Free tools
Chart types, side by side
The same simulated prices, drawn five ways. Switch between them to see what each type keeps, what it smooths and what it leaves out. There is no strategy and no result here, only construction.
Chart type
How it’s built. Each bar is a body from open to close with a thin wick to the high and low. Here a bar that closed above its open is hollow and one that closed below is filled, so direction reads without colour.
How it’s built. Each bar is a vertical line from low to high, with a tick to the left at the open and a tick to the right at the close. It carries the same four prices as a candlestick with less ink.
How it’s built. One point per bar at the close, joined in order. It drops the open, high and low, which makes the sequence of closes easy to follow and hides the range inside each bar.
How it’s built. A smoothed candlestick. Each close is the average of the bar’s open, high, low and close; each open is the midpoint of the previous Heikin-Ashi body; the high and low also take in that new body. The prices drawn are therefore not the prices traded.
How it’s built. Bricks of a fixed box size, built from closes and ignoring time. A new brick in the same direction needs a close one box beyond the last brick; a brick in the other direction needs a close two boxes from the last brick’s top or bottom. Moves smaller than that draw nothing.
SIMULATED data: 90 bars indexed from 100, each opening at the previous close with a random, zero-mean change. No real instrument is shown.
About these types
Candlesticks and OHLC bars show the same four prices per bar. A line keeps only the closes. Heikin-Ashi replaces each bar with averages, so its candles run in longer unbroken colours and its prices are not the ones traded. Renko drops time entirely, so a quiet stretch and a busy one can take the same space.
The Analess charting workspace is designed to draw all five of these, plus Kagi and Point & Figure, from the same data.