Tick Trading Tools

The Multiple TimeFrame Tick Advantage!

The ability to track your favorite indicator in different time frames on the same chart is a major advantage to the trader!

Tick Charts have special features in their own right, but to be able to add multiple timeframes of data to the same chart is even better. You now have that ability with this new Suite of Tick Trading Tools offered for TradeStation.

Tick Tool Suite Overview

For over 18 years, I, Bill Brower, have heard traders talk about the benefits of using multiple time frames to trade. It is one of the most important features in the arsenal of successful traders because you need to be flexible and adjust to volatility. A $100 stop loss might work well in a low volatility situation and be totally inadequate 10 minutes later when volatility spikes up. Traders dreamed of using charts that automatically adjusted the bar interval based on volatility. Their dreams were answered with tick charts.

A tick is one trade of any size volume. A tick chart is formed of bars using the same number of ticks. When markets are slow, the bars form slowly and when activity picks up, the bars can form very quickly. This allows the indicators to update according to activity. If it takes all night for one tick bar to form, then the indicator updates only once but if you get 200 tick bars in a minute, the indicators update 200 times. This is exactly what traders need to adjust to different volatility conditions quickly and efficiently.

However, there always was a penalty with TradeStation if you used tick bars. You were not allowed to use multiple time frames on the same chart. Sophisticated traders have used multiple time frames for years. The longer time frame is used to compute a trend direction and the shorter is used to trigger trade entry and exits. So traders were then in a dilemma because if they used tick bars they lost the ability to compute a trend (or anything else) on a higher time frame.

The Tick Tool Trader Suite solves the problem by allowing traders to plot multiple time frames on a tick chart. The trick is to use some advanced programming features in TradeStation to synthetically compute the higher time frame tick bars from the bars plotted on the chart. However, this needs to be done for each indicator that you want plotted. No other data is required; no DLL’s and no global variables.

The Suite is a package of common indicators and functions that can be applied only to tick charts. Each indicator has a TickBarMultiple that specifies the higher time frame bar interval you want to use. If you are using a 500 tick bar chart and the input is set to 10, the indicator will plot based the 5000 tick bar interval. If you set it to 5, the indicator will plot based on the 2500 bar interval.

You can have the same or different indicators running on the same chart, all using different tick bar multiples if you wish. There is almost no restriction on this other than the limits of the TradeStation chart capability. At last traders can have multiple time frame capability using tick charts and so can you. If you are still not convinced about the advantage you will have with the Suite, download the free instruction manual and see examples of how to trade with this package.

Why Tick Charts?

Tick charts have distinct advantages over time charts. To summarize please review these distinctions:

  • Tick charts are not disrupted with gaps in trading. Often the gaps can throw your indicators off course creating a discontinuity in the flow of the charting display.
  • Tick charts incorporate both time and price in their bars. This provides a more compressed consistent presentation of the chart patterns currently in formation.
  • This time and price combination allows for a more valid display of momentum when breakouts are about to occur giving an advantage over just time charts.
  • And tick charts allow for a smoother presentation of the key indicators you choose to use in your trading set ups.

Overview of These New Multiple TimeFrame Indicators For Tick Charts

This new set of indicators is called the Tick Suite of Indicators. They have been designed for the TradeStation Software. They will display all the major indicators in multiple time frames on ONE chart. This gives you the distinct advantage of being able to trading using the economy of geography on your trading screen along with the full power of tick charts!

Here are the Indicators in the Suite:

Module 1

  • ADX/DMI
  • Average Range
  • Average True Range
  • Bollinger Bands
  • Commodity Channel Index
  • HH/LL Channel
  • Chande Momentum Oscillator

Module 2

  • Blau Ergodic
  • Keltner Channel
  • Linear Reg Curve
  • Momentum
  • Simple Moving Average
  • On-Balance Volume
  • OBV Momentum

Module 3

  • Pivots Swing High and Low
  • Rate of Change
  • Relative Strength Index (RSI)
  • Parabolic
  • Stochastic Slow D (simply smoothing)
  • Standard Deviation
  • X Average

Module 4

  • MACD
  • Positive Volume Index
  • Linear Regression Slope
  • Adaptive Moving Avg.
  • Hull Moving Avg.
  • Weighted Moving Avg.
  • Stochastic DMI
  • Triple XAverage LogPrice

These tools are all engineered to function on one chart in multiple time frames of your choice! You may also plot multiple indicators as well. A prominent feature is how easy these tools are to install in a simple turn key fashion!

Build Your Favorite Trading Strategy Around These Multiple Time Frames

Professional traders almost always use multiple time frames for trading. The longer time frame is used to establish the trend while rules for triggering trades are computed based on shorter time frames. While Tradestation featured multi-data minute based charts, multi-data tick charts were not allowed. The advantages of multi-data charts were lost when using tick charts and if you used minute based charts, you lost all the advantages of tick charts. Now there is a solution. The Suite allows you to generate multiple time frame plots in a tick chart! Now you can combine the powerful advantage of using a higher time frame with the responsiveness, agility and smoothness of shorter time frames on tick charts!

For examples of how this may work for you, Bill Brower now presents sample illustrations of specific trade set-ups utilizing some of the indicators in multiple time-frames.