I do not trade using this method anymore, nor do I recommend it. It worked for nearly a year back between 2011 and 2012, but the nature of such short term scalping strategies is that the market tends to change and invalidate systems rather quickly, and this method now does not work nearly as well. So this is just an example of the process I took to sussing out a strategy using tick charts, that's all.

Attached you'll see a chart outlining what I was noticing and playing off of.. and a statement of returns on an account I was working at the time showing a half decent day trading this way. (I know the size looks nothing impressive, but when you trade like this, it's way better to use extremely low risk and just take as many trade setups as you see letting the numbers work for you in the long run than hit it hard with larger risk. The reason: your equity curve tells you when you're off track or when the strat needs adjustment and you don't want that curve down to decimate your account on small number of bad trades. Plus I was never convinced the strategy would work long term so I kept my risk minimal.)

Again, I can't stress enough that this isn't a recommendation for you to trade exactly like this. But pull up a tick chart, watch the volatile periods of your favourite pair, and if you see some interesting patterns you might be able to play from or at least get a better 'feel' for the personality of said pair then all the better to you.

 

[TopFroxx]

thank you, that's exactly what i meant. yeah, i would have begun with watching and observing if i could make out any repeating patterns as well. so i'll probably do that when i have the time. and dont worry, i wouldnt trade it just like that. if at all i would use it to time my entries from a bigger perspective.

 

[Piper]

Pretty sweet,altough i don't think i'll use EA's in my trading..It seems amazing to get out 50+ pips,without moving a finger..
It's a consistently working EA?

 

[jack]

Pretty sweet,altough i don't think i'll use EA's in my trading..It seems amazing to get out 50+ pips,without moving a finger..
It's a consistently working EA?

Oh, it's not an EA, it's just an indicator displaying each quote update (tick) as the price changes.

Really just a visual aid to watching price. Any trading ideas you get from it will be up to you to execute manually.

 

[dentist007]

Thanks
a great indecator
Any chance it could be modified so the user can display multi tick with a dot aswell
so..the user inputs say 3 tick.the line chart displays the price after 3 ticks have passed with a dot to show the price at that value.Single tick data can be very noisy...sometimes
Tick charts..if you can adjust thenumber of ticks that are plotted according to the volatility as in p/f charts
thanks in anticipation