Broker-supplied charting
The chart your broker gives you
It is free, it is already logged in, and it is next to the order ticket. Those three things are worth a great deal.
What broker-supplied charting is genuinely good at
A broker chart is attached to the account that matters, shows the positions you actually hold, and costs nothing extra. For someone who trades from the chart, that adjacency is hard to give up and we do not compete on it: no order ever leaves this building and there is no broker integration on the roadmap.
What is different here
What a broker chart rarely gives you is depth or portability. History is as long as their vendor contract allows, it usually ends where their coverage of that instrument began, and neither the drawings nor the alerts leave their platform. The difference here is ownership of the store: how far back you can scroll is a number we set rather than a vendor’s, timeframes we do not store are aggregated in the database at read time, and every drawing is anchored to price and time so it survives a timeframe change instead of sliding off it.
When you should stay exactly where you are
If you trade from the chart and never need more history than your broker keeps, their chart is the shorter path and you should use it.
The difference is who owns the history
A broker chart is almost always a licensed vendor feed rendered inside the broker's shell. That single fact explains most of what it can and cannot do for you.
When the data is licensed from a vendor, depth is a contract term. How far back you can scroll is what the broker is paying for, coverage of a given instrument tends to begin where their relationship with that vendor began rather than where the market did, and the intervals on offer are the intervals the vendor serves. None of that is anybody behaving badly; it is what reselling a feed means.
Here the candles are ingested from public venue endpoints into our own Postgres and served from there. Depth costs us disk rather than a licence fee, so it is a number we set — and because it is genuinely ours to set, it is the axis the plans differ on most.
What that means at the chart
| Capability | A broker chart | Here |
|---|---|---|
| History | As deep as the vendor contract allows, and usually starting where their coverage of that instrument began. | Up to 40,000 bars of whatever interval you asked for, from a store we keep — 5,000 on the free plan. |
| Intervals | The intervals the vendor serves, from a fixed menu. | Any interval that folds cleanly from the stored grain, aggregated in the database at read time. A 45-minute chart is a query, not a new feed. |
| Drawings | Stay inside that platform, and are often tied to the chart layout rather than to the market. | Anchored to price and time, so a trendline survives a timeframe change instead of sliding off it — and it is on the same two highs from any machine you sign in from. |
| Alerts while you are away | Usually available, and usually evaluated by the same vendor feed with its own conventions. | Evaluated by a worker running the same indicator module your browser runs, so an alert on RSI(14) crossing 70 fires on the number printed on your chart. |
| Leaving | Closing the account generally closes the charts, the drawings and the alerts with it. | The workspace is separate from any brokerage relationship, and a lapsed plan makes it read-only rather than empty. Nothing is deleted. |
| Trading from the chart | The whole point, and it is a real advantage. | Not offered, and not planned. No order ever leaves this building. |
We are not a broker, and that is a design choice with consequences
Both good and bad ones, and they are worth stating together.
The cost is adjacency. If your workflow is see-a-level, click, done, then nothing here replaces the chart sitting next to the ticket, and the last thing this page wants to do is pretend otherwise.
The benefit is that a charting product which routes no orders takes on none of the registration, suitability or best-execution obligations that come with routing one, holds no customer funds, and has no incentive whatsoever in what you decide. The chart is not a funnel toward a trade; it is the product.
It also means you can use both, which is what most people do. Keep the broker chart for execution and use this for the depth, the study and the alert that runs while the browser is shut. The plan limits are all on one page, and the security page says plainly what we do and do not defend against.
The other two comparisons
Three categories, and no product names anywhere on this site. A page comparing us to a named competitor is a page that becomes wrong the next time they ship, with their trademark on it.
Every number on the pricing page is read from the same table the server enforces.