Tick Chart vs Time Chart: What Each Bar Counts

A tick chart starts a new bar once a fixed number of trades has printed; a time chart starts one once a fixed stretch of clock has elapsed. Quantower documents its Tick Bars that way — a bar per set count of trades, 500 in the example on its page, against a basic time-based chart that cuts after a period such as five minutes or an hour. Everything else that differs between the two follows from that one choice of what to count.

The consequence worth knowing before you switch is that the trade count is a count of transactions and not of contracts, and that it is assembled from whatever your data feed delivers. Quantower warns about the first on its own Tick Bars page; Sierra Chart has a long help topic on the second.

What is a tick chart, and what is a time chart?

A tick chart is a chart whose bars are cut by trade count: the bar stays open until the set number of trades has printed, then closes, however long that takes. A time chart cuts on elapsed time instead, so its bar closes when the period expires regardless of how much or how little traded inside it.

The naming is not consistent across software, which matters when you read documentation or a support thread. Quantower calls the type Tick Bars and switches between types from an Aggregation Type menu, where it lists ten chart types and six chart styles. Sierra Chart calls the same construction Number of Trades bars, and its keyboard shortcut for the bar period type is the letter t — typing 100t on an intraday chart gives a hundred trades per bar, where m gives minutes and s gives seconds.

One practical asymmetry: a time chart's bar boundary is known in advance and a tick chart's is not. You can say when the next five-minute bar will close; you cannot say when the next 500-trade bar will, because that depends on how fast trades arrive. Where few trades print, one tick bar covers a long stretch of clock; where they arrive quickly, the same count is met again and again in the time a single time bar would have taken.

How do tick charts and time charts compare?

The row about contract quantity is the one that catches people out. Quantower states it plainly on its Tick Bars page: set the count to 500 and each bar holds 500 trades whatever their size, and a single one of those trades can be one contract or ten thousand. That is why the page calls it crucial to use tick charts together with volume.

Does a tick chart measure volume?

No. A tick chart counts trades and volume counts contracts, so a bar of many small trades and a bar of a few large ones can carry the same trade count and wildly different volume. The CFTC glossary's Volume entry is a count of contracts over a specified period — most commonly quoted in contracts, and for some physical commodities in physical units such as bushels or barrels instead — and transactions do not appear in it.

Sierra Chart's documentation adds the structural reason the gap is not merely theoretical. Its topic 43.2 says exchanges routinely bundle, roll up or combine trades together as trading volumes grow, so one trade received may really be many, and flags that as something to weigh whenever a chart's bars are cut on a trade count. Topic 47 draws the conclusion for traders: a count of trades per bar is no reliable guide to how much volume actually traded — generally true, the page says, though not 100% precise. Topic 43.7 adds that the exchange's daily volume figure can include trades, spread and strategy trades in futures among them, that intraday charts leave out, and that the data feed is what decides which trades make it in.

So the honest reading of a 500-tick bar is "500 transactions happened here", which is information about participation rather than about size. If you want size, the platforms cut bars on that directly: Quantower's Volume Bars accumulate a specified volume level from tick or exchange volume and, as the page puts it, "Time is not involved in this aggregation". Its setup instruction is to enter the lots, or ticks, each bar should hold — a different setting answering a different question from the trade count above it.

Why do two tick charts with the same setting look different?

Two trade-count charts differ because the bars are assembled from whatever trades your data or trading service hands over, and services differ. Sierra Chart's help topic 47 says that two Number of Trades charts with identical settings, fed by different services or even by different connections to one service, probably will not look the same, and calls the problem inherent to this bar type rather than a fault in the software.

Where a service does not deliver trades consistently across its own connections, the page calls getting two such charts to match an impossible task, and harder still across two different services. Topic 43.4 adds that a real-time feed can deliver less trade data than the same provider's historical download, mainly because providers send less to hold down bandwidth and lag. Where records arrive without a trade-count field, the chart reverts to the days-minutes-seconds setting even with a trades-per-bar value entered.

There is also a storage setting underneath all of this. By default Sierra Chart collects live data and downloads history in one-second records, under a setting it calls the Intraday Data Storage Time Unit, and topic 47 asks for 1 Tick for full accuracy on all eight of the bar types it lists. Where the unit is larger, the bar currently forming can run past its trade, volume or range setting until the record in progress completes; the record is then split, the last bar adjusted to the chart's settings and a new bar added. That is why a forming bar can read over its own count and then snap back.

Reloading matters too. Duplicating or reloading one of these charts loads only the configured days-to-load, while the original may have accumulated more as it updated live, so the two can disagree unless a new bar is forced at each session start.

Is the "tick" in a tick chart the same as tick size?

No, and the two meanings sit one letter apart in the same software. The CFTC glossary's Tick entry is about price: a minimum price change in either direction, with an up-tick a last trade higher than the one before it and a down-tick one lower. It cross-refers to the glossary's Minimum Price Fluctuation (Minimum Tick) entry, which the CFTC defines as the "smallest increment of price movement possible in trading a given contract". That is the tick that has a cash value — what one tick is worth is the companion question to this one.

The tick in "500-tick chart" is a trade print. Sierra Chart keeps both ideas available as separate bar period types: t cuts a bar every so many trades, while pc cuts one every so many price changes, which is the price sense of the word. Its range bars are specified in ticks in the price sense too — 4r means four ticks of range per bar, not four trades.

That distinction decides which chart answers your question. A chart cut on price changes or on range moves a bar along only when price moves, so a long period of trading at one price produces nothing new. A chart cut on trade count advances through that same period steadily, because trades are printing even though price is not going anywhere. Neither is more correct; they measure different things, and the word "tick" covering both is an accident of vocabulary.

Which other chart types leave the clock behind?

Several, and their troubleshooting is shared. Sierra Chart's bar period type list runs to volume per bar, six range variants, reversal bars, renko in four forms, delta volume, price changes and point and figure, alongside the ordinary seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, quarters and years. Quantower's ten chart types cover much of the same ground under its own names: Renko, Range Bars, Volume, Reversal, Line Break, Kagi, Points & Figures and Heikin-Ashi, next to its Time chart and Tick chart.

Range bars carry a trap of their own that the Sierra Chart documentation illustrates with a currency cross at a 0.1 range setting. Accurate range bars need the chart's price display format to show every decimal place the underlying data actually carries; shown to two decimals the measured range of each bar is not very accurate, to three it is much closer, and to four it is precise, because the prices from that feed are bid-ask averages in effect, so a price can land half a minimum increment away from the increment itself. The same page gives three reasons a range bar's open can fall inside the previous bar's range: the "new bar on range met" variant rather than the standard one, a new session arriving while the chart is set to start a bar at each session start, and no tick-by-tick records in the data file.

A related cosmetic symptom turns up on trade-count and volume bars: identical bars repeating down the chart. Sierra Chart attributes that to the record splitting that makes each bar hold its quota when the underlying records are not single ticks, and to single trades whose volume alone exceeds the per-bar volume setting.

What does a non-time chart change on a funded account?

Nothing about the rules. A simulated funded account here is measured in money and in sessions, not in bars. The drawdown line sits a fixed distance below your highest end-of-day balance, rises only on a new highest close, and is live through the session — the chart you watch has no bearing on where it sits.

What does change is the boundary your software treats as a new day. Sierra Chart's guidance for accurate trade-count and volume bars is to have the chart open a bar at each session start — unless the setting would give bars longer than a day — and it takes that moment from the chart's session start time, or from the evening start where the evening session option is on. Our own trading hours define the trading day on the CME session: it opens at 6:00 PM ET and runs through the flat time the following afternoon, so a Sunday evening position belongs to Monday. If the chart's session configuration disagrees with the day your account is scored on, your bars will straddle a boundary that matters to your balance. Studies configured by session carry the same dependency — VWAP accumulates over a session you configure, not over a bar count.

The second thing is risk arithmetic. Whatever cuts the bars, a stop's cost is its distance in ticks multiplied by the tick value multiplied by the number of contracts. Sizing a position against a fixed loss limit is the same calculation on a 500-tick chart as on a five-minute chart. Both platforms quoted here are on the list of platforms you can trade on, and each documents its own bar types; read the one you actually trade.

FAQ

Is a tick chart better than a time chart for day trading futures?

None of the pages cited here compares the two on trading results, and neither will we. What they establish is what each bar measures: trades for a tick chart, elapsed time for a time chart, contracts for a volume chart. Quantower frames tick bars as a way to read activity more clearly in a fast session, and calls it crucial to use them with volume, since 500 trades says nothing about their size. Sierra Chart's pages on them are about accuracy and consistency, in its own words, not outcomes.

What tick count should I use?

The figures in the documentation are examples, not recommendations: 500 trades per bar in Quantower's illustration, and 100t for 100 trades per bar in Sierra Chart's keyboard example. Because the setting counts transactions rather than contracts, the same number fills at a very different rate on a heavily traded contract than on a thin one, and Sierra Chart's note that exchanges routinely bundle trades together means the count is not a precise measure of activity in either case.

Why does my tick bar hold more trades than the setting?

The cause the documentation gives is the data storage unit. Sierra Chart stores intraday data in one-second records by default, not tick by tick, and where that unit is longer than 1 Tick, the bar still forming can exceed its trades, volume or range setting until the record in progress completes; the record is then split and the last bar adjusted to the chart's settings.

Do tick charts work in the overnight session?

They build the same way, but slowly: a bar cut on trade count does not close until the trades arrive, so an overnight bar can cover a long stretch of clock. The setting that matters is whether a new bar starts at the session start, which Sierra Chart recommends enabling for these bar types unless the setting would produce bars longer than a day. Our trading hours put the CME session open at 6:00 PM ET, with everything flat by 4:45 PM ET the following afternoon.