tick beat indicator

line patterns


(the future of the bsTL approach)

Would any programmer want to make the below as an indicator?





In the upper right corner of the chart, a dot disappears between every tick and appears with every tick. This is the tick beat.
In a separate window below the main chart, the number of ticks for the chart's candle (or other PA type) appears at the close of the number's respective candle. Each number prints in the window relative to the other numbers in the same horizontal and vertical position as its candle does to the other candles on the main chart. This is the tick count.

I'd imagine that if you had a large number of ticks in a small candle or a small number of ticks in a large candle, the import of that candle'd change to the indicator's user. Plus, the tick beat would help one decide on intra-candle moves.

One downfall would be numbers excessively high to read effectively in the daily, weekly and monthly scales, so the indicator would, through standard settings when loading the indicator, fail to work at these levels except at the user's discretion.

STik (tick with TF separators, read with fun patterns: bottle cap, cookie cutter, drunken step, ripple, 45) ,http://i44.tinypic.com/6rof8l.jpg

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Part of the bsTL microverse: Overview, patterns (or, those with fewer or more candles), TF use, trading. (And its future: automatic; precise.)

Sounds like a fancy tick volume indicator. It would only measure the volume based on your borker's price feed.

Sorry took so long to answer. No, you have the wrong idea. Think of musical notation. An example of what I'm looking for is the vertical lines in http://codebase.mql4.com/5044 . Only, this only groups the number of ticks per TF's unit of time. I want a graphical representation of the time between each tick, to be included with the volume and direction of each tick, so that one does not need irregular vertical lines like STik has. In the indicator I'm looking to have, there'd be lots of empty spaces between regularly-spaced vertical lines, exactly timing when each tick shows within each of the TF's time units. Thus, tick beat (a word from music).

The volume inclusion, making each of the ticks a particular size to show its volume and also making each of the ticks a particular color (for example, up blue, down red, and neutral (if there is one in forex) grey), is nice to have, also. You can't have it all, often, however.

I understand your complaint about volume in forex. (Read esignal has a good one.) I follow VSA's view on this issue, that the relative volume is similar enough from most any source.

If anyone wants to write this indicator and post it, that'd be great.

So, basically, you want a "light" to flash for every new tick?

And for the record: forex volume is calculated based on the number of ticks in a bar.

The flashing light isn't hard to code, the issue is how long to leave the light up there. =D. In computer time, I can make it flash maybe 50-100 times, and you wouldn't see it because it's just too darn fast.

(I rewrote my answer to remove extra information to the end of the post.)


Thanks for the post.
Yes, that's what I want, the flashing light in one corner of the chart, like a current-price label that changes at the speed of the price, only that of the tick.

First thing I needed to answer your question was limits. Metronome freeware or limited-trial software programs that I've seen have different limits, generally below 240 (taken from a popular, free one for a guitar) beats per minute. (I've read (source: Ecstatic Postures (Felicitas Goodman)) that the brain can go into theta hearing a multitonic metronome played at 215 bpm, under certain conditions, and theta is deep thought, one step away from sleep.) Even though it's sound instead of light, this limit seems an okay one to go with. So 240 bpm is 240/60=4 beats per second. Going with this, one'd base the tick beat on dividing a second into four equal sections and thus having 240 spots per minute for the flash to possibly be on.

The flashing light now sounds like a metronome program, only at the pace the market sets. If ticks bunch together so the brain can't or won't distinguish them, say all 163 volume ticks of one minute on the GBP/USD (which I found glancing at MT4's built-in Volumes indicator on the past several months' 1' g/u) into one second of that one minute, then the tick beat indicator'd have to record all or most of the ticks as one beat in the corner of the chart, followed by silence or a blank space during that minute.

One'd thus lump together into one tick beat or 'flash' any ticks that happen within each 1/4-second interval.
Then, one'd have to consider if there's one tick beyond the interval.
This brings forth the question of when tick volume crosses over two or more 1/4-second slots, how does one represent it on the on-chart tick beat 'flash'. The 'flash' would act, speed-wise, somewhat like those little indicators that print the current price on the chart as soon as it changed, only it would respond to the tick not the price. The 'flash', limited to a fourth of a second per beat, could hold for 1/2 second(or, ") when one tick appeared beyond the standardized first 1/4"; the 'flash', now more a light, would hold until a full 1/4" held no ticks.

I hope this answers your question.


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Just to get it on paper, no offense, I've got an idea for an oscillator to record the tick beat's action.

It'd be a separate-window 1/4-second volume bars with the indicator having under 'Inputs' a user-defined variable (5 seconds to 4 minutes) that adjusts the width separately from the main chart.
A problem is there'd be a lot of spaces in it. Thus, another variable is having enough data per screen to look at to make a decision from the separate window. A solution may be to have the indicator allow itself, in a user-denoted variable, to widen and condense the separate window apart from the TF'ed chart.
Why: Just under a thousand minutes showed on my screen when I completely condensed a midweek-day chart on the 1', which gives about four minutes per screen. This may be appropriate for very short-time decisions during most of the day. Fully-widened, a chart'd only provide five seconds of tick lines. Sometimes, during news perhaps, this could be necessary to view for the volume. Only, I doubt many people keep open a full-condensed chart, so they wouldn't see that four minutes or five seconds on one screen when they could use it in a hurry.
Once the user selects how wide to make the separate-window indicator, the indicator would of course widen and narrow when the chart's size is adjusted.
Finally, on price: a NumBars user-defined variable under 'Input' would allow more than one screen to increase usefulness.

You can see this extra indicator is a bit complex. Just thinking thru it helped.

When the bar changes its size, is what I wanted to record with correct spacing in a separate window with a (MT4-standard) candle each time. Someone just made an indicator with temporary recording, here, so what you answered has just been done. What I asked (which is more simply explained in a post after the noted one, than in the last post in this thread), recording with correct time spacing, hasn't...
Thanks again, though, for considering; otherwise, I may not have started using the new one.

I don't have any ideas for how to code this up with MT4, but my comment to you is that in order to make the bars even in time, you're really talking about something like far-shorter timeframes like "6second". I've never seen S6 charts but have heard there are some professional charting packages that offer these, and I'm fairly sure you'd have to pay for a datafeed (like eSignal) as well.

Good luck...

Well, no, ticks don't arrive one every six or whatever number of seconds regularly, they arrive irregularly. Only your clock, to date, displays this fact, to my limited knowledge on the subject. It's the irregularity of the ticks and how much price moves for each of these ticks that counts.
If I wanted yet another averaging scheme, hundreds of those are available. I want raw data, the baseline of the market, displayed.

I think I get what you're saying, tho. The tick data'd have to be broken up into intervals of six seconds to be displayable.
When I watched your CandleTime indicator for a little while, it seemed, to my smalltime broker and slower session, that tick only changed the candle every 1/10 to 1/2 minute or so, at irregular intervals. This is what I'm used to, in forex. It just seemed like a good idea not to force-fit this into regular candles, and instead keep them displayed in the format they're delivered. Tick indicators for MT4 I've seen don't do this.

Anyhow, you know this, and thanks for the pro advice. If I ever try and lift this off the ground, I'll definitely be lighter in the pocket for it.

So perhaps something else you would add to an otherwise standard 6-second bar chart would be to put in gaps where there are no ticks. The same issue exists for M1 and M5 and, rarely, higher timeframes, where the market has no ticks for such a long time that an entire bar is skipped. At the 6-second rate, this would in fact occur all the time, just about every minute.

I can see how the OHLC for a 6-second bar can be indicated by a standard looking bar, but how would relative volume be indicated as part of the bar? Just like today with standard volume bars at the bottom of the chart? Or perhaps one could change color for emphasis.

With MT4, there is at least one problem in that an indicator gets triggered by a tick and goes off and does calculations, and DURING those calculations, any incoming ticks are completely ignored until after a complete cycle through the code has completed. There is no catch-up cycle for missed ticks; the chart will stay as it was regardless of the missed ticks final price. Then with the NEXT tick, whenever that occurs, the code cycles again. There's no telling how many ticks one will miss, and especially so during market news when ticks just come flying in like crazy. MT4 is just not a strong platform for tick-related charts, IMO.