Tick charts??

Hey guys, anyone here use tick charts instead of time based charts for futures? Are there any advantages or disadvantages? Thanks for the info guys!

Unless you are automated, trying to trade tick charts real time doesn't make sense IMO.

However, historical tick data is important. IMO all bars and candles you use for charting or backtests should be built up from your tick data; that way you can be sure it doesn't hold bad ticks that will mislead you in terms of giving you a wrong picture of a time period's actual High and Low. Otherwise, if your bars and candles are wrong, you're backtests will be wrong ... garbage in, garbage out...

See some bad ticks here ... Ghouls Gallery - Financial Tick Cleaning, Compression and Migration

Tick charts are great to use for futures. You don't have to use 5 tick charts or anything crazy like that. You can use high time framed tick charts like 1,000 ticks, 2,000 tick charts. These will slow the pace down depending on the market and keep time out of the equation for trend trading.

Find a good broker that supports tick data without any problems and you will be pleasantly surprised. Tradestation is who I use, and they are great. If you want to PM me I can give you a coupon code for $500 commission rebate I have for them.