Read the vertical line first
An OHLC bar compresses one chosen period into four prices: open, high, low and close. On a daily chart, one bar is one trading day. On a fifteen-minute chart, it is fifteen minutes. The timeframe decides what one bar contains.
The vertical stroke runs from the period’s low at the bottom to its high at the top. Its length is the range. Thursday’s low was ₹96 and its high was ₹111, so the range was ₹15.
Two small horizontal ticks finish the drawing. The tick pointing left marks the open. The tick pointing right marks the close. Read it as time moving from left to right: open on the left, close on the right.
One bar, four exact jobs
Tap a price. The drawing highlights the stroke that records it. These are Thursday’s synthetic prices from 03.01.01.
The open and close are ticks, not the ends of the vertical line. The vertical ends belong to the high and low.
What became visible
The bar restores the full range hidden by the line chart. Thursday no longer looks like a gentle ₹1 step. You can see that price reached ₹111 and ₹96 before the period ended at ₹105.
It also restores the opening price. Thursday opened at ₹104 and closed at ₹105, so the close was ₹1 above the open. That fact is different from saying the close was ₹1 above Wednesday’s close, even though both happen to be true in this exercise.
Across several bars you can compare ranges, opening gaps and where each close sits inside its own range. You can also observe higher or lower highs and lows, and whether ranges are expanding or contracting. Those are measurements, not proof that a trend has started, weakened or reversed.
OHLC bars use little horizontal space, so a dense chart can show many periods without filling each one with a candle body.
- Full range
- ₹111 − ₹96 = ₹15
- Close above the low
- ₹105 − ₹96 = ₹9
- Close location
- ₹9 ÷ ₹15 = 60%
The calculation supports one precise sentence: Thursday closed 60% of the way up its range. Saying buyers were in control, sellers lacked commitment or the market was emotional adds a cause that the four prices do not record. Part 04 studies those interpretations while keeping them separate from the facts.
Before you choose this chart
- Why use it?
- To keep open, high, low and close in a compact drawing, so range, gaps and close location remain visible across many periods.
- Who is it for?
- Readers who need more session detail than a closing line provides but prefer a thin, dense chart to filled candlestick bodies.
- When should you use it?
- Use it when the question depends on the four recorded prices: full range, open-to-close change, opening gaps, price extremes or comparisons between neighbouring bars.
- Why should you not use it?
- Do not use it for a quick uncluttered comparison when closing values are enough, or when you need the actual order of trades, time spent at price or volume-at-price.
- What will you miss?
- The route between open and close, whether high came before low, repeated visits to a price, duration, trade count, total volume and who initiated the trades.
A bar’s left tick is at ₹104, its right tick at ₹105, its top at ₹111 and its bottom at ₹96. Which statement is recorded?
Four prices are not a replay
The bar still throws away every trade between its four numbers. It cannot tell you whether the high came before the low, how many times price crossed ₹105, how long it stayed at any level or how much traded there.
Two completely different sessions can therefore draw the same bar. One might climb to ₹111 first, fall to ₹96 and recover. Another might fall first, rally later and finish at the same ₹105. The recorded OHLC is identical.
The honest reading is mechanical: it opened at ₹104, reached a high of ₹111 and a low of ₹96, then closed at ₹105. A story about buyers, sellers or what happens next is an interpretation added after the four facts.
Many platforms colour a bar by whether its close is above or below its own open. Some can instead compare the close with the previous period’s close. The same bar can therefore change colour when a setting changes. Read the four strokes first and check the platform’s colour rule before treating colour as information.
Can an OHLC bar answer this?
The line and the OHLC bar now describe the same history at two levels of detail. The next lesson keeps the same four prices but changes their visual weight: the candlestick makes the open-to-close distance impossible to miss.