Not certain of what you mean but I doubt that it does. I was referring to my data. Time and range charts look alike pretty much before and after a chart refresh. CV and tick charts, particularly the faster ones, can look significantly different after a refresh. Of those the tick is the worst. By that I mean if I have a tick chart running, refresh the chart and afterward what I am looking at after the refresh no longer resembles what I was looking at before the refresh. IOW not all the ticks are being loaded on the chart real time. I'm sure the magnitude of this issue probably varies among data providers.
I have no problem what so ever following mechanical rules with 100% efficiency. I even made a thread when I was pissed off at every poster who says "if only i had followed my rules I would have made money today but I freaked out and blah blah blah." That's why I like 100% mechanical systems. There is never any question. It's is always 100% clear cut ENTER and EXIT signals. No "oh gee I wonder if price will keep going up" and then if you exit and it does, you are like "damn, I missed some of the move." Even if a mechanical system takes you out at that point, you say "awesome, i exited when my system told me to. I traded with 100% efficiency" and you don't care that price kept going up higher. Speaking purely from a "PA" standpoint, I don't know. I have no indicators on my charts to tell me what is going on. Is that a pullback or a reversal? I have no idea! Is the trend done going up or is that another pull back? Beats me!! That's why this PA stuff is so difficult for me. Before, with my old system, I could answer each of those questions in 100% concrete terms with no room for interpretation at all. I just feel like I've developed some bad habits by using a few indicators (MAs) before, so I'm trying to unlearn them now. My hope for making this thread was that I would eventually learn the answers to those questions, so how I could tell that price was retracing in an uptrend and not reversing into a down trend, for example. Once I have strictly defined rules I have no problem following them, as mentioned before. I just don't know how to make them using only PA. I feel like I've just been given a book written in Sanskrit and told to translate it, and I don't know any Sanskrit, how to read it, or even have a Sanskrit --> English dictionary. So since I'm utterly clueless looking at *only* price action, it would be pointless for me to use real money, anyway. It would be like someone who wants to learn MMA so for his first day of training he competes in UFC.
A different frame of reference thats all. You seem to imply that to trade you need hundreds of bars across your screen. 5min bars offers plenty of trading opportunities. If stops are wider so are profit targets for the most part but not sure why for you 5m has so much bigger stops. If you have tight 4 or 5 tick stops I can see why you are getting stopped out often only to see the market move the way you originally intended. You are being biased by things such as stop size and tick size as opposed to learning price action. Longer time frames have bigger profit targets and stops but you can adjust contract size to account for this based on your account. You are probably overtrading and using like 5 tic stops on YM which really makes no sense. I am not saying tic charts are not useful, but at your beginning stage 400 tick charts on YM for a beginner is just gonna chop you up and you will not get the bigger picture.
5 tick stops? i wish! Price regularly makes 5-10 point jumps on the DOM. I feel like 20 tick stops are the MINIMUM just to not get stopped out with noise (which I find to be horribly annoying... is the NQ any better?)
I'm probably not the one to ask. So don't chisel this in stone. If I remember correctly it's partly IB and partly the exchanges. I remember some years back the exchanges made some changes to how they disseminated ticks/data that effects tick charts. At the time many traders stopped using tick charts. And IB's data, if I'm not mistaken, is a snapshot of sorts. In effect you don't get see every trade, until after a refresh from another source that collects all the ticks, in my case DTN.