How to read a candle
A price chart draws time across the bottom and price up the side. Each mark on it covers one slice of time, and the standard mark is a candle, which packs four numbers into one shape:
│ ← the highest price reached in this slice
┌─┴─┐
│ │ ← the body: from the opening price to the closing price
└─┬─┘
│ ← the lowest price reached
Green (or hollow) means it closed higher than it opened. Red means it closed lower. The body shows where most of the action settled; the thin wicks show how far price got pushed before coming back.
That last part is the reason candles beat a plain line. A long upper wick means buyers pushed price up and got rejected. A line chart would just show you the close and hide the whole fight.
What a timeframe changes
Pick 1m and each candle covers one minute. Pick 1D and each covers a day. Same market, same data, completely different picture.
There is no correct timeframe. There is only the one that matches how long you intend to hold. If you plan to be out by lunch, a daily chart tells you almost nothing about today. If you plan to hold for months, a 1-minute chart is noise that will talk you out of a good position.
Most traders keep two open: a slower one for direction, a faster one for timing.
The toolbar
Symbol
The first chip is what this chart is showing. Clicking it points this chart somewhere else, leaving the rest of the board where it is. The pair switcher in the top bar is the other half: that one moves everything, book and ticket included.
A chart holding its own symbol is badged Pinned, so on a four-chart board you can see at a glance which panels still follow the top bar. Follow the board at the bottom of the picker hands one back.
Timeframes
Eleven of them, ten with a single-key shortcut. Press the digit anywhere in the app and the active chart switches.
| Key | Timeframe | Key | Timeframe |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1m | 6 | 2h |
| 2 | 5m | 7 | 4h |
| 3 | 15m | 8 | 1D |
| 4 | 30m | 9 | 1W |
| 5 | 1h | 0 | 3D |
Monthly is in the menu without a shortcut.
Not every exchange offers every interval. Kalshi has three, Polymarket four, and each futures exchange publishes its own list. The picker shows only what is actually available.
Your choice is remembered rather than overwritten. Point a chart pinned to 15m at an exchange that does not have it and you get the nearest shorter interval, because a finer bar still covers the window you asked for. Go back to an exchange with 15m and you are on 15m again.
Chart types
Sixteen, all drawn on the GPU so they stay smooth with a year of history loaded.
Candle family. Candles, Heikin-Ashi, Hollow Candles, Bar, High-Low.
Line family. Line, Step Line, Area, HLC Area, Baseline.
Bar family. Histogram, Column.
Alternative. Renko, Line Break, Kagi, Point and Figure.
Start with candles. Heikin-Ashi is worth knowing about too: it averages neighbouring candles to smooth out the chop, which makes a trend easier to see and a reversal harder to catch early. The four alternative types drop the fixed time axis entirely and draw a new mark only when price moves a set amount, which filters noise out of a trend at the cost of knowing when anything happened.
Prediction markets open on Step Line. A contract’s price is a probability that trades in occasional jumps, so candles come out as a row of tiny ticks with nothing between them, which looks like a flat market when the market is only quiet. See prediction markets.
Crosshair
Normal follows your pointer freely. Magnet snaps to the nearest high, low, open or close, which is what you want when you are drawing a level off a wick and want it exactly on the wick. Hidden removes it for a clean screenshot.
On a phone there is no pointer, so you touch and hold the chart and a crosshair appears under your finger. See the mobile terminal.
Price scale
Four modes, and the second one matters more than people expect:
| Mode | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Linear | Absolute price, evenly spaced |
| Logarithmic | Equal percentage moves take equal vertical space |
| Percentage | Everything relative to the first visible bar |
| Indexed to 100 | All series start at 100, ideal for comparing symbols |
Use logarithmic on anything with a long history. On a linear scale, a move from $1 to $2 (a doubling) looks like a tiny wiggle next to a move from $60,000 to $61,000 (under 2%). Log scale fixes that: the same percentage move is the same distance anywhere on the chart, so a trendline drawn across years actually means something.
Invert scale flips the axis upside down. Traders use it to check whether a setup still looks convincing from the other side of the trade, which is a surprisingly effective way to catch your own bias.
Bid and ask lines
Toggle Bid/Ask to draw the live best buy and sell prices across the chart. On a thin market the gap between them is what a market order will actually cost you, and seeing it drawn to scale changes how you size. See the order book.
Futures overlays
On a perpetual contract the main chart also draws the ccxt reads that used to live only in side panes, as price lines on the candles they belong to. Mark in blue and index in purple come from the funding snapshot, your own entry (dotted) and liquidation (dashed) come from the venue when a position is open, and up to three dotted liq zones mark where measured liquidations clustered in the last 24 hours. Open interest and the funding history curve stay in their panes: they are not prices, and drawing them on the price scale would bend the axis the candles read on.
Screenshots
The camera menu gives you Copy image and Download image. On desktop the file lands in a real folder and the toast tells you which. Everything on screen comes with it, drawings and indicators included.
Downloaded and copied images carry TradingView style branding: a top banner with your nickname and the creation date, a PS ONE brand in the corner with the symbol, timeframe, venue and date along the bottom, and a bottom footer with the PS One logo. The same watermark sits fixed over the live chart while you pan and zoom: brand on the right, symbol line centered at the bottom. Set your nickname (takma ad) in the camera menu. It is stored only on this device and burned only into images you export. Charts are gridless by design, on screen and in the file.
The camera menu also holds the watermark controls: show or hide the mark, show or hide the symbol line, edit the title and subtitle, and reset to the default with one click. If the mark ever disappears, check that the title is not empty and the symbol line is on, or hit reset.
Export data
The spreadsheet button saves the chart’s bars as a CSV. Take Visible bars or All loaded bars, and choose how timestamps are written.
One row per bar with time, open, high, low, close and volume. Indicators on your chart come along as extra columns, one per line they draw, so a MACD arrives as three. Bars from before an indicator had enough history to compute leave the cell empty rather than borrowing the next value, which keeps a spreadsheet honest.
Fullscreen
Expands the chart over the whole workspace. Esc leaves. If you are not in fullscreen, Esc drops the active drawing tool instead.
Zoom and pan
The chart moves the way TradingView’s does, and the numbers underneath are the same: one mouse-wheel notch is a 10% zoom step, a trackpad tick is a fraction of a notch in proportion to how far your fingers moved, and the bar under your cursor stays under your cursor while you zoom. Zoom in eight notches and out eight and you are back on exactly the view you left.
Scroll to zoom the time axis about the cursor. A burst of notches glides into one motion that speeds up and settles instead of jumping a step per notch.
Swipe sideways on a trackpad, or hold Shift and scroll, to pan. Drag the chart to pan too; let go while moving and it coasts to a stop.
Pinch on a trackpad to zoom the time axis about your fingers. Pinch and pan are the same gesture on the phone: see the mobile terminal.
Drag the time axis to zoom anchored at the right edge: left zooms out, right zooms in. Double-click the time axis to reset to the default view at the latest bar.
Scroll over the price axis, or hold Alt (Option on a Mac) while scrolling anywhere, to zoom the price axis about the price under the cursor. Drag the price axis to stretch it. Either one takes the price scale off auto until you double-click the price axis or press F.
You can zoom down to five bars and out until a bar is half a pixel wide. Panning past the oldest bar loads more history.
Date range shortcuts
Below the chart sits a TradingView style range row: 1D 5D 1M 3M 6M 1Y 5Y and All (1G 5G 1A 3A 6A 1Y 5Y and Tümü in Turkish). One click jumps the window to that span ending at the latest bar, and the active span stays highlighted until you switch pair. Tumu fits all loaded bars back into view.
A span wider than the bars already loaded pulls the missing history in from the exchange, so 5Y reaches back years instead of stopping at the edge of a 500 bar buffer. When a span is too wide to draw on the current interval, the chart moves to a coarser one first: 1Y at 15m becomes 1Y at 2h, which is the same calendar span in fewer, longer candles. The timeframe chip in the toolbar updates with it. On a large interval a short span still lands: it zooms into the last bars instead of doing nothing.
Drawing toolbar
The drawing rail lives left of the chart. The pencil in the top bar and the chevron in the rail open and close the same rail, and the choice is remembered on the device. When the rail is parked, a slim strip with a pencil stays visible so there is always a way back. Star a tool with a right click to pin it to the favorites box at the top of the rail.
Bar replay
This is the single best practice tool in the terminal, and almost nobody finds it.
Replay hides the future and steps historical bars forward one at a time. You see exactly what you would have seen live, make your decision, then advance the bar and find out if you were right. Pan left first to load deeper history, then open Replay and use play, pause and next bar.
Indicators recompute as replay advances, so an EMA crossover looks the way it looked at the time rather than the way hindsight paints it. If you want to know whether a setup works, this is how you find out without paying for the lesson.
Compare symbols
Add up to five symbols to one chart. Three modes decide how they are drawn together:
Percentage (indexed). Every series rebased to its first visible bar. This is the right choice for “which of these outran the other”, and the one you want almost always.
Price overlay. Raw prices on one axis. Only readable when the symbols trade in a similar range.
Dual axis. Each series keeps its own scale. Good for pairing an asset against something on a completely different order of magnitude.
A prediction contract starts on dual axis, because a contract priced at 47¢ next to Bitcoin at 64,000 would otherwise be a flat line along the bottom.
Right-click menu
The fast path to what you do most:
- Add indicator
- Horizontal line at the clicked price
- Trend line, ray, arrow, Fibonacci retracement
- Add alert at the clicked price, which creates a real notification rule with the level filled in
- Fit content, scroll to latest
- Delete drawing, when you right-clicked one
What is remembered
Chart state is saved per pair: chart type, timeframe, scale, indicators and their settings, and your drawings. Reopen a pair next week and it looks the way you left it. Local by default, synced across devices when you are signed in.
Two things are saved per market type instead of per pair: chart type and compare mode. So candles on Bitcoin and a step line on an election contract hold at the same time, and choosing Line on a stock does not turn your crypto charts into lines.
Multiple charts
Add more than one chart panel and each keeps its own symbol, exchange, timeframe, type and indicators.
Dual Charts, Triple Charts and Quad Charts in the Workspaces menu are the ready-made versions. The first panel follows the pair you were already on, the rest arrive with their own, and every one is changeable from its symbol chip.
Keyboard shortcuts go to the chart you last pointed at, so digits and tool chords land where you expect.
Related
- Drawing tools
- Indicators
- Reading the market for the book, tape and depth panels
- Keyboard shortcuts
