Select Unique Country / Date Pairs With Self Join

I have built a sample table, query, and results for this question. I am using SQL server.

declare @TableX Table
(
Date Date not null,
ID int not null,
Tick varchar(6) not null
)
INSERT @tableX

[Code] ....

Expected results:
DATE(No column name)count
2013-09-02LON1
2013-09-03LON1
2013-09-04LON1
2013-09-05LON1
2013-09-06LON1
2013-09-02USA2
2013-09-03USA2
2013-09-04USA2
2013-09-05USA2
2013-09-06USA2

I want to select unique country - date pairs. It is not even necessary to have the count of each one, just the list of unique country/dates.

My query here uses 'group by' to accomplish this task, but there may be a way to do this with a self join. I believe using a self join would make the query faster.

1) Is this possible to do with a self join?