Tick data refers to any market data which shows the price and volume of every print. Additionally tick data often includes information about every change to the best bid and ask. The most common alternative to tick data is candlestick data. Although the charts may be drawn different ways, it is common to compress tick data by grouping the ticks into candlesticks. This compressed data is more commonly available than tick data because it requires significantly less memory, bandwidth, disk space, etc. In addition to the computer hardware involved, most people can only take in a limited amount of tick data at one time.
Tick data is essential for certain types of analysis. Our software requires tick data primarily to separate the noise from the real trends.