Alternative Bar Types

Alternative Bar Types draws a second chart over your chart: synthetic candles that close on traded activity instead of elapsed time. Choose the unit — tick, volume, dollar value, range or delta — and each candle prints once the underlying chart bars accumulate the threshold amount, the core idea behind alternative bar types. By default the threshold scales itself to recent average activity, and a dashboard reports the effective threshold, the forming bar's progress, bars printed and the average chart-bar span, so the threshold yields a workable bar count.

How to Trade the Alternative Bar Types?

• Volume and dollar bars: quiet sessions compress into few candles while busy ones expand, so each bar carries comparable participation.
• Range bars: close once a set high-low distance fills, collapsing congestion and printing directional legs as clean runs.
• Delta bars: close on the net difference between estimated buy-side and sell-side volume, putting one-sided pressure on the x-axis itself.
• Forming bar: the dashed candle updates live until the threshold is reached and the bar prints.

Alternative Bar Types Settings

• Bar Type (default Volume): the activity unit that closes a bar — Tick, Volume, Dollar Value, Range or Delta.
• Auto Threshold (default on) and its multiplier field (default 10): threshold = multiplier times average activity per chart bar; raise it for fewer, larger bars.
• Average Length (default 500): chart bars measuring that average.
• Manual Threshold (default 100000): fixed threshold in the selected unit when Auto Threshold is off.
• Show Dashboard (on) with Position (Top Right) and text size (Small).
• Style: Body Transparency (default 60), Show Forming Bar (on), Maximum Bars (default 200).

Frequently Asked Questions

How do alternative bars relate to Point and Figure?

Point and Figure also abandons the clock, but discards bar anatomy altogether, recording only box-sized moves and reversals. Alternative bars keep the full candle anatomy and simply regroup the same trading by activity, so candlestick reads still apply.

Are tick bars counting real ticks?

On standard chart data, Tick mode counts chart bars as a proxy for trade count — a fixed number of chart bars closes each synthetic bar. The other types aggregate genuine per-bar quantities: volume, traded value, price span, or net delta.

What limitations should I know about?

Synthetic bars are assembled from whole chart bars, so one can only close when a chart bar closes, and detail inside a chart bar is unavailable. Volume, Dollar Value and Delta types also need volume data — the dashboard flags symbols without it.