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Charts

Pull up any chart. Then learn to read it.

Type a ticker into the search box to change the symbol. Draw trendlines, add indicators, switch timeframes. Below the chart: what you're actually looking at, a routine for using it, and the questions a chart genuinely cannot answer.

Market data provided by TradingView and may be delayed. Shown for educational purposes only — nothing on this page is investment advice, and past performance doesn't guarantee future results.

Today across the market

What moved, before you chart it.

Eleven cross-asset benchmarks — the major US indexes, the 2- and 10-year Treasury yields, the dollar, gold, WTI crude, copper and bitcoin — each with its one-year high and low. Most are the underlying series rather than a fund that tracks it; where a card names an ETF, type that ticker into the chart above to see the history behind the number.

2-Year Treasury

4.63%

+7 bp

1-year range 3.38–4.63%

At its 1-year high

2-year par yield · U.S. Treasury

10-Year Treasury

4.96%

+1 bp

1-year range 3.97–4.96%

At its 1-year high

10-year par yield · U.S. Treasury

U.S. Dollar

118.07

−0.05%

1-year range 117.44–121.92

3.2% below the high · 0.5% above the low

Fed broad dollar index · FRED

Oil

$97.26

+3.24%

1-year range 55.44–114.58

15.1% below the high · 75.4% above the low

WTI spot, per barrel (EIA via FRED) · FRED

The time under each card is when that price printed, in New York time — not when this page was built. Sources: FRED, U.S. Treasury. These figures are refreshed hourly through the trading week, so a stamp from the previous close means the market is shut, not that the page has stopped.

Refreshed every weekday morning. Delayed and for education only — see the Markets hub for the full picture.

01 — What you're looking at

A chart is four numbers, repeated.

Every candle on the chart above summarizes one period of trading with four numbers. That's it. Every indicator you can add to this chart is arithmetic performed on those four numbers, which is worth knowing before anyone sells you a system built on them.

OpenThe first price agreed in the period.
HighThe highest anyone paid.
LowThe lowest anyone accepted.
CloseThe last price agreed.

The thick body spans open to close. The thin lines above and below — wicks — mark the extremes. When the close finishes above the open the candle is drawn one color, below the open the other. Nothing more is encoded than that.

The most basic read available: where did price finish relative to where it traded all period? A close near the top of the range means buyers had the last word. A close near the bottom means sellers did. It's a small piece of information and it's real — which already puts it ahead of most of what gets said about charts. We take the same four numbers apart in more detail on the free Technical Analysis page.

Timeframe changes the answer, and that's not a bug

Switch this chart from daily to weekly and you will see a different picture of the same stock. Both are accurate. A stock can be falling on the hourly, rising on the daily and flat on the weekly with no contradiction at all — they are measuring different spans.

The rule that matters: pick the timeframe that matches how long you intend to hold. The trouble starts when someone forms a view on one timeframe and then goes looking for a different one that agrees with them. That isn't analysis, it's shopping, and it is one of the most reliable ways people talk themselves into a position they'd already decided on — a bias we cover properly in Market Sentiment.

Where this comes from

This is the ground covered in Stage 1 of our Technical Analysis course. The free Technical Analysis markets page goes further into trend, volume and market breadth.

02 — Volume

The one thing worth adding first.

Volume — the bars along the bottom — counts how many shares changed hands. It is the closest thing a chart has to a measure of conviction. A big move on unusually heavy volume means a lot of participants acted on it. The same move on thin volume might be a handful of trades in a quiet afternoon.

Used properly, volume is corroboration, not a signal. It can tell you a move had participation behind it. It cannot tell you whether that participation was right. Plenty of heavily-traded moves reversed the following week, and the volume bars gave no warning whatsoever.

The practical version: when price does something notable and volume is unremarkable, hold the observation more loosely. That's the whole lesson, and it's more useful than most indicators. The same logic scaled up to the whole index is called market breadth, which we track on the Technical Analysis page.

03 — A routine

Five steps, in this order.

Almost everyone learns charts backwards — they start with indicators, because indicators look like answers. Indicators are the last layer and they are derived from the first two. Learning them first is how people end up with a screen full of colored lines and no idea what any of it means, which is exactly why our Technical Analysis course runs candles first and indicators fourth.

  1. Zoom out first. Set the chart to weekly or monthly before anything else. You are asking one question: over a long span, is this generally rising, generally falling, or going sideways? A surprising number of bad decisions come from analyzing a five-day chart of something that has been declining for three years.
  2. Find the obvious levels. Look for prices the stock has repeatedly failed to get above, or repeatedly refused to fall below. These aren't magic. They're just prices where enough people have historically changed their minds that it shows up in the record. Mark two or three, not fifteen.
  3. Drop to your actual timeframe. Now switch to the span that matches your intended holding period. Check whether what you see here agrees with the long view from step one. If it doesn't, that disagreement is the most useful thing on the screen.
  4. Add volume. Stop there for a while. Confirm whether recent moves had participation. Resist adding a fourth, fifth and sixth indicator — they are largely computing the same thing from the same four numbers, and three that agree is not three pieces of evidence.
  5. Write down what would prove you wrong. Before acting, name the specific price or event that would mean your read was mistaken. If you can't name one, you don't have an analysis — you have a preference.
Step five is the whole game

Deciding in advance what would falsify your view is the single highest-value habit in this discipline, and it's psychological rather than technical. That's the subject of our Trading Psychology course.

04 — The limits

What this chart cannot tell you.

A chart is the complete history of every price two people have ever agreed on for a thing. That is genuinely useful information, and it is not a forecast. Most of what goes wrong in technical analysis comes from confusing the two.

Because a chart contains prices and nothing else, it sets a hard ceiling on what it can possibly know. It holds no information about what a company earns, what it owes, whether its largest customer just walked, or how much of its profit is real cash — that lives in the filings, which is what Fundamentals is for. Nor can it see what the Federal Reserve will do next month, which is the territory of the economic data. Anyone claiming a chart told them something outside those four numbers is telling you about themselves, not the market.

What the evidence actually supports

It's worth splitting the discipline up, because the parts have very different track records. Momentum and trend-following have decades of academic support across many markets and asset classes — the tendency for what has been rising to keep rising over intermediate horizons is one of the most replicated findings in finance. But that is a statistical tendency across many positions over time. It is not a prediction about the specific chart in front of you.

Specific chart patterns fare considerably worse under testing, largely because they get identified after the fact and human beings are extremely good at seeing shapes in noise — the pattern-matching instinct itself is the problem, and it's unpacked in Market Sentiment. Risk management built on price levels — sizing a position against the point where you'd admit you were wrong — isn't a prediction method at all, and is arguably the most valuable thing in the whole field.

None of this makes charts useless. It makes them a record rather than an oracle, which is a more modest claim and a far more defensible one. If money is tight right now, charts are a long way down the list of things that will help — start instead with the free five-stage Financial Literacy resource.

05 — Keep going

Where to go from here.

06 — Questions

Common questions.

What do the four numbers in a candlestick mean?

Open, high, low and close: the price it opened at, the price it closed at, and the highest and lowest reached in between. The thick body spans open to close; the thin wicks mark the extremes. Every indicator you can add is arithmetic performed on those four numbers.

Which timeframe should I use?

The one that matches how long you intend to hold. Different timeframes genuinely disagree and can all be accurate at once — a stock can fall on the hourly, rise on the daily and sit flat on the weekly. The problem isn't the disagreement, it's forming a view on one timeframe and then justifying it with another.

What does volume tell you that price doesn't?

Roughly how much conviction sat behind a move. A large move on heavy volume means many participants acted; the same move on thin volume may be very few. It's corroboration rather than a signal — it can tell you a move had participation, not whether that participation was right.

Can a chart predict where a stock is going?

No. A chart is a record of prices already agreed. It holds no information about earnings, debt, customers or central bank policy. Momentum and trend-following do have real academic support, but as a statistical tendency across many positions over time — not as a forecast for the chart in front of you.

Is this free, and is the data live?

Free, no account needed. Data comes from TradingView and may be delayed depending on the exchange and symbol. Educational purposes only — this is not investment advice.

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