The chart

How to read a candle

A price chart draws time across the bottom and price up the side. Each mark on it covers one slice of time, and the standard mark is a candle, which packs four numbers into one shape:

        │  ← the highest price reached in this slice
      ┌─┴─┐
      │   │  ← the body: from the opening price to the closing price
      └─┬─┘
        │  ← the lowest price reached

Green (or hollow) means it closed higher than it opened. Red means it closed lower. The body shows where most of the action settled; the thin wicks show how far price got pushed before coming back.

That last part is the reason candles beat a plain line. A long upper wick means buyers pushed price up and got rejected. A line chart would just show you the close and hide the whole fight.

What a timeframe changes

Pick 1m and each candle covers one minute. Pick 1D and each covers a day. Same market, same data, completely different picture.

There is no correct timeframe. There is only the one that matches how long you intend to hold. If you plan to be out by lunch, a daily chart tells you almost nothing about today. If you plan to hold for months, a 1-minute chart is noise that will talk you out of a good position.

Most traders keep two open: a slower one for direction, a faster one for timing.

The toolbar

Symbol

The first chip is what this chart is showing. Clicking it points this chart somewhere else, leaving the rest of the board where it is. The pair switcher in the top bar is the other half: that one moves everything, book and ticket included.

A chart holding its own symbol is badged Pinned, so on a four-chart board you can see at a glance which panels still follow the top bar. Follow the board at the bottom of the picker hands one back.

Timeframes

Eleven of them, ten with a single-key shortcut. Press the digit anywhere in the app and the active chart switches.

Monthly is in the menu without a shortcut.

Not every exchange offers every interval. Kalshi has three, Polymarket four, and each futures exchange publishes its own list. The picker shows only what is actually available.

Your choice is remembered rather than overwritten. Point a chart pinned to 15m at an exchange that does not have it and you get the nearest shorter interval, because a finer bar still covers the window you asked for. Go back to an exchange with 15m and you are on 15m again.

Chart types

Sixteen, all drawn on the GPU so they stay smooth with a year of history loaded.

Candle family. Candles, Heikin-Ashi, Hollow Candles, Bar, High-Low.

Line family. Line, Step Line, Area, HLC Area, Baseline.

Bar family. Histogram, Column.

Alternative. Renko, Line Break, Kagi, Point and Figure.

Start with candles. Heikin-Ashi is worth knowing about too: it averages neighbouring candles to smooth out the chop, which makes a trend easier to see and a reversal harder to catch early. The four alternative types drop the fixed time axis entirely and draw a new mark only when price moves a set amount, which filters noise out of a trend at the cost of knowing when anything happened.

Prediction markets open on Step Line. A contract’s price is a probability that trades in occasional jumps, so candles come out as a row of tiny ticks with nothing between them, which looks like a flat market when the market is only quiet. See prediction markets.

Crosshair

Normal follows your pointer freely. Magnet snaps to the nearest high, low, open or close, which is what you want when you are drawing a level off a wick and want it exactly on the wick. Hidden removes it for a clean screenshot.

On a phone there is no pointer, so you touch and hold the chart and a crosshair appears under your finger. See the mobile terminal.

Price scale

Four modes, and the second one matters more than people expect:

Use logarithmic on anything with a long history. On a linear scale, a move from $1 to $2 (a doubling) looks like a tiny wiggle next to a move from $60,000 to $61,000 (under 2%). Log scale fixes that: the same percentage move is the same distance anywhere on the chart, so a trendline drawn across years actually means something.

Invert scale flips the axis upside down. Traders use it to check whether a setup still looks convincing from the other side of the trade, which is a surprisingly effective way to catch your own bias.

Bid and ask lines

Toggle Bid/Ask to draw the live best buy and sell prices across the chart. On a thin market the gap between them is what a market order will actually cost you, and seeing it drawn to scale changes how you size. See the order book.

Screenshots

The camera menu gives you Copy image and Download image. On desktop the file lands in a real folder and the toast tells you which. Everything on screen comes with it, drawings and indicators included.

Export data

The spreadsheet button saves the chart’s bars as a CSV. Take Visible bars or All loaded bars, and choose how timestamps are written.

One row per bar with time, open, high, low, close and volume. Indicators on your chart come along as extra columns, one per line they draw, so a MACD arrives as three. Bars from before an indicator had enough history to compute leave the cell empty rather than borrowing the next value, which keeps a spreadsheet honest.

Fullscreen

Expands the chart over the whole workspace. Esc leaves. If you are not in fullscreen, Esc drops the active drawing tool instead.

Bar replay

This is the single best practice tool in the terminal, and almost nobody finds it.

Replay hides the future and steps historical bars forward one at a time. You see exactly what you would have seen live, make your decision, then advance the bar and find out if you were right. Pan left first to load deeper history, then open Replay and use play, pause and next bar.

Indicators recompute as replay advances, so an EMA crossover looks the way it looked at the time rather than the way hindsight paints it. If you want to know whether a setup works, this is how you find out without paying for the lesson.

Compare symbols

Add up to five symbols to one chart. Three modes decide how they are drawn together:

Percentage (indexed). Every series rebased to its first visible bar. This is the right choice for “which of these outran the other”, and the one you want almost always.

Price overlay. Raw prices on one axis. Only readable when the symbols trade in a similar range.

Dual axis. Each series keeps its own scale. Good for pairing an asset against something on a completely different order of magnitude.

A prediction contract starts on dual axis, because a contract priced at 47¢ next to Bitcoin at 64,000 would otherwise be a flat line along the bottom.

Right-click menu

The fast path to what you do most:

• Add indicator
• Horizontal line at the clicked price
• Trend line, ray, arrow, Fibonacci retracement
• Add alert at the clicked price, which creates a real notification rule with the level filled in
• Fit content, scroll to latest
• Delete drawing, when you right-clicked one

What is remembered

Chart state is saved per pair: chart type, timeframe, scale, indicators and their settings, and your drawings. Reopen a pair next week and it looks the way you left it. Local by default, synced across devices when you are signed in.

Two things are saved per market type instead of per pair: chart type and compare mode. So candles on Bitcoin and a step line on an election contract hold at the same time, and choosing Line on a stock does not turn your crypto charts into lines.

Multiple charts

Add more than one chart panel and each keeps its own symbol, exchange, timeframe, type and indicators.

Dual Charts, Triple Charts and Quad Charts in the Workspaces menu are the ready-made versions. The first panel follows the pair you were already on, the rest arrive with their own, and every one is changeable from its symbol chip.

Keyboard shortcuts go to the chart you last pointed at, so digits and tool chords land where you expect.

Related

• Drawing tools
• Indicators
• Reading the market for the book, tape and depth panels
• Keyboard shortcuts