Each bar shows the open, high, low and closing prices over one unit of time, e. The left dash of every bar shows the opening price and the right dash shows the closing price. The highest point of every bar reflects the highest price traded on the market during the chosen unit of time. The lowest point of every bar reflects the lowest price traded on the market during the selected period. Now about the colour. The green bars are the buyer bars where the closing price is above the opening price.

The red bars are the seller bars where the closing price is below the opening price. These bars form the basis of the next chart type called candlestick charts, the most popular type of forex charts. You will be surprised to know that candlestick charts were first used by Japanese rice traders in the 18th century.

They are similar to OHLC bars because they also give the open, high, low and closing prices for a specific time period. The difference between the OHLC bar chart and the candlestick chart lies in the elements. The candlestick bar has the main element, a "box" between the open and closing prices, known as the 'body' and the thin line at the top and the bottom of the body known as the shadow.

The image of the bar with the shadow makes this element similar to a candle, that is why the candlestick chart has got its name. The function of the shadow in this chart will be explained later in the article. The selection of time frame depends on the analytical needs and trading strategy of a particular trader. MetaTrader 4 allows analyzing a variety of time frames:.

While analyzing OHLC bar charts or candlestick charts, you will notice a new bar or candle formed at the end of each unit of time. For example, if you analyze a chart with a 5-minute time frame applied M5 , you will see: a new bar is formed every five minutes.

Candlestick charts are highly informative. It is not only the information every chart element contains, but also regularly repeated patterns that help traders to see the oncoming changes.

These patterns help to see the short-term direction and predict the bullish or bearish trend. Just one element, a candlestick, is able to reflect many parameters such as the market's open, high, low, and the closing price over the unit of time. The colour of the body indicates the result of close.

When the candle is red or black, it means the close was lower than the open. If the candle is white or green, it means the close was higher than the open. The hammer candle is the result of resistance, showing that the sellers are pushing the market to a new low and then the buyers are pushing it all the way back up. When the open and close prices are both situated in the upper half part of the candle, it means a rejection of the downside and possible strength to the upside in the future.

The bullish harami is a combination of the red candle followed by a green candle pattern which represents indecision in the market and the possibility of a breakout from it. The "inside candle" is another name for it since the second candle is formed inside the first one's highs and lows.

The bullish engulfing is a combination of a red candle followed by a green candle pattern which represents a strong positive shift in sentiment of the market. Generally, the green candle totally engulfs the red candle's high to low price range suggesting a possible growth. The inverted hammer or a shooting star shows that buyers are pushing the market to a new high and then the sellers pushing it all the way back down.

With the open and close price levels in the lower half of the candle, it represents a rejection of the upside and a possible move to the downside next.

The bearish harami is a green candle followed by a red candle pattern which represents indecision in the market and the possibility of a breakout from it. These are also called 'inside candle' formations as one candle forms inside the previous candle's high to low price range. The bearish engulfing is a green candle followed by a red candle pattern which represents a strong downside shift in sentiment of the market.

The red candle totally engulfs the green candle's high to low price range suggesting movement downside. In the section above we have described the candlestick charts and the patterns they form. Now let's check, whether you are able to identify some of these patterns in the chart. Under the first chart you will see the answers. All three types of charts mentioned in the article are unique, and candlestick charts stand out the most. Identifying and analyzing patterns from candlestick charts helps traders to foresee possible turning points and the beginning or end of the market cycles.

Stay tuned! Follow the updates in our Education section. This material does not contain and should not be construed as containing investment advice, investment recommendations, an offer of or solicitation for any transactions in financial instruments. Before making any investment decisions, you should seek advice from independent financial advisors to ensure you understand the risks.

Main article sections How to read trading charts Types of trading charts Line, Bars and Candlesticks Why forex traders love candlestick charts Charts provided by the best trading platform - MT4 The first question you are going to face once you decide to learn trading charts is where to get them. MTrading offers free powerful MetaTrader platform with options: Metatrader 4 for Windows is a secure platform with enhanced trading tools MetaTrader 4 Multiterminal allows simultaneous order allocation with an unlimited number of trading accounts MetaTrader 4 Web Trader is suitable for any OS and doesn't require installation MetaTrader 4 Supreme Edition compiles the world's most innovative MT4 features: mini and trade terminals, a tick chart trader, news feed, indicator solutions, trading simulator and mini chart MetaTrader 4 or MT4 is the perfect software tool for beginners and professional traders.

How to read trading charts Knowing how to read charts is an essential skill for technical analysis, even though comprehending it may seem rather entangling. The price and time axis Pips and the exchange rate pricing Chart types Line, Bars and Candlesticks Time frames The price and time axis The structure of all trade charts is pretty the same. Pips and the exchange rate The pip or "percentage in point" is a standardized unit and is the smallest amount by which a currency quote or any other financial instrument price can change.

Look at the two scenarios: If you bought at 1. If you sold at 1. Types of trading charts Line, Bars and Candlesticks MetaTrader Platform offers three different options to observe live exchange rate changes: in the line charts, bar charts or candlestick charts. Line charts This type of chart reflects the line, connecting the closing prices within the determined timeframe. OHLC bar charts An OHLC chart is a sequence of bars for a certain time period.

It leads to a balance between supply and demand. There are a lot of trends that you can recognize only by glancing at the graph. The concept of chart patterns is premised on the idea that human behavior does not alter quickly, and so history continues to replicate itself. Chart patterns illustrate the psychology of capital markets, assuming that they have succeeded in the past, so will they work next time. They send you hints as to the possible path the pattern is likely to go.

They are at the center of all important market fluctuations that form a correlation across trends. It would help if you used chart trends as a stand-alone strategy for your investing.

A few crucial patterns to know are the Triangles, a continuity pattern that indicates a war taking place amongst soaring and declining values. This means that the price is ultimately likely to proceed in the direction it headed until the trend was detected.

Another prominent trend to recognize is the double top, showing the value reaching two highs and suggesting the price reversing to the bearish way from the bullish pattern. Its opposite — the double bottom — describes a trend turnaround from bearish to bullish, implying an inevitable uptrend. From such instances, you can realize how essential it is to recognize trends for your trading performance.

When you get more acclimatized with reading and analyzing graphs, you can add additional instruments, like technical measures, to calculate price movement and change in value. These statistical metrics can help you learn whether stocks are oversold or over-purchased.

If a stock is oversold or over-purchased, it fails to sustain its course, which sometimes indicates a turnaround is inevitable. Instances of the most widely used dynamic metrics are MACD, Stochastic or RSI. Other ways of analysis can allow you to determine when to take a trading position or leave a trade, including the Bollinger Bands.

Trend line metrics such as the Moving Average clearly help you determine how the market moves by cutting off all the noise from small price fluctuations.

You may use a couple of these measures in unison to validate the signal. They all appear on most of the trading sites. Traders use several metrics to read the market graph, but at its heart, it holds two essential bits of information — value and quantity.

Anything other than past prices and volume details is nothing other than speculation. Yet, these halves of knowledge are crucial to anticipate possible price movements. Volume shifts are often ignored, but growing volumes indicate a much more substantial change, one that is likely to persist, whereas declining volumes display a lack of confidence among traders. The first thing that most technical traders measure while considering a market graph is the trend line. Markets are not necessarily trending all the time, and you may not have a strong trend pattern.

You would need to focus on a longer time span to see what the pattern is. Here, it might sound right to broaden the possibilities that you may find long-term support or resistance levels that can be incredibly significant. The trend line and the level of support or resistance are critically important, and traders who depend on these factors would find trading very critical. As far as technical metrics are concerned, the moving average in all of its various time frames may be the most relevant predictor precisely since so many traders implement them as a base of their trades, particularly the 50 days and days moving averages.

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Charts are the one and only thing that can tell you where currency prices are going. Tim Fries is the cofounder of The Tokenist. He has a B. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, and an MBA from the University Meet Shane. Shane first starting working with The Tokenist in September of — and has happily stuck around ever since. Originally from Maine, All reviews, research, news and assessments of any kind on The Tokenist are compiled using a strict editorial review process by our editorial team.

Neither our writers nor our editors receive direct compensation of any kind to publish information on tokenist. Our company, Tokenist Media LLC, is community supported and may receive a small commission when you purchase products or services through links on our website. Click here for a full list of our partners and an in-depth explanation on how we get paid. Have you ever driven down a dark road, in the middle of the night, with a really dirty windshield—so you could hardly see anything at all?

But if you can image what it would be like, then you can understand the importance of forex charts. Unfortunately, many traders want quick profits and never even learn the basics properly. There are about 9. Needless to say, there is more opportunity here than ever, but only for those with forex literacy. A forex chart shows changes in the exchange rate of a currency pair over time.

This is the exchange rate anyone will pay. These might seem dry at first, but once you figure out how to make money from them, they can quickly become exciting. Each chart shows the exchange rate of a currency pair. When the line goes up, that means that a Euro will cost more USD to buy and when it goes down, that means EUR is cheaper compared to the US dollar.

What kind of chart you need depends on your trading style—some traders like to bet on daily price fluctuations, while others play the long game. If you have ever taken a trip to Europe or any other part of the world, you probably had to exchange, or trade currencies.

Even if you are new to forex trading, you are probably familiar with the pricing shown on these graphs. This is the exchange rate between two currencies, as simple as that. In general, reading a forex chart is about understanding the relationship between two currencies. These charts will show you information such as the open, high, low, and close prices of a currency pair—these are important because knowing what they are means you know when you can buy low and sell high. As you get more familiar with these charts, you will be able to identify patterns in the charts, like whether a price is trending up or down or if it is stagnant.

Eventually, this will help you find opportunities and shape your forex trading strategy in the best way possible. Forex charts work much like other charts you may have seen.

There is an X-axis horizontal , which represents time, and the Y-axis vertical , which represents the price. That said, not every chart is the same. Maybe they forgot to wear their watch? Forex charts will always have a price on the Y-axis, though. You will also see markings on the X and Y-axes to show the time and price for that specific chart. For forex traders, price changes are expressed in pips. A pip is just the smallest price change a currency pair can have—this depends on the currency pair, but in almost all cases, 1 pip equals 0.

On these charts, your exchange rates usually have several decimal places, allowing you to follow fine price movements. The only case where a pip is at a different decimal point is the Japanese yen. In pairs that contain the JPY, 1 pip equals 0. Now that we have an idea of how pips work, we can cover the five different types of charts. A line chart is simply a chart with a line drawn from one closing price to the next. They sort of look like one of those lie detector graphs—except line charts always tell the truth.

You could even call them boring, but line charts can still be useful! Line charts can be used to identify long-term trends like the growth of AUD compared to the USD. And if traders are especially concerned with the closing prices, line charts may be useful because they tell you how much the prices were higher or lower at the beginning of the trading day. If you just want a broad overview, line charts work, but for more information, you need to look at another type of chart. Bar charts add more granular detail about opening and closing prices.

They allow you to see high, low, open, and close prices. They are sometimes referred to as OHLC charts for that reason. Because we need another acronym, right? The entire bar represents the price range, where the top is the high and the bottom is the low. On the left side of the bar is a horizontal line to indicate the opening price; on the right side is the closing price.

The opposite is true if the price is falling. This is why it helps to know which side of the bar shows open vs. Tick charts primarily show changes in the price of a single currency pair. Unlike line charts, which are time-based, a new tick only appears after a certain number of transactions. This might be transactions, 1, transactions, or 10,—basically, the more ticks there are, the more popular this currency pair is at the moment. Point-and-figure charts are similar to tick charts in a few ways.

First, they are not fixed to a specific interval on the x-axis, and they also illustrate the number of transactions. Also like tick charts, you see movement on point and figure charts only after a certain number of transactions.

These charts look slightly different though, filling an X in a rising column of boxes and an O in a falling column. It might make more sense to call these tick charts because the X and O marks are like what you see in a friendly game of Tic-Tac-Toe. As you might expect, that rising X and falling O correspond to changes in price. Each box indicates a specific price. Thus, these X and O marks are not made on the chart unless the price rises or falls enough to justify making a mark.

Point-and-figure charts have a reversal requirement as well. A reversal is set at three boxes, and the price must change at least that much before switching from X to O or vice versa. This is helpful because it means there must be a clear and pronounced change in price before it is marked on the chart. Candlestick charts are somewhat similar to bar charts but build on the idea. Much like bar charts, the bottom of the body will be open if the price is rising; if the price is falling, the bottom will be the closing price.

However, the bottom of the wick will always be the low price, and the top will always be the high price—these candlesticks can reveal a lot more detail, too, which is why they are popular with many traders. A long, green body could indicate that there was a lot of buying pressure for that day, while a long, red body could indicate significant selling pressure. These charts have a larger body in the middle which indicates the difference between the opening and closing prices.

If the body is filled in, the closing price was lower than the opening. Because candlesticks can show so much about market activity, there is terminology specific to things you may see with these charts. One phenomenon that can sometimes occur is that the opening and closing prices are nearly equal. It means neither buyers nor sellers were able to noticeably affect the price that day. The injection of money meant more investment from American forex traders, which boosted the confidence in the USD , stopping its decline.

On a chart, this will appear as a cross or a plus sign—it is rare to see this happen on the open market, but it can happen at times. If you see a Doji occur during an uptrend or downtrend, it may indicate there will soon be a reversal, so be prepared whenever you see a big plus. Similarly, some patterns signal a bearish sentiment—for example, a hanging man occurs when there is a possible reversal in an upward trend. This will be indicated by a small body with a large upper wick and a small lower wick.

This formation could indicate that traders are selling the currency you are analyzing like hotcakes. Buyers may have brought the price to near where it opened, but buyer confidence is generally falling, which means that the price is about to drop or stagnate. Thus, what you may well be seeing here is a currency that is losing its strength , and the uptrend may have disappeared. Another bad omen, the so-called shooting star, is indicated by a small candle body, large upper wick, and little to no lower wick.

This means the candle body will appear near the bottom—a shooting star is also known as an inverted hammer for obvious reasons. So, what actually happened here? It means the price opened low, shot up high during the day, then later closed near the opening price. This could indicate a bearish outlook as sellers push back against a rising price. The bearish Harami has a large green candle body with small lower and upper wicks followed by a smaller red candle body, again with small wicks.

This suggests buyers are indecisive and there may soon be a reversal to the downside. The bearish engulfing is just the opposite, still with small wicks. In this case, there is a strong possibility of a downward trend to follow. Some patterns will indicate a bullish sentiment, and here is the most prominent example. A hammer is just the inverse of a shooting star—in other words, sellers pushed the price to a low during the day before sellers pushed it back up.

This could indicate a bullish outlook as buyers push back against a falling price. You may also see a bullish harami or bullish engulfing pattern—and as you might expect, each is just the opposite of their bearish counterparts.

Many traders find candlestick charts the most visually appealing when viewing live forex charts. Either way, it is a very important topic that you will need to master in order to become a successful Forex trader. The entire bar represents the price range, where the top is the high and the bottom is the low. There are different time frames you can select in a Forex chart. There is a third form of the movement that is sideways, horizontal, or flat. You can miss important information about price action since the line chart is only based on closing prices.

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