length of time to form.

So in seeing the speed of creation of the tick candles,

we are
also, in a sense, seeing inside the market and the 'volume' or activity that is
associated with this buying and selling frenzy.
This is something you will NEVER see on a time based chart, since each
candle is
defined by the time frame of the chart. On a tick chart it is not, and this is a
key
difference and why many full time traders and professional traders only use
tick
charts.
To put this into context for you, imagine a tick chart in the following
scenarios.
First in the example above, the open of the New York trading session and an
NFP
data release. Each 80 tick candle would form in seconds and perhaps in
milliseconds.
Now imagine the same chart overnight in Asia, where perhaps we are
overlapping
the close of one market and the opening of another. Then the time taken for
each
candle on the chart might be 30 seconds, perhaps even a few minutes.
And the point is this. With a tick chart, you see the activity visually with the
speed
the candles are created. With a time chart, you never see the activity, just a
price
moving higher or lower as the candle forms. This is the difference between
tick and
time based charts and is why many traders prefer to trade on tick charts. With
a tick
chart, we are seeing 'inside the market' and it is reinforcing our volume
analysis.
cme efer tAfter all, volume is really nothing more than 'activity' which is
what we
see visually with a tick chart.
One important point about tick charts is if the volume is also represented as
ticks, all
we would see would be a series of 'soldiers' of equal height, with each one
representing 80 ticks or 80 transactions. In order to overcome this problem,
most
platforms will provide the option of selecting either tick volume or trade
volume
when setting up a chart, and this is certainly the case with another of my
trading
accounts. Here we simply select trade volume when setting up the chart,
rather than
tick volume, and we then have volume reported in trade size, which gives us
our
variable volume bars.