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Time bars close every minute or hour. Range, tick and volume bars close when something happens in the market, so a busy stretch gives many bars and a quiet one gives few. The Agent builds them from the stored trade tape.

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What you can ask for

  • Range bars: a bar closes when the next trade would stretch its high-to-low beyond a size you choose, counted in ticks. show me 40-tick range bars on NQ for yesterday's session is a 10-point bar, because NQ moves in quarter points.
  • Tick bars: a bar closes after a set number of trades.
  • Volume bars: a bar closes after a set number of contracts.

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What comes back

  • A chart of the bars.
  • A table of up to 3,000 bars, which you can download.
  • Bar speed: how many bars formed per hour, so you can see when the market accelerates or goes quiet.
The result states the bar rule it used, the window it covered and the source of the trades.

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Limits

  • The trade tape starts on 29 January 2026, so bars cover dates from then on.
  • One request covers up to 8 hours of trading and up to 400,000 trades. For a longer window the Agent shortens it and says what it kept.
  • Bars are built from trades that happened, with no smoothing, and a range bar never stretches beyond the size you asked for.
Range bars from your own platform can differ slightly from these, because platforms treat the trade that closes a bar in different ways. The Agent states its rule on every result so you can compare like with like.