How to count PRICE TICKS in Pine Script V4

hey traders i've got a really
interesting lesson for you guys today
covering a new feature that was recently
added to pinescript
this morning i woke up and saw a post on
the panscripters network
forum over at pinescripters.net where
someone asked hlf asked
how to calculate the cumulative total
count of tick movements
in a real-time bar in pinescript
now this wasn't possible until recently
but today i found out a way to do this
and it's actually quite interesting
and a pretty important feature that most
traders probably don't know about
at least not yet since it's a new
feature but it is quite powerful i
answered this question basically his
question was hi everyone i'm a bit stuck
and looking for some help i'm working on
a script where i'm trying to count every
tick movement
whether up or down and show the
cumulative total movement in a bar as a
count
and he's stuck because every time
pinescript
detects a new tick on a
real-time bar whatever your script is
doing is basically reset
so when we're using a var variable
that variable is saved across all of the
bars
on our chart now these are terrible bars
i'm drawing but you get the idea
if you don't use var then every time a
new bar starts printing whatever was
saved on this previous bar
gets deleted in your variables but if
you use the var
keyword then on the next bar that starts
that variable will be saved from the
previous bar however
these variables are only updated once on
a real-time bar so even though you're
using the var
keyword if you're trying to count price
movements on a bar
the highest you can count to is one
because as soon as
the price change is detected and your
var variable your counter is
incremented by one it will never be
incremented again even though
new ticks have been detected on the
real-time bar but
tradingview have recently added a new
feature
and this was on their blog that i read a
couple of weeks ago but didn't think
much of it until i read this
person's question the most important
improvement that
certainly slipped under my radar is the
var ip
keyword which is useful for when you
want to keep track of some
some data and how it changes inside the
real real-time bar
all regular pine variables are subject
to what is known as a rollback where on
each new data tick
the state of the variable is reset back
to its value on the previous bar
before evaluating the new data the var
keyword escapes this and enables you to
compare the current value of a variable
with its value on the previous
tick as opposed to the previous bar
which opens up a whole new world of
possibilities such as counting how many
ticks have occurred on the current bar
so let's jump over to the charts and i
will show you what this looks like in
practice so here i am on a real-time
chart and we're on the five-minute chart
here and what you see down here is this
script that i've written which is
counting
the ticks in price action so remember
that every time
pine script detects a change in price
your script is iterated so your script
is reevaluated all the code is executed
on every price change on
a real-time bar i behave slightly
differently on historical bars so in
historical bars there are no tick data
you just have the open high low and
close so on each
historical bar your script is run once
but on the real time bar it's executed
every time
price changes or volume changes
so we have price tick movement and
volume tick
movement so this script down here is
calculating both the blue
number here is how many times price
changed on the current bar that's
price ticks the purple number here is
how many times
volume changed on the current bar so
that basically means how many orders are
executed
doesn't tell you the quantity of the
position size just tells you that a
trade was executed
through the this broker at least through
orlando so every time this purple
number changes that means a trade has
been executed at market
on this market and every time the blue
number changes that means that an order
was executed at a different price
to where price currently is so hopefully
that makes sense
let's open up the source code of the
script it's actually quite a simple
script
and i'll break down what each line of
code here is doing so
first we need to prepare our tick
counter variables
so for this we use the new var ip
keyword and each variable here is saved
across each
real-time tick so every time price moves
or volume moves
these var ip variables are not
rolled back or cleared that allows us to
use a couple of if statements here
to count the tick changes so
our first if statement here checks is
the current bar a real-time bar
and is the last price not equal to the
current price
and last price is just the closing price
and
every time this condition is met so
we're on a real-time bar and the current
price
changes we add one to our ticks counter
and we reset our last price to the
current market price
so that we can detect the next change in
price and this just loops over and over
and over again
until a new bar is detected which is
this if statement here
so if the bar state is new which means
this is the first tick on a brand new
bar then all of our variables are reset
we reset our ticks to zero we reset
reset our volume changes to zero
and we we reset our last price to the
current closing price
and this middle if statement here simply
counts the volume changes
so every time price changes this if
statement is
um this code is executed however if
we're on a real-time bar
and price has not changed so the last
price is equal to the current closing
price
remember that our script is executed on
each new tick
so we can safely assume that this
code here is only being executed if this
price hasn't changed
if volume has changed so we can just
increment our volume counter here you
could also
add another var ip here and call it last
volume and set it to the volume and do
the same thing we did with the closing
price
but because our script is executed on
every tick
be it a price tick or a volume tick we
can safely assume that if the price is
the same as it was on the previous tick
then we just have a volume change not a
price change
and that's it it's really quite a simple
script now obviously
you can do a lot more with this than
just simply count this information
so for example you could use this
approach to objectively
determine or analyze the volatility of a
real-time bar
so just because a bar is large
doesn't necessarily mean that there was
a lot of volatility in that bar
so for example we have this bar here
this green bar here
it doesn't look that volatile when
you're just looking at it
but actually over the past five bars
five five minute bars so the past 25
minutes
this middle bar here this green bar was
actually the most volatile bar
over the past five bars so this red bar
here looks quite volatile but not quite
as many orders were executed
on that red bar as the one before it so
that's some very interesting information
to have especially for day traders
people who trade the five minute one
minute chart
i imagine this approach would be much
more effective on crypto and stocks
or maybe even futures markets than
necessarily forex
but it's still quite interesting even on
the forex markets it is quite
interesting to see how
how many times price changed on the
current real-time bar that's quite
interesting information have
and let's turn on the volume here so you
can see that the volume here
was higher than the past five bars
looking left from the current bar so if
i put in a horizontal line here
you can see that i started running the
script on this bar here
the script cannot calculate tick
movements on historical bars because
that bar is printed to the chart
it can only count it while the script is
running on the current real time bar
so keep that in mind as soon as we
refresh the page
or change to a different market this
will all reset back to zero
but for now we've left this script
running on this market for the past half
hour or so
and you can see now even this big green
bar right here didn't have nearly as
many volume changes or price changes
as the past three bars preceding it here
so that's really interesting information
of course we've still got a minute to go
so i imagine it will creep up there but
anyway i thought this would just be a
cool
demonstration of how to use this new var
ip variable
and there are infinite use cases for
this
if you get creative but obviously the
most useful one is just counting
tick changes to determine volatility on
the current bar so yeah just to recap
the
purple line here is how often volume
changed on the current bar so right now
we've had roughly 80
nearly 90 trades executed on the current
bar on this five minute bar
through oanda on this market and it is a
quiet time of day
so i imagine during a highly volatile
time of day this number would be much
higher and we've had 75
price changes in that time or 75 price
ticks
on this five minute bar since it began
and of course as always the source code
to this script will be
underneath this video if you want to
play around with this code
there we have a new bar just started and
you can see our count is reset to zero
and the whole process just starts again
anyway that's it for today's video
i hope you found that interesting and
useful in your scripting good luck with
your trading
and i will see you in the next lesson