Unit 5 of 10 · Beginner

What a chart actually is

In one read

A chart is an event record, not a picture. It plots price against time, and each candle compresses one interval into four numbers: the open and close, where price started and ended, and the high and low, how far it reached each way. The body spans open to close; the thin wicks mark the extremes. Colour encodes direction only — green closed above its open, red below — never good or bad. Read left to right, a run of candles becomes a sentence: where price began, what it tested, where it settled. A chart records what happened and when. It does not encode why, and it does not tell you what happens next. Learning to read one is learning the alphabet before you can read the words. This unit defines the candle, then reads a generic session as a story you can run and recompute yourself.

What a chart actually is

A chart is not a picture of a stock. It is an event record — a compressed log of what traded, arranged so you can read it left to right like a sentence.

The atom of that record is the candle. One candle is four numbers and nothing more:

  • Open — where price started the interval.
  • Close — where it ended.
  • High and Low — how far it reached each way.

The body is the space between open and close; the thin wicks mark the high and the low. Colour is direction only: a green candle closed above its open, a red one below. Green is not "good" and red is not "bad" — they simply say which way the interval finished.

A worked example

Take a single generic index session — call the instrument GENCO — sampled one candle per interval.

Zoom into one candle and the four numbers are all there: it opened, drifted up to its high, sold back down to its low, and closed near the middle. That is one letter.

Now zoom out. A run of candles, read left to right, becomes a sentence: higher closes, a pullback that holds above the prior low, a recovery into the close. The shape is the record of who was willing to pay what, and when. Nothing in the shape tells you why it happened, and nothing in it fixes what the next candle will be — a chart records the past exactly and forecasts none of the future.

See it in kestrel

You do not have to take a chart's word for anything. Run a real, recorded session and read the candles straight off the tape:

npx kestrel.markets sim fomc-rate-decision-whipsaw

That runs a deterministic simulation over a generic index session — managed licensed data, no wall time, no signup, no card — and prints a certified proof URL. Point the CLI back at any proof and it recomputes the whole record on your own machine, byte for byte:

npx kestrel.markets certify https://kestrel.markets/proof/art_d29415f0cf502f4a218a9cba

Keep the alphabet one command away: drop the kestrel.markets MCP server into your client and the next session opens where this one left off — no account in between.

Recompute it

Every claim in this unit recomputes from a certified proof — no account, no card.

/proof/art_d29415f0cf502f4a218a9cba
Keep readingWhy price jumps

Agent twin: /education/market-fundamentals/mf-what-a-chart-is/content.md