Why do some tickers show up with variable time increments between bars on the 1s?

[carnitron]

In particular, I was looking at the ETFs SGOV and USFR. I'll get price bars separated by 3 seconds, 17 seconds, 38 seconds. The time intervals are all over the place, even though this is on the 1 second time frame.

Other tickers reliably give me ticks on each 1s even if the price doesn't move.

Why is this?

Is it that I don't get a bar unless a trade has occurred on that second? And in most cases, there's enough traffic that I get a bar each second?

Or are ETFs special somehow and they are internally generating a new average price on the fly according to some time-varying internal heuristic?

I'm not actually sure if this is even an NT8 thing, so apologies if it isn't. I'm just curious if anyone here knows what I'm actually seeing.

Cheers

(And that was the last question for hopefully a while. Thanks again for all the answers!)
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[NinjaTrader_Manfred]

Hello carnitron,

Thank you very much for your post.

This would indeed be the reason.

By default, NinjaTrader displays each candle next to the last/next candle, regardless of how much time passed between them.

If e.g. on a 1-second chart 7 seconds go by without a trade, the next candle would then still print next to the prior candle.

To disable this, please right-click the chart, select "Properties", and disable the checkbox next to the "Equidistant" setting.

Once disabled, the platform would then draw candles solely based on the time, charting empty space if no trades took place.

For a demonstration of this feature, please take a look at the video below:

https://www.screencast.com/t/ln5FTbeNihpm

Please don't hesitate to let me know, should you have any further questions!

[carnitron]

Manfred, thank you for the explanation and the video - super helpful! Have a great evening.