Me neither. But, 5 ticks might not always represent 5 trades, to make a simple example. So, they might not be consistent in what they're showing from day to day or bar to bar. A volume bar will always represent what it's supposed to represent. But not sure if it really matters...
The problems with Volume-based bars, that I have determined for MY use are twofold... 1) The elimination of time. One bar may take 2 minutes to complete and the next bar may take an hour to complete. Without looking at start-stop details of each bar, either in hindsight or witnessing in real-time, for me, usefulness greatly is reduced. 2) Without tracking bid-ask price and/or spread during volume based bars formation, the bar removes important pricing factors... lifting offers, hitting bids, immediate support/resistance levels etc. all are missing! While the same can be said with time based bars, each price bar and volume data point represents a uniform time interval which can be analyzed visually, mathematically, with or without additional data, and most important (to me) in a universal way, bar-by-bar.
I've used time-based charts and tick charts. Switched solely to tick charts last year. My personal trade plan / win rate / risk:reward, is about the same whether I'm using time or tick, but I get a lot more signals using tick charts during higher volatility days. For me, more signals is better. I see little difference between tick vs volume charts. I think either could work fine for what I'm doing. Something I learned earlier this year when studying the Ninjatrader manual: "Market data vendors each employ various methods for tick filtering, throttling and time stamping. As a result, no data stream is 100% identical and thus can cause subtle differences in charts. Since NinjaTrader supports many of the leading brokerage and data feed technologies, it is highly likely that two traders using NinjaTrader on different data feeds will have minor differences when plotting the same market and time interval." In NT, volume/tick/second/etc. charts are all constructed off of tick data. If using one of those, the volume bar or tick bar you are seeing (coming in on your live feed) might be slightly different than the bar I'm seeing, even if we are using the exact same instrument and parameters (3000 ticks, 1000 volume bars, etc). This due to our respective vendors, data feeds, pc clocks, latency, etc. This page explains - https://ninjatrader.com/support/helpGuides/nt8/en-us/?how_bars_are_built.htm -------------- I believe it all comes down to preference. The only thing that matters is to develop a plan for catching price moves and keep fine tuning until it works.
I use volume charts for all my Futures Charts for day trading. I see that you use 500V as fastest volume chart for ES. mine is typically 2000V, depending on market situation. for spot forex, volume data is of questionable integrity. so plotting volume chart doesn't make sense. anyway I don't trade spot forex.
Posting this because "Howard" ragged on me for it....(can't reference his post as I put him on ignore) I've traded a lonnnng time and have made $Millions. Let me suggest that anyone with such cred should at least have his views considered. I have 3 disses on conventional wisdom. 1. TA doesn't work (it does), 2. Indicators don't work (they do) and 3. Volume considerations are essential. Not only "are they not essential", they are at best coincidental... and at worst, detrimental to your success if you try to use them.
Hmmm very very interesting. When you say volume considerations, you are referencing all forms of volume not just volume bars, correct ?
Best post ever on this bored. Volume is totally meaningless, only price matters . We learned this in our prop shop years ago
99% of the people started with time based chart. Because almost all the free charts offer time based chart. As time goes by, people might continue to use time based chart Or people might start to explore other charting options either because - they need something more exotic, more complex for trading. The more exotic it is, the better it is for trading - time based chart doesn't represent what is happening in real world well. So they choose things like volume based. Anyway do whatever you want to do as long as you are making money.