Welcome, please play the video to get started:
Why study charts
Traders use charts to conduct technical analysis and in turn, to develop their edge. Charts are a fantastic way of doing this, by viewing a price on a chart a trader can see lots of insights – trends, patterns and so on.
There are lots of different types of chart, we’ll be explaining line, bar and candlestick charts in this short course.
What is a chart
Chart timeframes
And if we set the chart to a 1-minute timeframe, each point represents the closing price for each minute and the whole chart now only covers about two hours. Remember, its the same financial market, just a much shorter timeframe.
What timeframe you decide to use is largely down to your investment or trading time horizons.
| Chart timeframe | Trading style |
| tick-5 mins | Scalper |
| 15-30 mins | Short term trader |
| 1 hour or 4 hourly | Day trader |
| daily or weekly | Swing trader/passive trader |
| weekly or monthly | Investor |
We’ll show you later on in our courses how to use multi timeframes to carry out a deeper analysis of a market.
- Charts are a great tool used by technical traders to analyse the price of a market.
- In this course, we’re introducing three popular chart types: line, bar and candlestick.
- Charts are a market’s price plotted against time.
- Traders select the timeframe of a chart, which is how much information is displayed as one plot in time.
- Your trading style is largely determined by how long you hold a trade, this will determine the best timeframe in which to view a chart.
Once you’re finished with this lesson please click ‘Mark Complete’ to move on.
