What one bar contains#
Every bar on a daily chart compresses a full trading day into four numbers: the open, the highest trade, the lowest trade, and the close. Chart types are just different ways of drawing those same four numbers, plus volume. Once you can read one bar, every chart type in Pyx is a variation on the theme.
Pyx draws eight chart types. Cycle through them with t (and ShiftT to go back), or jump straight to one with Cmd1 through Cmd8 inside a chart.
| Type | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Line | Closing prices connected |
| Candles | Full open/high/low/close per bar |
| Hollow Candles | Candles, hollow on up periods |
| Area | A line with the space beneath filled |
| Baseline | Movement above and below a reference level |
| Log Line | A line on a logarithmic scale |
| OHLC | Open/high/low/close as tick marks on a bar |
| Bar | A bar chart |
How to read a candlestick#
A candlestick has a body and two wicks. The body spans the open and the close. The wicks extend to the high and the low.
- Body: where the session started and finished. A long body means conviction in one direction. A tiny body means indecision, the session went nowhere despite whatever happened in between.
- Wicks: the territory price visited and abandoned. A long upper wick says buyers pushed high and got rejected. A long lower wick says sellers drove price down and it recovered.
Color marks direction: gains and losses use distinct colors, and Pyx adds sign cues so the distinction survives without color. Hollow candles carry the same information with a different convention, up periods draw as outlines, which some readers find easier to scan in dense charts.
OHLC bars are the older notation: a vertical line from low to high, a left tick at the open, a right tick at the close. Same four numbers, thinner ink, favored when candles feel too heavy on long histories.
When a line beats a candle#
Candles earn their detail when you are studying individual sessions. For most long-horizon questions the detail is noise:
- Line connects closes and nothing else. Best for "what has this done over five years."
- Area is a line with weight under it, useful when the eye needs the level, not just the shape.
- Baseline splits the chart around a reference level and shades above and below it, which makes "when was this underwater" visible at a glance.
A reasonable habit: line or area for judging a holding, candles for inspecting what happened during a specific week.
Log scale versus linear scale#
A linear scale gives every dollar the same vertical distance. A logarithmic scale gives every percentage the same vertical distance. The difference is invisible over a quiet month and enormous over a decade.
On a linear chart of a stock that grew from $10 to $400, the move from $10 to $20 is a barely visible wiggle at the bottom, even though it doubled the investment. The same chart on a log scale shows every doubling as the same vertical step, which is how compounding actually feels to the owner.
Rule of thumb: any chart spanning more than a couple of years, or any asset that has multiplied several times, reads more honestly on a log scale.
Pyx exposes this two ways: the Log Line chart type, or the Log Scale normalize mode on any chart.
Comparing symbols honestly with percent mode#
Put a $30 stock and a $3,000 stock on the same chart in raw prices and the $30 stock becomes a flat line pinned to the floor. Its moves are invisible at that scale, not absent.
The normalize mode fixes this. Press n to cycle through three modes:
- Absolute: real prices, no adjustment.
- Percent: every series is rebased to start at the same point, so the chart compares percentage change from a common starting date.
- Log Scale: logarithmic vertical axis.
Percent mode is the honest way to answer "which of these performed better since January." One caution: the answer depends on the starting date. Rebasing from a different day can flip which line ends on top, so treat any single comparison window as one sample, not a verdict.
Ranges and timeframes#
The range presets run from 1D out to MAX, and ] and [ step the window longer and shorter. Exact windows come from the date inputs in the toolbar, typed as YYYY-MM-DD.
The range you pick is itself an analytical choice. A holding can be simultaneously up 40% on the 5Y view, flat on the 1Y view, and down 8% on the 1M view, and all three statements are true. Zooming out until the noise resolves into shape is usually more informative than zooming in until the shape dissolves into noise.
What a chart cannot tell you#
A price chart records what buyers and sellers already did. It contains no earnings, no valuation, no news, and no information about the future. Patterns describe the past compactly; the patterns repeating is a hypothesis, not a property of the chart. Every indicator in Pyx, from a moving average to RSI, is a transformation of the same historical numbers, and inherits the same limit.
Charts are still worth reading. They answer "what is happening" faster than any table, and they keep you honest about trends you would otherwise narrate from memory. They just do not answer "what happens next," and nothing drawn on them changes that.
Where to go next#
The chart workspace guide covers the mechanics: panes, symbols, saved workspaces, drawings, and every shortcut. To go deeper on the indicator side, start with moving averages.