Tick charts

An M1 candle hides everything that happened inside its minute. Twenty price changes and two are drawn the same way, as one body and two wicks. A tick chart drops the bars and plots every change of price as it arrives, which is the closest look at the market the terminal can give you.

Open a tick chart

• Web terminal: open the timeframe drop-down in the chart toolbar and choose Tick, the first entry, before M1.
• iPhone and Android: swipe the timeframe strip above the chart back to the start and tap Tick.

The chart reloads with the most recent ticks for the instrument and then adds each new one live. Pick any bar timeframe to go back to candles. Your chart type, indicators and drawings are waiting where you left them.

Reading it

A tick chart has two lines. The solid line is the bid, the price you sell at. The fainter line above it is the ask, the price you buy at. The space between the two is the spread at every moment, so a tick chart is the plainest way to see the spread open up and close again.

The horizontal axis is not time in equal steps. Each point is one price change, so a busy stretch spreads out wide and a quiet one squeezes together. The labels on the time axis read hours, minutes and seconds, which is how you tell a burst of forty ticks in two seconds from forty ticks over a minute.

A few things a tick chart shows well:

• How fast the price is moving right now, before a one minute bar has closed.
• Whether a jump was one tick or a run of them.
• The spread during a news release or at the daily open, when it tends to change most.
• That the feed is live. A flat line in open hours means no new prices have arrived, and in closed hours means the market is shut.

Scroll the mouse wheel, or pinch on a tablet or phone, to see more or fewer ticks at once. Drag left to look further back. The tick chart holds a recent stretch of ticks, not days of them. For anything older, use M1 and up, which have deep history.

What is switched off

Indicators and drawings need bars to work from, so the tick chart does not draw them. Your indicators stay on the chart's list and come back when you switch to a bar timeframe. If you pick a drawing tool while on Tick, the terminal says Drawings are off on the tick chart and returns to the cursor.

The chart type picker does not change a tick chart either. It is always the two lines.

On the iPhone and Android apps, tick mode also hides the pending order and price alert buttons on the chart rail, because both need a price picked from bars. Your existing orders and alerts are not touched. Place new ones from the ticket or a bar chart.

Your open positions and pending orders are still yours to manage while a tick chart is on screen, and the ticket works as usual. The placing orders guide covers the ticket.

Tick charts next to bar charts

In the web terminal you can show up to four charts at once, and each one keeps its own timeframe. A common way to use a tick chart is to put it beside a bar chart of the same instrument: the bars for the picture, the ticks for what is happening this second. The chart layouts guide shows how.

Market depth goes well with it too. The tick chart shows prices changing, and the depth panel shows the levels waiting at each price, where the Broker publishes them.

Tick charts and tick volume

The Volume indicator on bar charts counts ticks. For most instruments a Broker quotes, the volume of a bar is the number of price changes inside it. A tall volume bar on M1 is a minute where the tick chart would have been crowded. The two views are the same information, one counted and one drawn.