gorx1

The unknown obvious: what chart types to use for each task

NYSE:MAN   ManpowerGroup
First of all, price charts are not price charts, at least, not exactly. There are always 2 prices: the price to buy (ask) and the price to sell (bid). Real price charts are actually the history of where BBO was located. If for some reason you'll wanna check that and you don't have the real data, the best you can do is to open a line chart based on close prices on the highest possible resolution, and compress it all the way down.

Second, all charts are built from ticks/trades/deals, which is the fundamental particle of the market. Every tick has a timestamp.
The only right way to aggregate ticks is by using time. If you’re using volume bars, tick bars, whatever, you’re losing information. There are many other very obvious reasons why it doesn’t make sense to use these kinds of charts, but it’s all inessential since you’re losing information. There's one specific task when you need to use volume/range bars, bur that's inessential 4 real and gonna be explained later. So, bar & candlestick charts are the charts of time-aggregated deals aka recorded trading activity, not "price charts".

On the assets where you don't use volumes but infer volumes from prices, you'll need 2 charts:
1) Bar chart: to locate levels and infer volumes (we infer volumes from bar ranges);
2) Candlestick chart: to infer volume delta from Close minus Open distance compared with the bar size.

Footprints/cluster charts are used on assets where the volumes can be trusted, was explained before in "Real levels: PVMs".

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