Time frame

The aggregation setting of a chart. Every candlestick compresses all the activity in one interval into four values, and the time frame decides how long that interval is. The underlying data are identical at every setting: nothing is added by choosing a shorter frame and nothing is lost by choosing a longer one, since both are summaries of the same stream of ticks. What changes is resolution, and with it every shape, every level and every indicator reading drawn from the series.

Two properties follow from the aggregation and are easy to overlook. The final bar on any chart is incomplete, so its shape changes until the interval ends, which is why a formation that appears on a live bar can disappear before it closes. And the boundaries of a bar are set by a clock rather than by the market: a provider's server time decides where a daily bar begins, so two providers on different server clocks draw genuinely different daily candles for the same instrument, and any calculation resting on those closes differs with them.

The reliable trip is contradiction between frames. The same instrument can show an unbroken advance on a weekly chart and a sequence of lower highs on a fifteen minute one, and neither picture is wrong: they describe different horizons. The convention of consulting a higher frame for context and a lower one for detail, usually described as multi-timeframe analysis, is widely used, and practitioners disagree about how far apart the frames should sit and about whether a conflict between them carries information at all.