How we read a chart

Every read on this site is computed from six numbers per bar, and which of them a rule looks at is the difference between a rejection and a breakout.

Price bands where earlier turns clustered — never a single price, because a single price is a precision the data does not have.

A close beyond a zone rather than a touch of it — and the reason this engine waits for the close.

A close beyond a zone that the very next bar takes back — recorded as its own event, never as a breakout that went quiet.

Price returning to a zone it has already broken, and closing on the far side of it again.

A bar that reached into a zone and closed back outside it, leaving the wick as the record of how far price got.

A wick that goes beyond the low edge of a support zone while the bar closes back above the whole band — labelled a heuristic, because that is what it is.

The highest high and lowest low of the previous twenty bars, and whether this bar closed beyond them.

Five subdivisions of one chosen swing — and the reason the two anchors matter more than the five numbers.

A bar that stands above or below its immediate neighbours — the smallest unit of structure, and the raw material for everything else in this taxonomy.

Four labels comparing each swing with the previous swing of the same kind — the vocabulary underneath the words trend and structure.

Which way the last four swing labels lean — a small, fast read that this product never allows to be the final word.

The read that requires price to have actually travelled, not merely leaned — and that answers transition when neither case is supported.

A measure of how one-sided recent movement has been, reported beside the two lines that say which side.

A line offset from price by a multiple of ATR that flips side when a close crosses it, read as which side and for how long.

A close beyond the most recent swing point, in the direction the chart was already going — the plainest way to say a trend has taken another step.

The same broken swing as a break of structure, but pointing the other way from the structure that preceded it — the first bar-level evidence that a trend has stopped behaving like one.

A band of price that three consecutive bars stepped over rather than traded through — and the question of whether the market has since gone back for it.

The last bar leaning the other way immediately before a break of structure — and the clearest example in this taxonomy of a term whose usual meaning we cannot verify.

How far this market normally moves in one bar — the unit nearly every threshold in this engine is written in.

Whether this market is currently quiet or loud for ITSELF — measured against its own history, never against a universal number.

A moving average with a standard-deviation envelope around it — used in this product for its WIDTH, not as a set of levels.

Three shapes, claimed only in textbook form — and a deliberate refusal to call a wedge a triangle.

A momentum oscillator this product mentions only when it is extreme AND price is at the zone that makes it relevant.

Reported only on a cross that is both recent and materially separated from zero — measured in ATR, never against the histogram's own typical size.

Reported only when price is fully clear of the cloud and the cloud is thick enough to be a reference — and read 26 bars back, where the cloud actually is.

An oscillator measuring where the close sits inside its recent high-low range — reported only when it is extreme AND price is at the zone that makes it relevant.

How far the typical price sits from its own recent mean, scaled so that most readings land inside a conventional band.

A twenty-bar exponential mean and a fifty-bar simple mean, reported as where price and the two sit relative to each other.

Whether the latest bar was busy for THIS market — the last bar against its own recent average, and nothing more.

Whether the bars moving WITH a trend carry more volume than the ones moving against it — a question that only exists once a trend does.

A running total of volume signed by each bar's direction, read only as agreement or disagreement with price.

RSI's arithmetic applied to typical price times volume, reported only when extreme near an important zone.

Whether the intraday chart and the higher one are telling the same story — reported as a conflict when they are not, rather than resolved into one answer.