Bar chart

A bar chart carries exactly the four prices a candlestick carries. The vertical line spans the highest and lowest price traded during the period. A short horizontal tick on the left marks the price at which the period opened, and a tick on the right marks the price at which it closed. One bar is one period, and the period is whatever the chart is set to, a minute, an hour, a session or a day.

The difference from a candlestick is presentational rather than informational. A candle fills the distance between the open and the close as a solid body, so direction is read from a shape and a colour. A bar leaves that distance empty, so direction is read from which of the two ticks sits higher. Bars take less horizontal room, which is why chartists comparing long histories tend to prefer them, and why pattern traditions built on the size of a body, engulfing formations among them, are drawn on candles instead.

Tick placement is what catches people. A bar whose two ticks sit near the top with a long line beneath describes a period that fell hard and recovered, which reads nothing like the same span drawn as a single downward stroke. A bar also says nothing about the path taken inside the period: the high may have come before the low or after it, and no chart of this kind records which, which is the reason multiple time frame work exists at all.