Learn Lesson 1 of 6 · 7 min read
Time, Tick, Volume and Range Bars
What each NinjaTrader bar type measures, and why the same market looks calm on one chart and busy on another.
Every bar answers "when does this bar end?"
A candle always shows the same four things: open, high, low and close. What changes from one bar type to the next is the rule that ends the bar and starts a new one. That one rule decides how many bars you get, how wide they are, and what a crossover or a pattern on them really means.
| Bar type | A new bar starts when | Good for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Minute / Second | The set time has passed (1 minute, 5 minutes...) | Comparing with other traders, session timing, opening ranges | The 9:30 bar and a 12:30 bar hold very different amounts of trading |
| Tick | A set number of trades has printed (for example 500) | Fast markets: more detail when it's busy, fewer bars when it's quiet | One trade of 1 contract counts the same as one of 200 |
| Volume | A set number of contracts has traded | Seeing where the heavy business happened | A few huge orders can end a bar in seconds |
| Range | The bar's high minus low reaches a set number of ticks | Clean trend structure; every bar is the same height | Bars can't show how far price really moved in one burst |
| Renko | Price closes a full "brick" beyond the last brick | Filtering small back-and-forth moves | Brick prices are built, not traded; time disappears completely |
| Heiken Ashi | Same timing as the series it's built on | Seeing trend runs at a glance | Its open and close are averages, not real prices |
Time bars: the shared language
Minute bars are what most traders, books and news use, so "the 5-minute chart" means the same thing to everyone. They also keep session timing honest: an opening range, a 15-minute inside bar or a 2:00 PM report all need a clock.
Their weakness is that time doesn't care how much happened. The first five minutes after the open can trade more contracts than an hour at lunch, yet both get one candle each. A signal on a quiet lunch candle is built on far less information than one at 9:35.
Activity bars: tick, volume and range
Activity bars wait for the market to do something. When it gets busy you get more bars, and when it slows down the chart almost stops. Many futures traders like this because their moving averages and patterns then react to activity instead of the clock.
Tick vs. volume
Tick bars count trades and volume bars count contracts. If one big player buys 300 contracts in one trade, a tick bar counts it as 1 and a volume bar counts all 300. Tick bars are smoother; volume bars react harder to size.
Range bars
A 10 Range bar on ES closes once its high and low are 10 ticks (2.5 points) apart. Every bar ends up the same height, which makes trends and pullbacks easy to read. The cost: a fast 30-tick move becomes three bars with no gap between them, so the chart looks calmer than the moment felt.
Derived bars: Renko and Heiken Ashi
These two don't just regroup the trades. They change the prices you see.
- Renko draws a new brick only when price closes a full brick size beyond the last one. Bricks hide small reversals, which is the point, but the open and close of each brick are where the brick should be, not necessarily where anything traded.
- Heiken Ashi smooths each candle with averages:
HA close = (open + high + low + close) / 4
HA open = (previous HA open + previous HA close) / 2
That smoothing is why Heiken Ashi trends look so clean. It is also why a strategy that "buys at the Heiken Ashi close" looks great in a backtest and disappoints live: that price never traded. Read direction from them, and take prices from a normal chart.
Which one should you use?
Pick the one that matches what you trade, then stay with it long enough to learn how it behaves:
- Session and time setups (opening range, inside bars, the prior day): minute bars.
- Trend and pullback trading in index futures: range bars or tick bars.
- Reading direction only: Renko or Heiken Ashi, with orders planned on a normal chart.
You can also use two together. A 1-minute chart for entries with a 30 Range series as a trend filter mixes the clock with activity in one view.
Try it in NinjaTrader
- Open two charts of the same instrument side by side.
- On the first, right-click > Data Series and pick Minute, value 1.
- On the second, pick Range and a value of about 10 for ES or 30 for NQ.
- Scroll to the open and then to midday. Count how many bars each chart prints in each hour.
Educational content only, not trading advice. Indicators describe what price has already done; none of them predicts what it will do next. Practice in Sim or Playback before trading live.