Tick Chart Traders

Id like to invite tick chart traders to interact in this thread.

My example below 1min chart on top and 30 tick below with moving average as an indicator.

heey m8. can you share that tick chart indi?

Cheers

Great idea for a thread!

I'm not trading sub-M1 just now, but I used to and I was decently profitable at it. For charting I was using Dukascopy's JForex -- gorgeous charts, you won't find anything near as good on Metatrader. Lately I've been considering it again.

For short term scalps, when you subtract spreads, commissions, slippage and losing trades, the pips/trade isn't all that much, it ends up being a pip or two. I found that by using sub-M1 charts I could improve my entries and exits by around half a pip on average, which makes a considerable difference at the bottom line at the end of the day.

hey alien, its a paid tick indicator..you can find it easy with a google search or you can find it here too https://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=446959

nice could u talk a bit about strategies? im curious about the different ones with tick trading.

Well, when scalping, I'm really only interested in holding a position open as long as price keeps moving in my direction. The instant it shows signs that its about to retrace, I'm out. Lock in the profit quick, because experience has taught that if you try to wait out any period of retrace, that winning trade quickly turns to a losing trade. So I'll use 10 second bars or whatever sub-M1 bars are working well that day, and draw a trend line as soon as a trend becomes discernible. Then, the instant that price breaks through that trend line, I take profit.

On M1 charts its hard to pick out where the areas of congestion are, and hard to spot when a retrace starts. On sub-M1 charts its all laid out and very plain to see.

I've been thinking of buying the Rainwood indicator. When you are a professional carpenter you buy a quality hammer, you don't quibble over the cost and keep pounding nails in with a rock.

Can you write a bit of a review -- what you like, what you don't like, etc?

Can you use range bars at .1 pip Is that the same?

I highly recommend it..its the best available..i see no flaws in it..and its cheap in my opinion.

Thanks. I have done a lot of my own coding in the past, and have a handful of free tick chart indicators already, but my favorite one has stopped working due to some change that MetaQuotes made.

Never tried it. If you have range bars set up already why not try it and post some screen shots of how it looks?

It probably won't look the same as time-based bars or equivolume bars, but who knows, you might find it has its own advantages.

This is a 1 minute chart with range bars at 0.5 pips per bar. Think it's quite similar. I can go down to 0.1 pip per bar, but difficult to correlate to the 1 min chart.

Regards
Razor

What is entry for this strategy?

Hey dragon, this thread isn't directed to one specific strategy AFAIK. If you are asking me about what entry strategies I'd use, I can talk to that.

Tick charts and sub-M1 charts are of most value when trading very short time frames - scalps. Typical time in a trade may be 5 minutes, but it can vary from less than a minute to more then ten minutes. So clearly, when you are trading for short intervals, the type of market action you are looking for is a short swift move, lots of pips in a short time. You would look for setups that give you a quick knee-jerk or a pop up or down. There are probably a hundred different setups could be found that would meet this criterion.

For example, many traders like to place stop-loss orders at specific places on a chart, such as just above or just below the day's high or low respectively. So when price breaks higher or lower into a cluster of SL, it moves as if it hit a banana peel, plunging through that area relatively quickly (let's say it moves 10 pips in 3 minutes, for the sake of the example). Once those SL orders are exhausted though, the movement stops and quite often will retrace back to the point of breakout. So if you are confident enough, you could also trade the return move, though I usually have not done this.

As another example, you may sometimes see a chart calmly meandering sideways and then without any news release or other clear reason the price will abruptly spike ten or fifteen pips. If you are pretty sure this is a random spike and not due to a significant market moving event then you know its going to retrace. So you watch the spike develop on the tick chart and when the spike is over and the retrace has begun, then take your position and ride the retrace back down/up.

What is sweet about scalping like this is it is actually pretty low risk. You don't sit around hoping for price to go your way, either it is actively going your way or you get out. I use an SL of 5 pips typically or even less, and move it up as soon as I can. You are in the market for only a few minutes at a time, so you are minimally exposed to surprise news events such as some Saudi oil minister announcing output cuts, earthquakes, etc.

The down side of such trading is that spreads and commissions become large relative to your profit size. You need to select a broker that has excellent spreads and razor-thin commissions.

Final pointer, and this is the most important: take your profits too soon. You've probably heard the advice "cut your losses short and let your profits run". Maybe its true when holding positions for longer term, but it is not true when scalping. Often, the difference between a winning trade and a losing trade is a few seconds of hesitation before closing the trade. If you are swift to bank profits you will keep your win rate high and your account will grow. But trying to hold a trade for longer hoping it will become a bigger winner is a path to ruin. Been there, done that, it was a very hard lesson to learn.

As with any trading strategy you need to spend some time working with it, getting familiar with how the market behaves and figuring out what works and what doesn't.

Hey scalpers,

I'm sharing a tick chart creator for MT4. Its very useful to get insight into what's going on inside an M1 bar, and I get about half a pip better returns per trade using it. Note this is actually an Equivolume chart creator, as each bar contains an equal number of ticks.

How to Install and Use it
Put it in your MQL4/Indicators folder and restart MT4 or compile it with Metalanguage Editor. Note: you may see some compiler warnings about possible loss of data due to type conversion, these should be ignored. Fake news.

To use it:

1. Create a new M1 chart for the symbol you want a tick chart for (you can resize it to be really small). I recommend running this indicator on a separate M1 chart that you leave undisturbed (different from the chart you use for trading), so that the data stream doesn't get disrupted by your activities such as changing the time frame.
2. Drag the TickChartMaker indicator from the Navigator onto this new chart.
3. On the "Common" tab in the dialog box that opens, put a check in the box beside "Allow DLL imports". Very important, otherwise it won't run.
4. On the "Inputs" tab, set how many ticks per bar you want.

That starts up the indicator to function as a server, which creates a data file containing your custom bars. Just leave it running.

To open a tick chart for viewing:

1. On the menu bar at the top left of MT4 click "File", then click "Open Offline" in the dropdown menu.
2. Scroll down to find your symbol in the list. The indicator (server) will create a file with a name that reflects the symbol and number of ticks per bar. So for example if your chosen symbol is EURUSD, and you have set the server to create bars containing 27 ticks per bar then the name would be "EURUSD_27t,M1". Don't ask why the "M1" is there -- it is an MT4 limitation.
3. Highlight the file and click "Open" and you have a tick chart!

The chart updates in real time with every tick received and you can add any indicators and drawing objects to the chart just as you would with any other chart.

Tips and Pointers

1. I find that a good way to use it is to put an M1 chart on the top half of the MT4 workspace and the tick chart on the bottom half.
2. I like to set unique colors and chart settings for tick charts. Once you get settings you like, save it as a template.
3. If its not working, first check for messages in the Experts tab or the Journal tab to help identify the reason.
4. It should be obvious, but bears mentioning that the custom bar data file is only updated while this indicator is running and while ticks are being received. So if you stop the indicator for a while and then restart it, your tick chart will have a gap for the time the indicator was off, and there is no way to get that gap filled in again.
5. If you change the number of ticks per bar, a different data file with a different name will be created and the old file will no longer be added to (again, this should be obvious).
6. This indicator does not purge or delete the data files it creates, it only adds to them. Eventually you might want to go into the "history" area of your MT4 data and delete files that are not needed or that have grown too large. (Take care not to delete the regular MT4 data files which share the same folder.)
7. Running multiple copies of the indicator on the same symbol with the same bars per chart setting would cause problems so the server tries to detect and prevent that by using a global variable. If the indicator won't run and reports "second copy" in the log but you are sure that there are no other copies running then some prior glitch may have left a global variable behind. Press "F3" and see if a global variable exists for the symbol and ticks-per-bar value. It may be necessary to manually delete it.
8. If you want to simultaneously create multiple charts with different numbers of ticks per bar on the same symbol, just put multiple copies of the indicator on your "server" chart, one for each unique ticks-per-bar value desired.
9. You can't trade directly from an Offline Chart. To place orders, adjust stops etc, do it on a regular live MT4 chart (M1 or higher).

Okay, I've tried to anticipate and answer most of the questions and issues that may come up. For any others, post them here.

Important Note
I'll try to fix bugs, but please do not ask me to add features or do free programming for you. I created this tool to fit my needs and in the spirit of open source I'm sharing it with the community. Feel free to use it any way you like, modify or enhance it to suit your own preferences and requirements, and to share your work too.

Thank you very much Trainman !