Non-Time-Based Charts: How Each One Decides to Print a Bar

Most charts put time on the horizontal axis. A one-hour bar covers an hour whether the market moved or not, so a flat afternoon produces as many bars as a violent one.

Another family discards that entirely. A new bar appears only when something about price has happened, so the axis measures market activity instead of duration.

The construction of each type is well documented. Two things are rarely followed through: what the change of axis does to everything applied on top, and how little the platforms agree about which charts belong in the family.

What a Non-Time Chart Actually Changes

The three chart shapes most traders start with are the line, the bar and the candlestick, and our page on the three time-based chart shapes covers those. All of them share one property: the horizontal axis is time, and each bar occupies a fixed slice of it.

Renko, range bars, tick bars, volume bars, point and figure, Kagi and Three Line Break charts all drop that property. The horizontal axis becomes a sequence of completed events, and the spacing between bars carries no duration information.

The usual argument for them is noise reduction, and it is a fair one. A quiet session that would fill a time chart with small indecisive bars may produce no new bars at all. What that argument leaves out is the cost: every tool built on the assumption of a regular time axis is now running on an irregular one, and most do not announce it.

How Each Construction Decides to Print a Bar

The family shares a principle and differs in the trigger. Each defines a quantity and prints a new bar when it is reached: a price distance for some members, a count of market events for others.

A Renko chart is built from bricks of a set size. StockCharts describes bricks as not being added unless price changes by a specified amount, with the brick size set either as a fixed value or from Average True Range. Our page on the Renko chart in detail covers that construction on its own terms.

A range chart works from a fixed high-to-low distance. The thinkorswim documentation describes a new bar being plotted after a specified price range has been accumulated, and states that each bar opens at the close of the previous one, which coincides with either the high or the low of that bar.

Tick and volume bars use a different quantity again. Neither measures a distance: one counts market events and the other accumulates traded size, and both need data at the level of the individual event rather than the interval. That requirement is where most of the practical trouble starts.

What a Tick Counts, and Why Two Platforms Disagree

A tick bar closes after a set number of ticks. That setting looks unambiguous and is not, because the two most widely used definitions of a tick describe different events.

Sierra Chart documents the Number of Trades Per Bar setting as basing each bar on a specified number of trades, and states plainly that a tick is a trade. On that definition a 500-tick bar closes after 500 transactions have printed on the tape, and the setting counts executions.

The MQL5 reference describes something wider. Its CopyTicks function separates ticks carrying bid or ask changes from ticks carrying changes in last price and volume, and returns both under a single request type. The MqlTick structure carries flags marking which of those changed, including flags for a bid change and an ask change on their own.

A quote update with no trade behind it is therefore a tick in one system and not a tick in the other. In spot forex the gap widens further, because the feed a retail platform receives is a stream of quotes from a broker rather than a consolidated record of executions, and two brokers watching the same market will not publish the same number of them.

The practical consequence is that a tick setting does not travel. Moving a 500-tick configuration from a futures platform to a forex platform, or from one broker to another, changes what the number counts and therefore how long a bar takes to fill, without changing anything visible in the settings box.

Instrument liquidity moves it again the same way. A count that produces a readable chart on a heavily quoted major produces a nearly static one on a thin cross, since the same threshold takes far longer to reach. The number is a property of the chart, the feed and the instrument together, never of the chart alone.

Volume Bars, Where the Setting Is a Floor

A volume bar accumulates traded size and closes when the configured amount is reached. It is the closest thing in the family to a measure of participation, since the axis advances by how much changed hands rather than by how far price moved.

The Sierra Chart documentation adds a detail that is easy to miss and changes how the chart should be read. Enter 100000 and the documentation says a bar holds that many shares or contracts of trading, or more. The figure is a threshold to be crossed, not a quantity each bar contains exactly.

That happens because volume arrives in indivisible pieces. A bar sitting just under its threshold is completed by whatever trade comes next, and if that trade is large the bar overshoots by most of its own size. Bars are therefore comparable in order of magnitude and not equal, and any calculation that assumes equal volume per bar inherits an error nobody declared.

Both tick and volume bars also depend on tick-by-tick data being available, which Sierra Chart states as a requirement for both settings. Where the feed supplies aggregated bars instead, the chart still draws, from a reconstruction.

Point and Figure, Kagi and Line Break

Three members print nothing until price reverses by a defined amount, which makes them the most aggressive filters in the group and the ones whose settings are least self-explanatory.

Point and figure uses two numbers rather than one. A box size fixes the price value each X or O represents, and a reversal amount fixes how many boxes against the current column are needed before a new column starts. StockCharts describes the three-box reversal method as the most popular, with column reversals filtered by requiring a three-box minimum.

The box size can be derived four ways in that documentation: a traditional table of price ranges, a percentage of price, a value from Average True Range, or a figure the user fixes. The percentage case makes the scale relative, and StockCharts gives the arithmetic directly: at 5 per cent scaling and a price of 100 dollars, boxes across that stretch of the chart are worth 5 dollars each.

Kagi charts work from a reversal amount alone. StockCharts describes them as based strictly on price action and as ignoring time, with the reversal threshold expressed three ways: an absolute number of points, a proportion of price, or a figure read from Average True Range. It can be measured from closes or across the full high-low range. The line continues in its current direction and turns only when the reversal threshold is met.

Three Line Break sets its threshold from the chart rather than from a number the trader picks. The direction turns once a close moves beyond whichever extreme the two most recent lines set, and only closes count towards that, never the intrabar high-low range. The compression is severe: StockCharts reports 85 trading days condensed into 44 lines in its own worked example.

Why Heikin Ashi Does Not Belong Here

Heikin Ashi is listed beside Renko and Kagi often enough to read as a member of the family. It is not one, and the distinction is documented by the platforms rather than a matter of opinion.

The values are synthetic. StockCharts sets out the formula: the Heikin Ashi close is the average of the current open, high, low and close, and the Heikin Ashi open averages the previous Heikin Ashi open and close. Nothing in that calculation decides when a bar starts or ends.

TradingView states the consequence directly. The bars of a Heikin Ashi chart follow the time scale exactly as an ordinary chart does, so each regular bar yields precisely one averaged bar and no more. A 15-minute Heikin Ashi chart still prints one bar every 15 minutes.

The difference decides which problems apply. A Heikin Ashi chart keeps a meaningful indicator period, its session boundaries and a fixed bar duration, so most of what follows does not touch it. What it does share is the synthetic price level, which is why it returns in the backtest section. Our page on how Heikin Ashi candles are built and read covers it as its own subject.

The same test settles the borderline cases: ask what advances the axis, not what the bars look like. If the answer is the clock, the chart is time-based however heavily its values are processed.

Why an Indicator Period Stops Meaning a Period

Set a 14-period indicator on a daily chart and it looks back over fourteen days. The number in the settings box has a unit attached, and that unit is time.

Put the same indicator on a range chart and the unit changes underneath it. It now looks back over the last fourteen completed price excursions, which might have taken four minutes during a fast move or two days during a quiet stretch. On a tick chart the unit becomes fourteen blocks of market activity, which is stranger still.

Nothing in the interface signals this. The setting still reads 14 and the line still plots, so a lookback quietly loses any consistent meaning: two readings a week apart can measure windows of wildly different duration, and comparing them is not the like-for-like comparison it appears to be.

It also breaks the assumption behind aligning several charts. Our page on aligning timeframes depends on a higher timeframe containing a known number of lower ones, and a non-time chart has no timeframe to place in that hierarchy.

The Range Bar Result That Turns ATR Into a Setting

The clearest demonstration is Average True Range, most often used to size a stop.

True Range, devised by J. Welles Wilder in his 1978 book New Concepts in Technical Trading Systems, is the greatest of three quantities: the current high less the current low, the absolute value of the current high less the previous close, and the absolute value of the current low less the previous close. The last two exist to capture gaps.

Apply that to a standard range chart. Every completed bar has the same high-to-low distance by construction, so the first term is the configured range on every bar.

The gap terms collapse too. Because each bar opens at the close of the previous one, and that open coincides with either the high or the low, one gap term equals the full range and the other equals zero.

The greatest of the three is the configured range, on every bar. True Range is constant, so Average True Range returns the chart setting rather than any measurement of volatility.

The qualification belongs with the claim: this follows from the standard construction, so implementations permitting gaps at a session open will produce exceptions. Here the number ATR returns largely restates a setting the trader chose.

The Bar That Has Not Closed, and Why It Can Redraw

A time bar closes when the clock says so, and once closed it is fixed. A non-time bar closes only when its threshold is met, so the bar being watched stays unresolved for as long as that takes. It can keep extending, and the completion being waited on may never arrive.

Some implementations also redraw the forming bar as price moves, so what is on screen now is not necessarily what will be there when it settles, and an indicator computed on that bar moves with it.

This is not the same phenomenon as an indicator revising its own history, which our page on indicators that repaint covers, but the hazard is identical. A reading taken before the bar resolves is provisional.

The claim usually made for these charts is backwards in one respect: they are cleaner once settled and less stable while forming, because a time chart at least says when the current bar stops changing.

Why a Backtest on These Charts Flatters the Strategy

A Renko brick or a range bar is printed once price has already covered the distance. The level recorded as that bar’s close is defined by the construction, and is not necessarily a price that was available to trade when the bar appeared.

TradingView states the general form of the problem in its own documentation. Because the price levels these charts display are synthetic, a test run over them will not usually reflect what the real market would have done, since orders fill from chart values instead of traded prices. The same documentation notes that published scripts running strategies on such charts are moderated for that reason.

Heikin Ashi is the documented exception, for the reason set out above. Because each averaged bar corresponds to one ordinary bar, a strategy can be computed on Heikin Ashi values while filling at standard prices, which TradingView exposes as a strategy property. No such correspondence exists for Renko, range, tick or volume bars, so no equivalent option is offered for them.

These constructions also sit outside bar replay, which the platform documents as unsupported on Renko and range charts. Our page on why a simulated result overstates execution covers the wider reasons. What is specific here is that the chart type introduces the artefact before any of those apply.

Setting One Up, and What Each Platform Calls It

The chart types are the same across platforms; the labels are not, and a trader looking for the wrong name concludes the feature is missing. In Sierra Chart every entry below sits under the chart settings window, in the bar period section, and the platform documents each name.

Two configuration facts do more work than the rest. Tick and volume bars both require tick-by-tick data in the chart data file, so when a chart looks wrong the data is the first thing to check, not the setting. And range bars exist in several documented variants differing in how they treat gaps and whether the open equals the close, so two platforms labelled the same way can draw different bars from identical data.

Platforms also differ in which members they carry at all, and our page on what the TradingView platform does and does not include covers one of them.

What Happens to Volume and Session Boundaries

Volume becomes the only remaining proxy for participation on the price-distance members, because bar width no longer carries any. On a time chart two volume readings covered the same interval and are comparable; here two equal readings may have taken very different lengths of time to fill. On a volume chart the reverse applies: volume stops being informative because it is now the axis.

Session boundaries also stop lining up, because a bar can begin in one session and complete in the next. Anything anchored to them is affected: a daily open, a session range, a release at a fixed hour, or a financing charge accruing by calendar date all reference a clock the chart has stopped tracking.

When These Charts Help, and Who Should Not Use Them

The genuine case is narrow and real. Where the question is whether price has travelled far enough, or whether enough has changed hands to matter, a construction that measures those things answers it more directly than one measuring duration.

They are the wrong tool whenever the method is time-anchored: trading around scheduled releases, session-based approaches, positions held across financing dates, and any method aligning several timeframes. They suit indicator settings poorly for the same reason.

This page recommends no brick size, range, tick count, volume threshold or reversal amount, because the right value depends on the instrument, the data feed and the question. The figures that appear are the worked examples the platform documentation gives, cited to show how a construction behaves rather than what to set.

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