This is a well-known architectural limitation of ProRealTime, and it is worth understanding the reason behind it rather than just seeing it as a missing feature.

On the auto trading side, ProOrder run server-side on PRT’s infrastructure, not on your local machine. This is actually a strength of the platform: your strategies keep running even when your computer is off. However, this server-side execution requires a universal, standardised time reference to synchronise bar construction, order triggering, and risk checks across all users and all instruments simultaneously. Time-based charts (seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks) provide exactly that: every bar has a fixed, predictable start and end timestamp that the server can work with unambiguously.

Range bars and tick charts are fundamentally different. They are constructed dynamically and locally, bar by bar, from the raw tick stream as it arrives. A range bar closes when price has moved a defined number of points, not at a defined moment in time. A tick bar closes when a defined number of transactions have occurred. There is no fixed timestamp at which the server can say “this bar is now closed, evaluate the strategy”. The bar construction itself depends on the live tick feed, which is inherently client-side and cannot be replicated consistently across a distributed server environment handling hundreds of simultaneous strategies.

This is not specific to PRT. The same limitation exists on most other professional auto-trading platforms for exactly the same reason: non-time-based charts are a visualisation tool built on your machine, not a standardised data structure that a remote execution engine can rely on.

Trend lines and any other graphical tools are WORKING for such type of price representation, you should test once more! 🙂 Alerts too!