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COIN: A sharp selloff, but MFI is above 20?In this November 2, 2026 snapshot, COIN trades around $135.94 after a sharp decline. The Money Flow Index reads 25.29—above the conventional 20 “oversold” threshold, although it briefly dipped below that line near the right edge of the chart. Why can a sharp decline coexist with an MFI reading above 20? MFI measures the balance of recent price-and-volume activity. It does not measure how far price sits below an earlier high. What goes into MFI? This 4-hour chart uses MFI (14), so the calcu

QQQ: Why is the channel rising while price falls?QQQ’s latest candle is below the lower edge of an upward-sloping regression channel. That can look contradictory. It isn’t: the channel summarizes a selected stretch of history, while the latest candle shows what price is doing now. This 4-hour chart fits September 1 through October 22. The recent pullback gives us a useful way to read the drawing without treating its upward slope as a forecast. What does the channel measure? The amber center line is a linear regression fitted to the selec

Why do these dots keep switching sides?TSLA’s October candles swing back and forth, and the amber dots alternate above and below them. Compare that with the longer sequences beneath the August recovery. The tool is Parabolic SAR—“Stop and Reverse.” It calculates a trailing reference that changes sides when price penetrates the calculated SAR level. What moves the dots? SAR advances from its prior value toward the running extreme of the current trend: the highest high in an upward sequence or lowest low in a downward one. Our 4-

AMZN: Green volume bars during a selloff?AMZN falls sharply on October 22, yet the Relative Volume at Time histogram is green. That is the lesson: the color describes trading activity relative to its usual pace—not whether price is rising. What are we comparing? This 15-minute chart uses Relative Volume at Time with a 1-day anchor, a 10-period lookback, and Cumulative mode. It compares volume accumulated since the daily anchor with the historical average accumulated to the corresponding point in the prior 10 periods. Current acc

SPY moved through these prices. Where did the volume trade?The October pullback brings SPY below the amber line near $769 in this snapshot. Why is that level highlighted—and what do the horizontal bars add to the candles? Fixed Range Volume Profile groups trading activity by price across a selected interval. The vertical volume bars tell you when activity occurred; the horizontal profile shows how it was distributed across price rows. Read the widest row first The amber line marks the point of control, or POC: the row with the greatest total volum

AMD’s Aroon Down hit 100. What does that mean? AMD’s October pullback changes the picture in the lower pane: the amber line reaches 100 while the teal line drops to 50 in this October 15 snapshot. Aroon works like a clock for price extremes: it tracks how recently the lookback high and low occurred. What the two lines measure Teal is Aroon Up: how recently the highest high in the lookback occurred. Amber is Aroon Down: how recently the lowest low occurred. Each runs from 0 to 100. With length set to 14, each reading is calculated as

Why does one Supertrend give PLTR more room? PLTR pulls back from its October high in both daily charts. In the October 15 snapshot, the teal Supertrend line sits near $196.13 in the first chart and $189.45 in the second. Same price history. Same ATR length. A different multiplier changes the indicator’s sensitivity. What builds Supertrend? Supertrend combines price with Average True Range, a smoothed measure of bar ranges that also accounts for gaps from the previous close. Its basic bands start at the bar’s high–low midpoint, pl

Same TSLA candles. Why do these bands disagree? Look at TSLA’s October candles in both 4-hour charts. The price history matches, but the amber boundaries do not. Bollinger Bands measure the spread of closes; these Keltner Channels use recent trading ranges. Bollinger Bands: how spread out are the closes? Bollinger Bands place boundaries around a moving average using standard deviation—a measure of how spread out the selected prices are. With a 20-bar, Close-based setup, the middle line is a simple average of those closes, and the outer

Price keeps moving. Why don’t these levels?SPY sells off on October 14. In the October 15 session captured here, price dips around the lower amber line and rebounds toward the white one. The candles move; the reference lines stay flat. That is how daily pivot points work: the levels are calculated from the previous session’s data, rather than following each new 15-minute candle. What builds the levels? This example uses Traditional daily pivots. P, the white central pivot, averages the previous session’s high, low, and close. The fi

Your 61.8% line moved. What changed?Same NVDA high. Same 61.8% ratio. Two different price levels. The difference is the starting low. A Fibonacci retracement measures a selected move, so choosing its endpoints is part of the analysis. What the tool measures A retracement drawing divides the distance between two selected prices into reference levels. For the upward moves shown here, 0% is at the high and 100% is at the starting low. The 61.8% line marks a decline equal to 61.8% of that selected advance. On a regular price sca

Higher price. Lower momentum. How?MSTR reaches higher prices in late September than in late August, but its ROC reading is lower. How can both be true? ROC measures the percentage change between the current close and the close a chosen number of bars earlier. With length 10 on a daily chart: ROC = (current close ÷ close 10 bars ago − 1) × 100. Two prices move through the calculation Each new bar advances both endpoints. The latest close changes, and so does the older close used as the starting point. Look at the late-Augu

Bitcoin kept trading. Why did IBIT gap?Bitcoin keeps printing candles. IBIT jumps between sessions—and, in the comparison chart, sometimes becomes a straight line. The difference starts with their trading clocks. Spot bitcoin trades through weekends. IBIT is a Nasdaq-listed trust that provides bitcoin exposure through shares. These charts show IBIT’s regular session, so its overnight and weekend timeline is different from bitcoin’s. A missing bar is not an unchanged price Bitcoin’s chart continues while the regular-session IBIT

Stochastic says 80. Eighty percent of what?An oscillator near 80 can sound like a prediction. Stochastic starts with a different question: where is the close within a recent price range? The raw calculation takes the close’s distance above the lowest low, divides it by the highest high minus the lowest low, and multiplies by 100. What the two lines show With %K length 14 and %K smoothing 1, the teal %K line directly shows the close’s position within the latest 14-bar high/low range. The amber %D line averages the last three %K readi

Same SPY chart. Why do the VWAP lines disagree?VWAP depends on where its calculation begins . Change the starting point and you change the history included in the average. It adds each bar’s source price multiplied by volume, then divides by total volume since the anchor. Here the source is HLC3: the average of each bar’s high, low and close. Session VWAP starts again each trading session. It answers a question about that session’s volume-weighted price history. Week VWAP starts again at the beginning of the trading week. Later sessions

Why is this cloud ahead of GME’s candles?The candles stop. The cloud keeps going. Is Ichimoku drawing the future? It is drawing historical calculations farther along the time axis. The forward placement does not turn those calculations into future prices. What builds the cloud? Ichimoku uses range midpoints. With the standard settings, the conversion line is halfway between the highest high and lowest low over 9 bars. The base line uses 26 bars. Leading Span A averages those two lines. Leading Span B uses the midpoint of the 52-

Near the recent high—or making a new one? Check the channel.A Donchian Channel is a three-line indicator outlining the price range over a chosen number of bars. Our daily QQQ chart uses 20, so the calculation looks at the latest 20 daily bars. Use the channel to locate price in its recent range Upper amber line = highest high of those 20 bars. Lower amber line = lowest low. Gray middle line = (upper + lower) ÷ 2. Together, they locate price within a consistent recent range. In QQQ’s advance into June, price repeatedly reaches and raises the upper bou

Price is rising. Are the closes getting stronger too?A rising price leaves another question open: have the busier sessions finished near the top or bottom of their daily ranges? Chaikin Money Flow (CMF) is a volume-weighted indicator of where prices close within their high–low ranges. Here, TSLA rebounds from the late-July low while CMF stays negative: rising prices and strong closing positions are different measurements. Use CMF to look beyond the candle color Each bar gets a score from −1 at its low to +1 at its high, with zero at the midpo

Same stock, different candles. What does Heikin Ashi change?Trying to follow a trend? Choose your candles for the job. Heikin Ashi is a chart type that builds candles from averaged prices. Ordinary candles show the session’s actual open, high, low, and close. Because a rising move can contain gray ordinary candles, Heikin Ashi’s averaging can make the broader sequence easier to follow. Use Heikin Ashi to follow the broader move Look at NVIDIA’s late-September advance. Ordinary candles alternate between teal and gray, while more of the Heikin Ashi

Your stock gained. Did it actually beat the market?If your stock rises 5% while the broad market rises 10%, you made a gain but lagged that benchmark. A standalone stock chart answers “Did it rise?” A comparison chart adds “How did it do relative to something else?” Use a benchmark to judge the move in context Microsoft is teal; SPY, an ETF tracking the S&P 500, is amber. Near the late-June trough, Microsoft is roughly 14% below the shared starting level while SPY is only a few percent below it. Both declined, but the stock’s move was larg

The bands are tightening. What does that actually tell you?Bollinger Bands expand and contract around price. That changing width is the focus of today’s @Investrade Chart Basics. Meet the three lines In this example, the middle line is a 20-period simple moving average. The outer bands sit two standard deviations above and below it. Standard deviation measures how spread out prices are around their average. When that spread decreases, the bands narrow. When it increases, they widen. What about a “squeeze”? Narrow bands indicate relatively low

Why does Volume Profile change when you zoom out?Yesterday's volume bars answered when shares traded. What if you want to see where on the price scale that activity occurred? Welcome back to Investrade Chart Basics: one chart, one concept, one thing to try. Visible Range Volume Profile places horizontal volume bars beside the price chart. They summarize trading activity at price levels within the portion of the chart you can currently see. Its point of control, or POC, is the price level with the most volume in that selected view. There is

Volume is rising. What is OBV telling you?Why can a small price move make the OBV line jump? Welcome back to @Investrade Chart Basics: one chart, one concept, one thing to try. On Balance Volume, or OBV, keeps a running total of volume. If today's close is higher than the previous close, it adds today's volume. If today's close is lower, it subtracts today's volume. If the closes match, the total stays the same. The size of the price change does not determine how much OBV moves. A tiny gain on a high-volume day can add more to the li

ADX is rising. But which way is the trend?What if an indicator says a trend is strengthening, but not which way it points? Welcome back to @Investrade Chart Basics: one chart, one concept, one thing to try. The Directional Movement Index, or DMI, puts three lines in one pane. +DI and -DI compare upward and downward directional movement. ADX measures the strength of the trend, regardless of whether the trend is up or down. That distinction matters. A rising ADX line is not automatically a bullish reading. To understand the full pictur

The MACD histogram is shrinking. Does that mean price is falling Welcome back to Investrade Chart Basics: one chart, one concept, one thing to try. TradingView's MACD pane has three parts: the MACD line, a signal line, and a histogram. The histogram plots the distance between those two lines. When its bars move toward zero, the lines are getting closer together. That does not, by itself, tell you whether the stock's price rose or fell on those bars. On the AAPL daily chart, read the histogram alongside the two lines. A positive bar means the MACD line is ab