Tick Bars, Realtime vs Historical

[Jim Osborn <jimo@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I've noticed a peculiarity concerning tick-bar charts,
yet another difference between historical and real-time
behavior.  Whenever a tick-bar chart is loaded, the
then-last bar on the chart is terminated, no matter how
many ticks it contains, and the next real-time tick to
arrive after the chart is loaded begins a new bar.  

Also, for two-session futures, like the S+P, the start of
the day session, session 1, is ignored while loading the
historical data.  That is, the last bar of the night session,
session 2, is not truncated and a new bar is not begun with
the start of the day session, for historical data.

However, once the real-time ticks start adding themselves
to the tick-bar chart, the day session DOES initiate a new
bar, as seems reasonable, given the qualitative change.
The start of the globex session always initiates a new bar,
whether the data is real time or historical.

Tick bars have a real appeal for various reasons, and are
the only way, in my opinion, to monitor a sparsely-traded
issue like the globex S+P.  It's disconcerting, though,
to have a chart look different depending on exactly when
it was first loaded.  It's something to think about when
considering whether to perform a prophylactic daily reboot.

Since my experience is with TS 3.5, perhaps someone else
can tell us whether this phenomenon is also in TS 4.0.

Maybe Omega can tell us about TS 5.0?

Cheers, and don't let your guard down,

Jim