Close price

The final price of an interval. On a chart, every candlestick reports one, and the interval is whatever the chart's time frame says it is. On a listed market, the official daily close is a separate and more formal thing: it is struck in a closing auction, where orders are collected and matched at a single price, so it is not simply the last trade printed before the bell.

The close carries more weight than the other three values because so much is calculated from it. Most indicators are computed on closing prices, index levels and fund valuations are struck on official closes, positions are marked to market against them, and a convention that a signal counts only on a close exists to filter out prices touched briefly inside a bar. The choice is deliberate: a close is the price a market was willing to end an interval at, rather than a price it merely visited.

The trip appears in markets that never shut. Foreign exchange trades continuously through the week, so a daily close there is a convention imposed by a provider's server clock rather than a fact about the market. Two providers using different cut off times produce genuinely different daily candles for the same currency pair, and any calculation resting on those closes differs accordingly. The same applies to a contract quoted on a share outside its exchange's hours, where the provider's window and the exchange's official close are not the same event.