IB - No Tick Charts?

R

RedEyeFly

Called IB the other day. They are not my broker, but I was just calling to inquire. On the phone they told me that they do not offer any charting package which uses Tick bars. Is this really the case?
 
You can connect Ninja Trader charting to IB. Ninja Trader is free to use, but you will have to pay if you use it to trade like I do with another broker.

Quote from RedEyeFly:

Called IB the other day. They are not my broker, but I was just calling to inquire. On the phone they told me that they do not offer any charting package which uses Tick bars. Is this really the case?
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IB doesn't supply tick data so no reason for tick charts.

The IB data feed is a snapshot data feed. For example, futures data is a 100 millisecond snapshot. The upside is that the data feed doesn't lag in fast markets. The downside is no tick data.

You have to go elsewhere for tick data.
 
IB charts may not chart tick data - I don't know as I don't use their charts although I am told they are getting better, so perhaps it's time I took another look.

Anyway, data is data. It's your charting package that will or will not be able to draw tick charts. Some data providers like IB sample the data and it is very accurate for trading at the 1 min level and below. Others like eSignal give all the ticks, which used to drive me crazy at news releases when the sw would choke on data overload while IB kept up with a fast the market.

So different data providers means that a 144T chart can look very different with different charting packages. I have been using IB tick data for many years. The question is, can your software construct tick charts? I think most can, but some sure can't. If your sw can connect to IB and construct tick charts, you're good to go.
 
Quotetracker with an IB feed is also a way to get "IB tick charts". I don't know how accurate they are, with IB's snapshot format, but I've checked out the charts and they look just like any other tick charts I've seen. Quotetracker is free if you have an account with Ameritrade.
 
Get real, if any of you think a 10x per second snapshot is any different from a pure tick feed (for 99.999% of anything you'd be doing) , you must be smoking the good stuff
 
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