Ensign Software (www.ensignsoftware.com), MultiCharts (www.tssupport.com) & QCharts (www.qcharts.com) are the only ones that supposedly build the Volume Bars correctly. I know the first two do, first hand. I have only been told QCharts does.
fwiw, i use both i trade YM they have different utility tick chart is very nice for incorporating the overnight session. on a time chart, the overnight session is kind of meaningless, but on a tick chart it makes much more sense. the reasons are obvious (extremely light volume o'night). floor traders think in terms of order flow, not in terms of time. tick charts give you more of a floor traders perspective, and during the doldrums (lighter volume), the "wandering" is consolidated more nicely as for the part about patterns. i don't trade patterns. for index futures i find they don't fit my style, and on an intraday basis i am looking at order flow, market internals, etc. charts are simply models. neither is "better". they are just different ways of visually modeling transactions
Volume (better way to say this is Size) from a single order cannot move the market. At best a large order can hold the mkt at a particular price level. It is the number of trades that follow thru in a particular direction that matters. Of course, if among those trades you see some reasonably "sized" orders, that makes the move more believable. Thus tick charts do have their position in technical analysis, especially in intraday trading, because they reflect the level of participation among the traders.
QuoteTracker, the free/"pay if you like" platform also has tick and volume charts, with flexible settings.
IMHO, when Globex destroyed the Constant Tick environment with randomly grouping orders they put the proverbial nail in the Tick Chart coffin. It was a variable environment before and then iit became worse. The best view of price comes from seeing price move unencumbered by time or market affiliation. Just because a large institution executes a trade in the Market doesn't mean then have any better grasp of where price is going then anyone else randomly throwing orders at the Market. The sentiment in total, as seen by price movement, is that clear indicator of direction. Lawrence, does NeoTicker has constant Volume bars and if so does it allow the user to cap the individual bar to a specific unit number or does it just tack on the next trade to fill out the bar before it goes on to create the next new bar?
My question is can one reconstruct the true ticks from the messages transmitted by the CME? Having said that, I don't think most quote providers provide data in such a format...
If you have access to the raw CME message format, it might be possible. Read: http://www.cme.com/files/M6Aggregation.pdf
See above post. PDF provides pretty pictures to make it all clear. How you go about getting such a feed is another question - definitely not from eSignal, IB, DTN, QCharts, or TS. Good luck getting any info out of CQG.