Stake strategiesUpdated 3 min readBy the FXNOD team
What is a tick in trading?
A tick is a single update of a market's price. Every time the price changes, or is published again, that is one tick. Candles are built from ticks: a one-minute candle summarises every tick in that minute. On Deriv's volatility indices a tick arrives every two seconds or every second, and some contracts last only a set number of ticks.
Tick, pip, point and candle
| Term | What it is |
|---|---|
| Tick | One price update |
| Pip | A standard unit of price change in forex, usually the fourth decimal place |
| Point | A unit of price change on an index or other instrument |
| Candle | A summary of all ticks in a period: open, high, low and close |
A tick is an event. A pip or a point is a distance. One tick can move the price by many pips or by none.
Ticks on real and synthetic markets
- On a real market, ticks arrive irregularly: many per second in busy periods, few when it is quiet.
- On Deriv's volatility indices, Deriv says ticks arrive at a fixed speed, every two seconds on the standard versions and every second on the faster ones.
- A fixed tick speed makes tick contracts predictable in length: five ticks is about ten seconds, or about five.
How a tick contract settles
Deriv defines the entry spot as the first tick after its servers process the contract. A contract of five ticks then settles on the fifth tick after that entry. The result depends on those specific ticks, not on the price you saw when you pressed Buy, which is why the entry on the chart can differ slightly from what you expected.
Why tick speed matters for a bot
| Contract | On a 2-second index | On a 1-second index |
|---|---|---|
| 1 tick | About 2 seconds | About 1 second |
| 5 ticks | About 10 seconds | About 5 seconds |
| Trades per hour, one after another, at 1 tick | Up to about 1,800 | Up to about 3,600 |
These are upper bounds from the tick speed alone; a real bot places fewer because of processing time and its own entry rule. The point is the scale. Each trade carries a small cost on average, and a bot can pay that cost thousands of times in a session. A bot on a faster index reaches its stop loss, or its target, in half the time.
Tick charts
A tick chart draws every price update as a point. It is the most detailed view and the noisiest. It is useful for seeing exactly how a short contract settled, and of little use for judging direction.
In FXNOD
Trade Pilot's chart updates with every tick and marks a trade's entry. On a bot's run page you can open a trade to see the ticks it was settled on, from the entry spot to the exit.
Questions people ask
- How long is a tick?
- A tick has no fixed length on real markets. On Deriv's volatility indices one arrives every two seconds, or every second on the faster versions.
- What is the difference between a tick and a pip?
- A tick is one price update. A pip is a unit of price movement. A single tick may move the price several pips.
- What does a 5-tick contract mean?
- A contract that settles on the fifth tick after its entry spot.
See the stakes before you start
Bot Forge shows the stakes of a losing streak before a bot runs, will not start without a stop loss, and caps the largest stake. Try any stake setting on your Deriv demo account.
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