Price, candles and % change

You'll see where a price comes from and how a candle sums up 15 minutes of trading. The last steps show why bots measure moves in percent.

A market brings together people who want to buy and people who want to sell. Every trade needs one of each. The price you see is what the most recent trade paid.

When buyers are in more of a hurry than sellers, they agree to pay a little more each time, and the price climbs. When sellers are in a hurry, they accept a little less, and it falls.

Move the slider and watch the trades come in.

Nobody can read thousands of trades one by one, so charts group them. All the trades in 15 minutes become one candle.

A candle keeps four prices: where the period opened, the highest and lowest trades, and where it closed. Press play to watch 15 minutes fold into one candle, or drag the slider to go minute by minute.

The thick part of a candle is the body. It runs from the open to the close. A chartreuse body means the price closed higher than it opened; a hollow one means it closed lower.

The thin lines are the wicks. They show how far the price went before it was pushed back. A long upper wick means buyers took the price up and sellers brought it back down.

Pick a shape to see how each part changes.

The timeframe is how much time each candle covers. The trades underneath stay the same; only the grouping changes.

Short timeframes like 1m show every small move. Longer ones like 1h smooth those out and show the bigger trend. Four 15m candles hold exactly the same trades as one 1h candle.

Price change 1h compares the price now with the price one hour ago, as a percentage.

Percent lets you compare coins with very different prices. BTC can drop thousands of dollars while DOGE drops a fraction of a cent, and both drops can be the same −3%. That's why bot conditions use percent.

Change the window to see the result change.

This is a full day of BTC. The lower chart shows the 1h price change at every moment.

Use the slider to set the condition Price change 1h at or below −3%. Each chartreuse dot marks a moment the condition became true, which is when a bot would send you a Signal. A lower threshold fires less often.

Under the chart, the same condition runs on the live feed.

Three quick questions, then a bot to build.

Read the strategy and set up a bot that follows it, with the direction and the conditions it names and no others. Passing depends on the build alone. Once it's right, the bot fires and you see what the market did next, which won't always go your way.