OHLC bars
OHLC bars compress an ordered price path into fixed time buckets. They are useful for locating moves, volatility, gaps, and trade events, but they do not reveal every intrabar sequence unless finer-grained data is supplied.
What can mislead you?
- A bar does not prove the order in which its high and low occurred.
- Different sessions, time zones, aggregation rules, and missing data can change the same apparent pattern.
- Visual smoothness does not establish execution quality or future behavior.
Volume Profile and TPO
Volume Profile summarizes supplied activity across price bins; TPO-style views summarize time or occurrence structure across price levels under a defined construction rule. Both can make concentration and sparse regions easier to see than a time-only chart.
What can mislead you?
- Profile meaning depends on the software's exact binning, session bounds, source units, and construction rule.
- A prominent node is descriptive evidence, not automatic support or resistance.
- Comparing profiles with different sessions or scales without labeling them can create false equivalence.
Historical replay
Replay is useful for inspecting a past sequence without immediately exposing the full future path. A safe replay must define when bars, events, indicators, and derived layers become available and withhold any layer whose timing semantics are not trustworthy.
What can mislead you?
- Replaying final-series indicators can leak future information even when their timestamps look historical.
- Trade markers or profile sessions must respect their own availability times, not only bar timestamps.
- Replay demonstrates an information sequence; it does not recreate every live-market condition.
Keep source, interval, units, and availability together.
Before interpreting any chart layer, identify who produced it, which instrument and timeframe it belongs to, which units it uses, and when that information was actually available.
Read the complete Chart Evidence How-To →