Timeframes

The same price data can be drawn three completely different ways, and none of them are wrong, they just show different amounts of the same story. Three views of one move Same six bars of price data, drawn three ways. A line chart plots one number per period, almost always the close, and connects them into a single continuous path. It’s the cleanest view for spotting a trend at a glance, but it throws away everything that happened inside each period. A bar chart brings that back: a vertical line for the high-to-low range with small ticks for open (left) and close (right), giving you the full range plus direction without a solid body to look at. A candlestick chart carries the same information as the bar chart, high, low, open, close, just drawn with a filled body between open and close instead of ticks, which is why the body and wicks read faster at a glance than a bar chart’s ticks do. Most traders end up on candlesticks for exactly that reason, though the underlying data is identical either way. ...