st: Candlestick charts

["Allan Reese (Cefas)" <allan.reese@cefas.co.uk>]

Michael Hecker <Hecker.Michael@gmx.de> gave link 
http://www.chart-formations.com/stock-charts/_images/_candlestickChart.g
if) 
for Japanese Candlestick Charts.

The explanatory page
http://www.chart-formations.com/stock-charts/candlestick-charts.aspx
gives the background and examples of what appears to be the "Oriental
approach" in giving names and characters to patterns.

The top example on that page, however, seems odd to me in having 18
trading intervals spaced equally through a 24 hour day.  We do have 24
hour stock trading, but taking stock [pun] every 1.3 hours seems odd.
If this was a record of trade at one location, and was 18 1-hour slots
with 6 hours closed, maybe the time axis should show the wider gap when
the market is closed.  I don't know which is right, but it's so easy to
let the plotting software decide and not notice the consequence.

Outside the specialist field of use, these plots look confusingly
similar to the more general box plot.  A more intuitive plot for
open-high-low-close would be an X: line segments joining open and close
and indicating the length of the trading period, and a centred vertical
bar joining high and low for the period.  You can still use colour, tone
and arrows (ie with redundancy to mitigate colour-blindness) at the bar
ends to indicate bull and bear markets.

Allan



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