Tick Bid Ask Imbalance
The current, still-forming bar is classified genuinely tick by tick: every time a new Bid price arrives, it is compared to the previous one and counted as buy pressure on an uptick, sell pressure on a downtick, the same directional tick rule used across most tick-based order-flow approximations. Ticks are quote updates, not trade prints, so there is no way to know whether a trade actually happened at the bid or the ask - direction of movement is the honest, standard substitute, and this indicator does not pretend otherwise. Bars that closed before the indicator was running have no tick-by-tick record at all - the platform keeps none in history - so those bars fall back to a whole-bar proxy: an up-close bar counts its recorded tick volume as buy pressure, a down-close bar counts it as sell pressure. This lines up naturally with the live count because the tick-volume field is itself already a count of price changes within the bar, not a measure of traded size, so both methods are measuring the same underlying quantity at different resolutions. The result is plotted as a two-colour histogram around zero: green bars above the line for net buying pressure, red bars below for net selling pressure, on every bar including the one still forming. Notes and limitations - Only the current, still-forming bar is built from real tick-by-tick classification. Every closed historical bar is the coarser whole-bar OHLC proxy described above, not a retroactive tick count. - Tick direction is a proxy for trade side, not a genuine bid/ask trade attribution - the tick stream carries no trade-side information to read on either platform. - On a quiet symbol with few ticks per bar, the live bar's tally can be small and noisy compared with the volume-scaled historical bars sitting next to it. - Needs the terminal actually receiving live ticks to build the current bar - it will sit at zero on a chart with no live connection or outside market hours.
Indicator · MT5 · v1.0 · Free
About Tick Bid Ask Imbalance
Tick Bid Ask Imbalance is an indicator for MetaTrader 5. MQL source code included.
Files in the download: TickBidAskImbalance.ex5, TickBidAskImbalance.mq5, TickBidAskImbalance.txt.
How to install
- Download the ZIP from your PolyMaria library and unzip it.
- In MetaTrader 5 open File → Open Data Folder, then go to MQL5 → Indicators.
- Copy the .mq5 file(s) there. Put any .mqh files in MQL5 → Include.
- Open the .mq5 file in MetaEditor and press Compile (F7) if MetaTrader does not show it.
- Drag the indicator from the Navigator onto a chart and adjust the settings.
Tags: MT5 Indicator · MQL5 Source Code