Tick Charts

Hi All,


For years users of MetaTrader have wished that the MetaTrader platform supported “Tick Charts”. We at RiverRock Trading Corp. feel we have developed an extremely powerful indicator solution to make the wish for MetaTrader “Tick Charts” come true.

The following is an example of our tick chart. Each bar represents fifty, user defined, ticks.

I'm also from the camp who wants to see good tickcharts in MT4.

At the moment I use my order entry box for the ticks. What benefit would your indicator have for me as a trader above the MT4 order box tick chart?

The Tick Chart indicator superimposes its bars on top of your standard time based charts.

Because the bars have no relation to time, the time information at the bottom of the chart is meaningless. However, you do need some basic reference to a point in time. The Tick Chart indicator can draw vertical lines on your chart when the major markets open or close. The user can change both time and color for the lines. The defaults for the colored lines are as follows:

Green US Open
Red London Close
Purple Tokyo Open
Blue London Open


You will find this feature useful on low level charts, but not high level charts. The above chart (50 ticks) is a low level chart.

You can also place all of your favorite MetaTrader drawing objects, such as Fibonacci lines, trend lines, etc. on top of the Tick Chart. We support all 20 plus standard MetaTrader drawing objects.

The indicator maintains a historical base of the bars you have collected for a currency pair. As you can see in the following compressed chart, we display a great number of 50 tick bars.

Now that we have saved a historical base, we can take it and fire up the “Tick Builder” indicator. This indicator will gather lower level tick bars, which have been saved, and create bigger bars that you can use. For example, you take your 50 tick bars and create 300, 350 or even 500 size tick bars.

The following is a 500 tick chart representation of our earlier chart running the Tick Chart indicator.

Below, you can see an example of what we have nicknamed our “WOW” chart. You can superimpose higher level Tick Bars on to the original lower level Tick Bar chart in the same window.

We are running the indicator twice in the same window, but each maintains its own interval. With this chart, you can always have the bigger picture in mind. Each indicator moves at its own pace. This is a unique indicator unlike any other found on MetaTrader, TradeStation or other trading platforms.

Well there are more cool things I could talk about. I will save them for another day.


We are looking for two additional Beta Site volunteers. We are selecting our volunteers based on the following criteria.

1. You must be a seasoned trader with a live account and not a newbie
2. You must have a Skype account with a camera (a really great one is less that $90)
3. You must be a US citizen residing on the east coast (I don’t like 2AM video links)

If you would like to volunteer please post your response on this thread or better yet send me a private message here at the Forex Factory.


Jim

I hope the rest of the product introduction answered a your initial questions.

Thanks for the info, I understand your indicator is for different purposes than the tick-by-tick order entry window in MT4.

In that case I am not interested, but maybe someone else is. Good luck!

Jim,

Looks like interesting stuff but i have a couple of questions...

1. So what exactly are tick charts and why are they so different than the standard MetaTrader charts? Can you show me the difference?

2. Can you tell me more about the drawing objects like a trend line and why supporting drawing objects is important? So why raise the issue? To me that is business as usual.

Thanks for your help!

flh-trader

Those are great questions. The first question is very easy. The second question is a very interesting question and goes to the hart of the Tick Chart indicator. I will try to answer your questions and I will place the answer in two posts.

Tick Charts vs. standard MT time based charts is based on when to start and end drawing a bar on the chart.

On a tick based chart the user defines how many price movements either up or down constitutes the drawing of a bar. In all of my examples so far, a new bar starts drawing after the bar earlier had 50 ticks or price movements.

In a standard MT time based chart, a new bar is drawn once every interval. So if you are on a 5 minute interval one bar will be drawn every 5 minutes with any number of ticks' buried in side of the bar. The bar could represent 2 ticks or 200 ticks. That is why you more often than not see one bar so much longer or shorter than the bar either before or after it. So if you were on a 5 minute char and the bar was made up of 180 different price movements you would see only bar. Where as on a tick chart you would see that three bars had been drawn and the formation of a forth bar was over 50 percent complete.

On the charts below both were captured at the identical time and price and I used the Euro as it is normally the most traded currency par in the spot/cash market. The charts were captured at about 10:00 pm EDST tonight. (And no I did not use the standard MT chart save function)

The top chart is a time based chart with a "white channel" applied. The yellow arrows are the bottom sync points of the channel and the orange arrow points to the upper end of the channel. You will notice on the upper chart a "Trend line break" or violation. And many, many, many traders would have bailed out at this point in anticipation of a change in direction. And then the bars came back into the channel.

The bottom chart is a Tick chart. The channel is drawn using the same high and low price values we used above but we are still in the trade and the price channel is in place.

The above trend violation happens all over every time frame and every currency pair you trade. But with out a real tick chart, you never know it is happening to YOU.

I will try to post a few more examples over the next couple of days to further illustrate some trade opportunities you may have missed.

One of the best summations of Tick Charts can be found in the following (3 page) educational article written by Dr. John Clayburg in 2007 and it is a great read

http://mediaserver.fxstreet.com/Repo...dffc569c33.pdf

flh, I hope you took the time to read Dr. Clayburg's article.

So to the question regarding drawing objects, the following two charts are the same pair we just spent reviewing. I removed the lines and the comments and added some Fib lines to the charts.

I mentioned in post #3 that the tick charts are drawn on top of your standard time based charts. Under a regular chart MT moves the chart to the left as time marches on as shown in the upper "Time based chart".

However, the Tick chart is drawing its bars on a different rhythm; ever 50 tick/price changes. When you place a Fib indicator on two tick bars, the tick indicator keeps track of it's tick bar positions and adjust the fib starting and end positions accordingly. If the indicator did not do that, the second chart's fib lines would have been moved "from here" "To here". And you would have said, why are my Fib markers way over there?

And yes, you could deal with that. But not to your question of trend lines, you can't have trend lines moving left across the chart and making it look like there has been a real rend line break/violation.

As post #4 stated the indicator keeps track of all of the standard MT chart drawing objects. The indicator will stash them away into a file for later retrieval as required.

The "Tick Chart" indicator is more than just painting bars on a chart. It is a complete "Joan Rivers" face lift to MetaTrader.

flh, that was a great question! And you have just pealed the first layer off of the product. Congrats.

Jim

Thank you. That was some interesting information. So if I use a tick chart, how do things like an RSI indicator behave ? Also, I only buy or sell pull backs on a specific trend. Is there way to see a bigger picture so i don't get slammed on a trade? I assume i have to open another chart with the tick count at a higher level. Did i ask that question right ?

FLH, I am sorry I did not get back with you sooner as I have been tied up.

Regarding your using the RSI and other standard MetaTrader indicators; DON'T do that. They are all based on time based intervals and not tick bar intervals. We are building a collection of indicators that are tick based that you can add to your tick charts. I hope to have one or two examples for you to look at sometime next week. These will be shipped with the package.

To see the bigger picture you could open up another tick chart. But if you look at Post #7 you can see that you can have your higher level chart in the same window as your lower level chart. You can also have Fib lines on different tick intervals in the same window window and we insure that they keep in sync with the proper tick bars. I will also try to illustrate this concept very soon.

Flh-trader. I am sorry I did not follow up earlier regarding indicators on our Tick Charts. I came down with a flu bug and I have been doing the RX thing for about two weeks.

Any way, I promised to show you some indicators we have developed for our Tick Charts. So that is the point of the next couple of posts.

This first chart shows a 50 Tick Chart with two tick based moving average lines. These are not the standard MetaTrader time base MAs. These MAs are tick based.

Also on the earlier charts I did not include the close tick on the bars. On each bar you will notice a little yellow marker that shows you where the bar closed. This yellow marker is ½ pip tall. And yes you can choose the bar color and the close tick color. If you don’t want to see the close tick, just specify that it is the same color as the tick bar it self.

The second chart shows the same pair with tick based RSI and Stochastic indicator. The indicator name (TC RSI) has the value of 50 placed after its name so as to let you know that the indicator is running on 50 tick bars.

As the indicators can operate on any tick bar interval, it is the trader’s responsibility to specify the interval as a start up parameter for the indicator. A error message will appear in the indicator area if the tick interval can not be found on the primary chart drawing area.

The next chart is an example of a basic MACD and a classier version with colored bars. The reason I show this classier version is because we also provide a short four page white paper for programmers who want to port their source code to the Tick Chart operating environment.

The following is a list of some of the indicators we have developed to date.

TC ADX
TC Bollinger Bands
TC MACD
TC MACD Bars
TC Moving Average
TC RSI
TC Stoch

Hi Jim,

A couple of questions on your Tick Charts.....

1. I have written an extensive EA that would like to use with Tick Charts in MT4. I use Moving Averages (EMA, SMA, etc), Stochastics and MACD (Histo bars and line). My question is: can I set the parameters according to my needs (i.e. number of tick bars to analyze)?

2. Can I use your indicators in my EA (i.e. calculate the value of Tick Charts' Stochastic, MACD and MAs)?

3. If so, then how do I get access to these (website, price, etc)?

Thanks!

Richard

Hi Richard,

Those are great questions and hence the title of my post.

The architecture is the hart of the product. By design you basically have easy access to basically all of the tick bar information you should need. This is how it works.

When you start your EA you will be required to supply your EA with a UI parameter for the Tick Bar size; 50 for example. With that number, you can now bridge to the Tick Chart and its tick-bars is by way of our DLL. I have attached two graphic pictures that outline the skeleton of the code on your end. This is the same code structure that our indicators use to find out what is happening in the primary chart window.

The our APIs for tick charts are TC_Init(…..) and TC_LoadHistory(……) which are normally called in the init() section of your EA. Also called in the init section is a MetaTrader request for the text of an object that the Tick Chart indicator places in memory as a full bar is closed. A change in the text of the description indicates a newly completed bar has been painted.

In your start() section, the code basically polls the description for a change of its text. When this occurs a new bar has closed so you can gather the high, low and close values for the bar.

It is simple yet elegant and fast. No muss, no fuss.

Again on the architecture side of things, the Tick Chart indicator doesn’t rely of MetaTrader disk I/O we go straight to the Operating System and send each closed bar to the history file. If for any reason MetaTrader were to crash or some other system glitch. There are no closed bars sitting around in memory.

Getting back to the remainder of your first question. We provide you with the source code to all of the indicators that run in secondary chart windows and the MA indicator that runs in the chart window. Your are free to take our source code and include what every you need to in your EA. You can get as exotic as you want/need. We also have a short 5 or 6 page document that explains how to port existing indicators to use our Tick Chart indicator.

I hope I have answered all of the points in your first two questions.

We are in the packing process for our Demo which we hope to get on the Factory in the next few days for you to download. This is a very simple install. If you have every installed a real Windows application you know how it goes. Point us to the target MetaTrader root directory and just click on the Install button.

Getting back to your EA, with the demo system you get the following indicators – executable code only for the RSI, MACD Bars, and the Stochastic. The source code is only provided to product owners. HOWEVER; that being said, you can with the demo installed build a mini-EA and can open the history file and obtain each bar close to make sure that you understand the interface and that it works as advertised. The demo trial period is for seventeen (17) days.

I am going to try to make another post in a little while to describe a few more items that come with the demo package. These are also very cool must have items.


And you last point was “3. If so, then how do I get access to these (website, price, etc)?” Our site is under construction as we add a shopping cart that supports global purchases (including VAT) so please be patient with us on that point.

Well that is probably more information than you wanted right now but maybe on the other hand it was just right.

Once again great questions and thanks for asking.

Till later Richard,



Jim Crossley
Chief Tick Chart Architect

Hi Jim,

Any updates about the upcoming demo?