What is an Open-high-low-close Chart?

Open-high-low-close Charts (or OHLC Charts) are used as a trading tool to visualise and analyse the price changes over time for securities, currencies, stocks, bonds, commodities, etc. OHLC Charts are useful for interpreting the day-to-day sentiment of the market and forecasting any future price changes through the patterns produced.

The y-axis on an OHLC Chart is used for the price scale, while the x-axis is the timescale. On each single time period, an OHLC Charts plots a symbol that represents two ranges: the highest and lowest prices traded, and also the opening and closing price on that single time period (for example in a day). On the range symbol, the high and low price ranges are represented by the length of the main vertical line. The open and close prices are represented by the vertical positioning of tick-marks that appear on the left (representing the open price) and on right (representing the close price) sides of the high-low vertical line. Colour can be assigned to each OHLC Chart symbol, to distinguish whether the market is “bullish” (the closing price is higher than it opened) or “bearish” (the closing price is lower than it opened). Also known as OHLC Chart, Price Chart, Bar Chart.