Guides
Three articles about the things a charting product assumes you already know and rarely explains: what the four numbers in a candle are, what an oscillator is actually averaging, and why the same pair on two venues is two different series. Each one is written to be worth reading whether or not you ever use this product.
What the four numbers in a candle actually are, why the body and the wick answer different questions, and how the same session looks on three different intervals.
- ·Open, high, low and close are four measurements of one interval, not four prices in sequence.
- ·A bucket is labelled by the time it OPENS, and the last one on the chart has not finished happening.
- ·Body and wick answer different questions: where the interval settled, and how far it was pushed and rejected.
- ·Colour convention is a display choice, and a chart that does not say which convention it uses is a chart you cannot read.
- ·The same data on 1-minute, 1-hour and 1-day bars is three different stories, all of them true.
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RSI is an average of gains against an average of losses over a window. That sentence explains every property people find surprising about it.
- ·The formula: average gain over average loss across the lookback, normalised onto 0–100.
- ·Wilder smoothing is not the same as a simple mean, which is why two platforms can print different values for RSI(14) and both be right about their own convention.
- ·Why 70 and 30 are conventions rather than signals, and why they are reached constantly in a trend.
- ·Why the first values on a short series are unreliable, and how many bars of lead-in a Wilder-family study needs before it settles.
- ·What divergence claims, and what it does not.
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Two venues quoting the same pair do not produce the same candles, and the reasons are structural rather than accidental.
- ·Every venue is its own market: its own book, its own participants, its own last trade. Identical hourly bars from two venues differ by a small but visible amount.
- ·Sparse against dense: some venues emit zero-volume filler for intervals with no trades and some omit the bucket entirely, which changes what a gap in your chart means.
- ·Bucket boundaries and timezones, and why every serious store keeps UTC and labels late.
- ·Revisions and late trades: a bar can change after it closed, and a store has to decide whether it believes the first answer or the last.
- ·Why stitching two venues into one series produces a seam that quietly corrupts every indicator across the join.
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Nothing in these guides is advice about what to buy or sell. They are about how the numbers on a chart are produced and what they can and cannot tell you.