I read a commentary by a trader (a scalper) who said "the ticks are moving but price isn't" What does this mean? I would like to learn more about ticks and relationship to price. Please feel free to recommend any articles, books or websites on this topic. Thanks again to all! B
Confusing, "tick" is the smallest increment an instrument can move. The problem arises because some refer to actual trades going off up or down the price range as ticks while others refer to the mere bid/ask moving as ticks even though there are no trades taking place. Most decent software can be set to just count trades. The bid/ ask moving wildly around without trades is exacerbated by computer driven cancel replace programs that reference the last bid/ask price not neccesassarily the last traded price.
he might be referring to bid/ask bounce. like front month libor where the quote is the same all day but moves between the bid and ask
Tick ($TICK) is a market internal that measures the net number of NYSE stocks trading on an uptick vs downtick at a given moment. In general, if the $TICK is increasing then stock prices are expected to move up too. If price does not move up with the Ticks then that may be signaling weakness in the stock/index that is being traded. Very useful indicator for short-term trading. Checkout this article: http://www.lbrgroup.com/images/terry_april_2002_AT.pdf