Understanding bid/ask/last

[dweems]

First understand I'm looking at historical price bars when calculating where to place an order to go long or short. My understanding of both bid and ask prices is that those bars are what the exchanges were accepting for short and long orders whereas last prices are the actual OHLC prices where trades have triggered at. The thing is, I've been working with FOREX data and last is actually bid. In other words, there is no last data. So I've had to develop strategies that look at the bid and ask prices to make trading decisions, which adds a significant overhead retrieving both. I've run into a situation that prevents me from continuing my work with FOREX data anymore. So I'm looking at futures data. Is my understanding of last prices correct, that it's based on the actual prices where trades have filled rather than what is posted by the exchanges of what they were willing to trade at? Seems like the last prices would be more accurate for predicting trader sentiment.

[NinjaTrader_Gaby]

Hello dweems,

Thank you for your post.

This would fall under general trading education. Below is an Investopedia article that talks about the difference between Last, Bid, and Ask.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042215/what-do-bid-and-ask-prices-represent-stock-quote.asp

This page also goes over Working with Forex.

https://ninjatrader.com/support/helpGuides/nt8/index.html?working_with_forex.htm#HowBarsAreBuiltAndOrdersFilled