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Glossary · Chart and price

OHLC (open, high, low, close)

The four prices that summarise a trading period — open, high, low and close — used to build candlestick and bar charts.

By Sky Trade editorial teamUpdated

OHLC stands for open, high, low and close: the first price of a period, its highest, its lowest and its last. Every candlestick and every bar on a bar chart is just these four numbers drawn in a particular way. Many indicators — ATR, Stochastic, CCI, Williams %R — are calculated directly from them.

Knowing which of the four an indicator uses explains a lot of its behaviour. A moving average of closes ignores wicks entirely. ATR includes the high and low, so it reacts to spikes. Stochastic compares the close with the high-low range, which is one reason it is so jumpy in quiet markets.

Two practical details often trip people up. First, the close of a candle is final only when the period ends; until then the “close” is just the latest price. Second, OHLC hides the path: two candles with identical OHLC values can have had very different journeys.

A line chart shows only closes, which is cleaner but discards the high and low. Sky Trade's chart offers Line, Candles, Bars and Heikin Ashi; keep in mind that Heikin Ashi candles are averaged and don't display the real OHLC. See candlestick chart basics and the wick entry.

Example

An H1 bar on USD/JPY: open 150.20, high 150.65, low 150.05, close 150.58. The range is 60 pips and the close sits near the top, which reads as buyers in control for that hour.

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