The $Tick index (the Number of stocks trading on an uptick - number of stocks trading on a downtick on the NYSE) never told me a lot. I had it on the screen to watch for extreme values, but other than that a chart always looked too erratic to me to be of any use.
But playing around a bit I now found a display which actually tells me something:
Instead of displaying the $Tick-NYSE in any kind of chart, I plot it as price histogram. This shows you quite nicely where we trade in relation to the 0-line, where the POC is, which gives you a kind of short term trend (being below 0 it tells you the trend is down, being above we go up).
The first chart shows you, what you would expect from the $Tick. A nice bellshaped curve, with the POC above 0 as we had a day with an upward bias yesterday. The second chart gives you a shortterm look into the $Tick displaying the selling into the close yesterday.
Here is the Ensign software template I use to create this chart for those of you interested in replicating the chart.
(If you have your manager not set to add symbols automatically, check the template for the symbols used, so the calculations at the bottom of the chart work as well)
