TradeStation Help
Tick Bars plot the price of each transaction. Tick bars differ from time-based bars because tick bars plot prices based on a transaction-by-transaction basis while time-based bars plot prices during a specified time period. A transaction can represent 100 shares, 200 shares, 1,000 shares, and so on. When plotting tick bars, price and number of ticks are the only factors used, as time and volume are not considered.
For example, you can create a 5-tick chart, where one bar is comprised of the Open, High, Low, and Closing ticks for each set of 5 ticks. The length of time in that 5-tick bar could be a few seconds, a minute, an hour, or even a day.
In a 1-tick chart, there is no reason to report the Open, High, Low, and Closing prices because the exact trade price is plotted. In a 1-tick bar chart, the Open, High, Low, and Closing price are the same. Therefore, when creating a chart consisting of 1-tick bars, the price data is not really displayed as a bar but rather a series of connected ticks.
When you create a tick-based chart where each bar contains a certain number of ticks, each bar contains the range of Open, High, Low, and Closing prices for a specified number of ticks (for example, 10 ticks, 100 ticks, 1000 ticks, and so on). When you change the data interval to build bars based on multiple ticks per bar, the bars look exactly like time-based bars in that they plot the Open, High, Low, and Closing prices for the specified number of transactions.