For me this sudden interest in time based charts came about about a month ago, after buying price action guru Al Brooks book. He uses 5 minute bar charts. I was quite taken a back by it. He mentions the following as to why 5 min chart works for him. -- better able to see S/R -- trendlines seems cleaner -- 5 min time period gives his brain enough processing time to make a decsion.
I don't think it is so much about your car is faster than mine, it's more about nuances that I might not know about that could improve my car's performance. I think as traders we need to continually ask questions, re-examine idea's, explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before... oops got off track I better edit out the man thing before Mrs. NoDoji gets on my case.
" better able to see S/R" Here is an example of when (for me) minute based charts are clearer. Forgot to add the obvious, if the majority of intraday traders are using time based charts it only makes sense to have at least 1 up. Also I don't think there is any magic to particular type of chart, pick a couple of different ones and see which, if any, help you make some sense of the symbols you are looking at.
It's obvious your volume charts has more oscillations of support and resistance during the same "time frame". Every oscillation top (resistance) and every oscillation bottom (support) offers a trader a decision point. Decisions - Enter, Exit, Re-adjust Stop or Stand Aside
One big advantage of using a time-based chart over tick or volume charts is that you could gauge how long a given trade might take to reach its target. For instance, assume there's a down-sloping trendline above. You measure the distance between the price and the TL and determine it would take approximately 30 minutes. Since the distance is measured in equal intervals (every 5 minutes, etc), you need only project out into the future. With tick or volume charts, this is nearly impossible. Just how am I to know how long 10,000 ticks would require to complete? 5 minutes? 30 minutes?
Interesting point. Where are your targets formulated from, fixed points of support or resistance that occured previously or calculated points based on such numerology like Fib numbers, Gann or astrology? My point is that if your targets are formulated from fixed points then what is important is: #1 the target is reached or breached before a corresponding "like" oscillation is created or #2 the target is NOT reached or breached before a corresponding "like" oscillation is created. In either case "time" is irrelevant.
The reason is that longish-term trendlines work much better on time charts. No idea why, and perhaps it only applies to how I draw/use them. The effect is most obvious when you start looking at more than 2-3 days on a chart. Intraday I've found no obvious difference and if anything volume charts seem to work better. I moved to time charts for those long-term views after one too many cases where, say, I'd think the market had broken out on my volume charts, only to see an obvious channel or TL on the time chart hold like a champ and blow me out. Volume is still fine for shorter TFs and indeed I use one for my "entry chart" view, I also keep a "big" volume chart for looking at the past 2-3 days as sometimes it does show you something that you miss on the time. In general I'd say that time charts have better geometric structure, while volume charts provide a more fluid and natural view - but that doesn't necessarily make them easier to trade.