Volume Chart distortion after restarting MT

[Doug Hayman]

Hi guys,

Trading MES futures on IB with 5 minutes bar/volume chart.  Please see pic below.  There were between 3k-5K contracts traded during the 5 minute period where the volume chart shows a spike.  It was displaying fine, but I shutdown MT and restarted, and upon re-start of MT, the current volume bar that was active shows this large spike volume bar, which is incorrect.  I tried backfilling and also tried spike removal on this volume chart, all to no avail.  I also tried removing/re-adding the Volume indicator, again this didn't help. 

Also, when I mouse-over this erroneous volume spike, it does not display the volume amount, whereas all surrounding volume bars (that are scaled to this big volume bar display-wise) do indicate the volume amount during a mouse-over in a rectangle box.  Additionally, on the OHLCV display, the erroneous bar indicates a Volume for that 5-minute period of the total contract volume of the day.

Here's what is looked like.  I'll send log file over as well.

Edited May 18, 2020 by Doug Hayman

[Jerry Medved]

your chart screenshots seem to include a huge amount of empty space. FYI - you can just right click and select COPY on MT chart and paste here.

Spike Filter really won't work there - it is for price spikes, not volume

Seeing the spike - you would want to look at a regular time based chart. But in general, in the situation you described, MT would have backfilled the data, and 1 min OHLC backfill data is nowhere near as granular as tick data (it is stored as just 4 records per minute), so when viewing volume charts, you can easily get unusual data. Same does for tick charts - they will not look correct with OHLC backfilled data. Only tick backfill will get accurate data for those charts (assuming you don't have stuff stored from when MT was running getting quotes)