Skip to content
GetProfitable
Search
Dictionary

OHLC

The four prices that summarise any chart period: the first trade, the highest trade, the lowest trade and the last trade.

The parts of a candlestickAn up candle and a down candle with the same high and low, labelled with open, high, low, close, the real body and the wicks.UP CANDLEclose above openHigh 41.00Close 40.30Open 38.20Low 37.40upper wickreal bodyopen to closelower wickDOWN CANDLEclose below openHigh 41.00Open 40.30Close 38.20Low 37.40Same high and low; only the open and close swap places.
The parts of a candlestick. One candle sums up a slice of time: the thick real body runs from the opening price to the closing price, and the thin wicks reach out to the highest and lowest prices traded. Colour tells you which way the body ran.

Every bar or candle on a normal chart compresses an entire period into four numbers. The open is the first traded price of the period, the high and low are the extremes, and the close is the last trade before the period ended.

Almost every indicator is built from these. A simple-moving-average usually averages closes, true-range uses the high, low and prior close, and heikin-ashi recomputes all four.

Example: a 5-minute bar with open 100.20, high 100.75, low 100.10, close 100.65 tells you price opened, ran up 55 cents, dipped, and finished near the top. What it cannot tell you is the order those things happened in. That ambiguity is why traders drop to a lower-timeframe when the sequence matters.

Related: bar-chart-ohlc, candlestick, closing-price

Educational only, not advice. Spotted an error? Post in Site Feedback.