TICK STRIKE

Tick Strike turns the Time and Sales tape into sound. When aggressive buying or selling accelerates past what the last two minutes have been doing, the study plays an alert, with a separate one for a strong burst. You keep your eyes on the chart and your hands on the order entry, and the tape reaches you through your ears.

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What it measures

The study reads the Time and Sales tape directly, trade by trade, and separates buying pressure from selling pressure. It then compares two windows:

• Fast window (2 seconds by default): what the tape is doing right now.
• Baseline window (120 seconds by default): what the tape has been doing, which is what "normal" means for this instrument at this moment of the session.

The alert fires on the ratio between the two, never on a raw number of contracts. That is what lets the same settings hold on ES and on CL, at the open and at lunch: when the market slows down, the baseline slows down with it, and the threshold follows.

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The four alerts

Event	Default alert number
Buying burst	1
Strong buying burst	2
Selling burst	3
Strong selling burst	4

Each number points at one of the sounds you configure in Sierra Chart, under Global Settings > General Settings > Alerts. Set two of them to the same sound if you only want a direction, or give the strong bursts a sound you cannot mistake for anything else.

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The three filters that keep it quiet

A squawk that fires constantly is a squawk you turn off. Three settings govern independently, and each one can silence an event on its own:

• Burst trigger, in multiples of the baseline (3x by default), and strong burst (6x). Raising the trigger is the direct way to hear less.
• Re-arm level (1.5x): after a burst, the study stays silent until pressure falls back under this level. Without it, one sustained push would sound over and over while it ran.
• Minimum contracts per second (2 by default): a rate floor, checked before any ratio. On a tape that has gone quiet, two lots against a baseline of nothing would otherwise be a thirty-fold acceleration.

A fourth setting, minimum seconds between sounds (0.5 s), caps how often anything can play at all. Set it to zero to hear every event.

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On the chart

Two subgraphs draw the same pressure the sound is reading, buy in green and sell in red, with the trigger and strong burst levels drawn as lines across them. It is the same measurement, shown rather than played, and it is how you calibrate your thresholds on a session you have already traded.

Each burst can also be written to the Sierra Chart Alerts Log, off by default, so a session can be reviewed after the close.

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Requirements

Sierra Chart 2896 or newer. The study reads the Time and Sales structure directly, and that structure changed in version 2896: an older build cannot read the tape correctly.

Works on any instrument with a live Time and Sales feed, including merged charts.