Charts show how a pair's price changed over time. You will learn to read candlesticks and timeframes, then practise placing simulated orders. This is educational only and is not investment advice.
Candlesticks, explained
Each candlestick summarises price movement over a set period. It shows four numbers: the open (price at the start of the period), the close (price at the end), and the high and low (the furthest points the price reached in between). A candlestick is usually coloured one way if the close was higher than the open, and the opposite way if it was lower — a quick visual cue for whether that period was, broadly, moving up or down.
Lined up next to each other, candlesticks form a continuous record of a pair's behaviour. Reading a handful of candles in a row tells you far more than any single price on its own.
Timeframes
The same pair can be viewed across many timeframes — from one-minute candles for a close-up view, to hourly or daily candles for a broader picture. Shorter timeframes show more detail and more noise; longer timeframes smooth that noise out but react more slowly. Many people practise by checking a longer timeframe first to get a sense of the broader trend, then a shorter one to look at recent movement in more detail.
Support, resistance and trend
Two of the simplest, most widely used ideas in chart reading are:
- Support — a price level where a pair has repeatedly stopped falling and turned back up.
- Resistance — a price level where a pair has repeatedly stopped rising and turned back down.
Together with the overall trend — whether a pair has generally been moving up, down, or sideways — these give you a basic vocabulary for describing what a chart is doing, which is the first step before trying to interpret it further.
Practise this
Open a major pair in the simulator, switch between a couple of timeframes, and try to spot one clear support level and one clear resistance level on the chart. Getting used to picking those out is a foundational chart-reading skill, and it costs you nothing to practise since it does not involve real money.