Types of Gold Trading Charts
In xauusd trading there are three types of charts that traders can use to trade XAUUSD.
Charts are graph representations of the price movement that are drawn on a grid & they can be drawn using different chart time frames such as 1 minute charts, 5 minutes charts, 15 minutes charts, 1 hour, 4 hour, daily, weekly and monthly chart time frames.
A trader will choose the chart time frame to trade with depending on their style of trading for day traders they will select the 15 minutes charts & scalpers will use the 1 minute charts, swing traders will use the hourly trading charts.
These charts can be drawn using different chart representations, these are:
- Line Charts
- Bar Charts
- Candles Charts
Line Charts
The line chart is a single continuous line drawn to represent the closing price, if a trader is using the five minutes charts then the closing price for every 5 minutes is drawn and connected to the next close of the next 5 minutes hence this forms a continuous line that forms the line chart.
This chart type leaves out a lot of information about the gold price movement; this chart only draws the closing price & leaves out the high price, the low price & the opening price. Because of this the line chart isn't very popular among gold traders - xauusd traders instead prefer to use other chart types such as the bar charts & candlesticks charts that include this information on their chart representations.
Bar Chart
Bar charts will plot all the information about price information - this information is known as OHCL - Opening price, High of Price, Closing Price and Low of Price.
This information is represented in the form of a bar. The bar charts have 2 different colors; these are red for when prices move down & blue for when price moves up, the bar chart is shown below.
These bar charts plot all the price information as illustrated above. The vertical bar represents the total price movement, the left horizontal bar shows the opening price & the right horizontal bar shows the closing price, the highest & lowest points represent the high of price and low of price respectively.
These charts aren't very visually appealing when drawn close together as shown below and for this reason these bar charts aren't commonly used when trading gold.
Candlestick Charts
These are the most commonly used types of charts - these chart show all the information of price - OHCL in an easy to interpret format.The candle charts are of two different colors, red for when price moves down & blue for when price moves up.
These candles charts look like candlesticks with wicks on both sides. The body of the candle shows the difference between the opening price & closing price. The high and low which are represented by what is known as the shadow this is the part that looks like candlestick wicks represents the highest price & lowest price.
An example of how xauusd charts look is shown below:
This is the most commonly used chart when it comes to trading gold.
To select between any of these chart types on the trading platform a trader can use the buttons shown below.
A trader can switch between different chart types using the above buttons when trading the xauusd market.
