Reading the AlertaChart Chart: Candles, Volume, and Timeframes

Every chart in AlertaChart uses the same vocabulary: candles, wicks, volume bars, and a time axis. This article walks through what each element means, when to switch timeframes, and how to read volume in context — written for the trader who's about to make their first technical-analysis decision on the platform.

Candle anatomy

A candle represents the price action across one bar of time. Five values go into it:

- Open — the first traded price inside the bar. - High — the maximum price reached during the bar. - Low — the minimum. - Close — the last traded price before the bar closed. - Volume — the cumulative amount traded inside the bar, drawn as a histogram below the price pane.

If the close is higher than the open, the body is green (our default) and the candle is bullish for that bar. If the close is lower than the open, the body is red and the bar is bearish. The thin lines extending above and below the body are the wicks (also called shadows) — they mark the high and the low.

Reading wicks

Long wicks are signals about who controlled the bar:

- A long upper wick on a bullish candle means buyers pushed price up but couldn't hold it — sellers stepped in. Often seen at resistance or at exhaustion tops. - A long lower wick on a bearish candle means sellers pushed price down but buyers rejected — common at support or at capitulation lows. - A doji (open ≈ close, long wicks) is indecision; treat it as a pause, not a signal in either direction unless it lines up with structure.

Timeframes and what they're useful for

Switch timeframes from the dropdown at the top of the chart. Each timeframe answers a different question:

- 1m / 5m: scalping, news scalps, very tight intraday work. Noise-dominant; lots of false signals from market makers ranging price. - 15m / 30m: short-term swing, intraday setups, day-trading. Cleaner than the 1-minute but still reactive. - 1h / 4h: classic swing trading. Most retail technical analysis lives here. Most reliable for support/resistance and trend lines. - 1d: position trading, weekly setups, narrative trades. Where institutional algos and slow capital live. - 1w / 1M: long-term investment thesis, cycle tops/bottoms. Mostly for context above all other timeframes.

A useful habit: always check the 4h and the 1d before committing to a 15m trade. If 15m and 1h disagree with 4h, the higher timeframe usually wins in the medium term.

Volume — the signal-to-noise filter

Volume is the second most-important read after the candle itself. AlertaChart paints volume below the price pane. A few rules of thumb:

- Big-volume breakouts (above recent average) are more likely to follow through. Big-volume rejections (heavy wick + heavy bar) are more likely to be real reversal points. - Quiet candles with little volume — even if they break a level — are suspect. Wait for confirmation. - Volume should match the move. A trending move where volume is steadily increasing is healthier than one where volume fades while price extends; fading volume often precedes mean-reversion.

The Volume MA overlay (Settings → Volume MA) plots a moving average of volume so you can eyeball "above average" and "below average" without doing the math.

Timezone

By default the chart uses your browser's local time. You can pick a specific timezone from Chart Settings → Timezone — useful if you want to align with NYSE open, London close, or simply prefer UTC for crypto. The timezone affects the time axis only; the data itself is exchange-timestamped.

Crosshair, OHLC legend, and tooltips

Move your mouse over the chart on desktop, or tap and hold on mobile. The crosshair shows you the exact bar and price under the cursor; the OHLC legend at the top updates to show that bar's values. The same crosshair sweeps through any orderflow sub-panes you have open (CVD, Open Interest, etc.) so a single hover gives you the full snapshot.

Saving your visible range

AlertaChart remembers the last-saved zoom level per device. When you reopen a chart or swap symbols, it tries to keep your visible candle count consistent. On a fresh first paint with no saved zoom it defaults to a window of about 150 candles on desktop and 80 on mobile — wide enough to see structure, narrow enough that each candle is readable.

Drawing on the chart

Drawing tools live in the left toolbar on desktop and behind the pencil button on mobile. Trend lines, horizontal lines, Fibonacci retracements, rectangles, and text annotations are the most-used. Drawings persist per device — they save to local storage and won't roam across browsers unless you sign in with a Pro account, which syncs drawings to the server.