Tick Data

Tick data is the most granular market data available: every individual quote update, each carrying a timestamp with a bid and an ask price, rather than a bar summarising a whole minute or hour. Because forex is decentralised, tick data always comes from one broker or aggregator feed, so two providers' ticks for the same pair never match exactly. Traders use real ticks to build more honest backtests — a strategy tester can model spread changes and movement inside a bar far better with them than with M1 bars — and to study how spreads behave around news. The trade-offs are volume and quality: tick histories are large, often have gaps, and may contain bad prints that need filtering.