Concept
Alternative Bar Types
Alternative Bar Types, also known as range, tick, volume, delta bars, are Meta & Composition concepts. The Library holds 3 implementations, each one a working definition you can pull into Quant.
Top Alternative Bar Types indicators
3 total
What are Alternative Bar Types?
Alternative bar types replace the clock as the trigger for printing a new bar. A standard chart closes a bar every N minutes no matter what traded; alternative bars close on activity instead. Tick bars close after a fixed number of trades, volume bars after a fixed amount of volume, dollar bars after a fixed traded value, range bars once price covers a fixed high-to-low span, and delta bars once the net difference between buy-side and sell-side volume (the bar's volume delta) reaches a set size. The trades are the same; what changes is how they are grouped along the x-axis.
The effect is activity-based sampling. Busy periods print many bars and quiet periods print few, so each bar carries a roughly comparable amount of trading, and dead stretches compress instead of flatlining across the chart. Market-microstructure researchers have argued that returns sampled this way have more stable statistical properties than clock-time returns, which is why activity bars appear in systematic pipelines as well as on discretionary charts. The trade-offs are real: elapsed time is no longer readable from bar spacing, indicator values shift because lookbacks now count events rather than minutes, and anything anchored to the clock, such as trading sessions or opens, needs explicit handling.
How traders use it
- To normalize indicator inputs: an oscillator computed on tick or volume bars sees a comparable amount of trading in every bar, which reduces quiet-session flatlines and news-burst distortion without touching the indicator's own settings.
- To simplify structure: on range bars every bar spans the same height, so congestion collapses into a handful of bars while directional moves print as clean runs, changing how consecutive-close or bar-count rules behave.
- To foreground participation: volume and delta bars devote chart space to where trading actually happened, making absorption and one-sided pressure easier to see than on a clock chart with a separate volume pane.
Alternative Bar Types vs other chart transforms
Renko: Renko rebuilds price from fixed-size bricks: a new brick needs a set move, and a reversal typically needs two bricks' worth. It discards time and intra-brick detail entirely, while tick, volume, and range bars still print full OHLC bars on a non-clock schedule.
Point & Figure: Point & Figure abandons bars for columns of X's and O's governed by a box size and reversal count, with its own signal vocabulary. Alternative bar types keep ordinary bar anatomy, so standard indicators and patterns still apply.
EquiVolume: EquiVolume keeps clock-time sampling and encodes each bar's volume as width. Volume bars do the reverse: they fix the volume per bar and let elapsed time vary. One changes how bars are drawn, the other changes when bars close.
Related concepts · Chart transforms
Concept family
Meta & Composition
28 concepts mapped · 23 in the Library
Alternative Bar Types FAQ
Are tick or volume bars better than time-based charts?
Neither is better in general; they group the same trades differently. Activity bars adapt to participation, which suits fast intraday markets and systematic sampling, while time bars keep sessions and news readable in context. Indicator values, pattern shapes, and backtest fills all change with the bar type, so any rule tuned on one should be retested on the other rather than assumed to transfer.
Why does a tick chart look different on different data feeds?
Because the inputs differ. Feeds aggregate trades differently (some bundle partial fills, some filter block or off-exchange prints), and volume conventions vary by venue, so the same tick or volume setting closes bars at different moments on different feeds. Historical backfill can also be built from coarser data than the live stream. Comparing charts across feeds therefore shows construction differences, not necessarily different market behavior.
Build Alternative Bar Types your way.
Quant writes, tests, and refines it with you — then it runs on LuxAlgo charting or ports to TradingView.