Forex Tick Data vs Minute Data: Which Do You Need?
In the world of forex backtesting, there is a constant debate: is tick data worth the headache, or is minute data enough? As someone who has spent thousands of hours staring at backtest reports, I can tell you the answer depends entirely on your trade duration. If you are holding trades for days, tick data is overkill. If you are a scalper, ignoring forex tick data is financial suicide.
Understanding the Difference
Minute data (M1) gives you four price points for every sixty seconds: Open, High, Low, and Close. It is a simplified snapshot. Forex tick data, on the other hand, records every single price change as it happens. In a volatile market, you might have hundreds of ticks in a single minute. If your strategy relies on hitting a 5-pip Take Profit or has a 3-pip Stop Loss, those individual price movements inside the minute candle are everything.
At historicalforexprices.com, we offer 25 years of data, allowing you to choose the granularity that fits your style. With 66 currency pairs available, you can test whether your tick-dependent strategy holds up across different liquidity profiles.
When Minute Data is Sufficient
For most swing traders and trend followers, M1 or even M5 data is perfectly fine. It is easier to store, faster to process, and gives a clear enough picture of price action. If your average trade lasts 4 hours and your target is 50 pips, a few fractional pip movements within a candle won't change your equity curve significantly. Minute data is also much easier to handle in tools like Pandas or Excel because the file sizes are manageable.
The Power of Tick-Level Precision
Scalpers and news traders need the granular detail. During a NFP release, the price might gap or move 50 pips in seconds. M1 data will show a long candle, but it won't show you if the price hit your Stop Loss before it hit your Take Profit. Only forex tick data can accurately simulate that. Furthermore, tick data often includes "Bid" and "Ask" prices, which is crucial for calculating the true cost of the spread.
Storage and Processing Considerations
Be warned: tick data is heavy. A single year of tick data for one pair can be gigabytes in size. If you are planning to run a multi-year backtest on 66 currency pairs, you need a solid SSD and a plan for data management. This is why many pros use historicalforexprices.com to get clean, pre-formatted datasets rather than trying to scrape it themselves. You get 25 years of data that is ready for ingestion, saving you days of cleaning and formatting work.
In short, use M1 data for the broad strokes and strategy prototyping. Switch to forex tick data when you are ready to refine your execution logic and get a "real world" look at your slippage and fill rates.
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