📊 Chart basics: line, bar and candlestick charts, scales and time frames

🎯 In 30 seconds: A price chart puts time along the bottom and price up the side. A line chart joins the closing prices. Bar and candlestick charts show four prices for each period: open, high, low and close. The time frame decides what one bar means, from one minute to one month. The scale decides how moves look: a linear chart shows rupee changes, a log chart shows percentage changes. And the history may be adjusted for bonus issues, splits and dividends, which Indian companies announce often. Check those settings first, and remember two Indian quirks: the open is set in a pre-open auction, and the official close is not simply the last trade.

What a price chart shows

Think of a chai stall owner who writes down the price of milk at the wholesale market every morning. After a year, the notebook is a list of numbers. Draw them as dots on graph paper, with days along the bottom and rupees up the side, and you can see in two seconds what took an hour to read: milk got dearer in summer, dipped after the monsoon and jumped before Diwali. That is all a price chart is. A picture of a record of trades.

On a share chart the horizontal axis is time and the vertical axis is price. Each point, bar or candle summarises all the trades in one period, such as one day. For every period, four prices matter:

• Open: the first price of the period. On a daily NSE chart this comes from the pre-open session.
• High: the highest traded price in the period.
• Low: the lowest traded price in the period.
• Close: the closing price. On a daily chart this is the exchange's official close, which in India is usually a calculated price, not the very last trade (more on that below).

Traders shorten these to OHLC. Below the price, most charts also show volume, the number of shares traded in each period, as a row of bars. Most chart types are simply different ways of drawing the same four prices.

Line, bar and candlestick charts

Line chart. Joins the closing prices. It is clean and good for the big picture over months or years. It hides what happened inside each day. On day 3 above, the price touched ₹500 during the session, but the line only shows the ₹505 close.

OHLC bar chart. Each period is a vertical line from the low to the high. A small tick on the left marks the open and a tick on the right marks the close. Most apps colour the bar green when the close is above the open and red when it is below.

Candlestick chart. The same four prices, but with a thick body between open and close and thin wicks (also called shadows) out to the high and low. The body makes it easy to see who won the period: buyers if it closed above the open, sellers if below. Most Indian broker apps open on a candlestick chart by default. Candlestick charts covers them in detail.

Bars and candles carry exactly the same information. Choose the one you find easier to read and stay with it, because switching back and forth makes you see different things in the same data.

Time frames: what one bar means

The time frame is how long each bar covers. NSE's normal session runs from 9:15 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. IST, six and a quarter hours, so the arithmetic of intraday bars is a little odd: an "hourly" chart has six full bars and one quarter-hour bar each day, depending on how your app aligns them.

A longer bar is built from shorter ones. Here is how the five daily bars above become one weekly bar:

On a weekly chart that busy week is one modest green candle: up ₹18, or 3.6%. The ₹50 swing from Wednesday's high to Thursday's low, about 9% of the price, is still there in the wicks, but you would barely notice it. That is the core idea of time frames: short frames show more noise, long frames show more direction.

Match the time frame to how long you plan to hold. A swing trader holding for two weeks learns little from a 1-minute chart, and an intraday trader learns little from a monthly one. The Technical Analysis Guide's chapter on multiple time frames shows how to use two or three together.

The 9:15 a.m. gap and the official close

Indian daily charts have two features that come from how the exchange runs the day.

The open is set in an auction. On NSE, orders for the opening are collected from 9:00 to 9:08 a.m. The exchange then finds the single price at which the most shares can trade and uses it as the open. Normal trading starts at 9:15 a.m. If something happened overnight, such as quarterly results, a big move in US markets or a change in GIFT Nifty, the opening price can be far from yesterday's close. On a chart this shows as a gap: empty space between yesterday's candle and today's.

Nobody could buy or sell at ₹610, ₹620 or ₹630 that morning. That matters if you held a stop-loss order or planned to buy "on a dip". Gaps are why a stop can fill far worse than the price you set. Stop losses and the guide's chapter on gaps and breakouts go further.

The close is calculated. For most shares NSE's official close is the volume-weighted average price of trades in the last 30 minutes of the session, not the final trade. Since 3 August 2026, shares that have futures and options get their close from a closing auction session instead, and SEBI revised that session's timing in October 2026 with effect from 7 December 2026 (as of October 2026). Either way, the close on a daily candle can sit a little away from the last trade you watched, and an intraday chart's last bar may not match the daily close. That is normal.

How to read an axis

Most chart mistakes come from the axes, not from the pattern.

• The price axis rarely starts at zero. Apps zoom in to fill the screen. A move from ₹500 to ₹510, just 2%, can fill the whole height and look like a cliff. Read the numbers on the side, not the slope.
• Check the dates. The same share can look like a winner or a loser depending on where the chart starts. A chart that begins at the March 2020 low makes almost anything look like a rocket.
• Volume is a separate panel. The bars at the bottom are shares traded, not price. See Volume and delivery percentage.
• Know which exchange. NSE and BSE charts of the same share are built from different trades. They usually look alike, but volumes and wicks can differ, especially in thinly traded shares.
• Special sessions. Exchanges sometimes hold short special sessions, such as the Muhurat session on Diwali, which can appear as a small extra candle.

Linear vs log scale

On a linear scale, equal distances up the side are equal rupee amounts. The gap from ₹100 to ₹200 is the same height as the gap from ₹1,500 to ₹1,600.

On a log scale (logarithmic), equal distances are equal percentage changes. The gap from ₹100 to ₹200 (a 100% gain) is the same height as the gap from ₹800 to ₹1,600 (also 100%).

Why it matters: your gains and losses depend on percentage moves. A ₹50 rise is 50% on a ₹100 share and 2% on a ₹2,500 share. A linear chart draws them the same size.

A simple rule: use linear for short periods where the price has not moved much, a few weeks or months. Use log for long periods or anything that has doubled or halved, such as a 20-year chart of the Sensex. Trendlines drawn on a long linear chart and a long log chart can point to different places, which is one reason two people looking at "the same chart" disagree.

Adjusted prices: bonus issues, splits and dividends

Indian companies change their share count more often than you might expect. Two events matter most for charts.

• A bonus issue gives existing shareholders free extra shares. In a 1:1 bonus you get one new share for every share you hold, and the price roughly halves.
• A stock split (sub-division) divides each share into smaller ones by reducing the face value. A split from ₹10 face value to ₹2 turns each share into five, and the price falls to about a fifth.

Your holding's value does not change in either case, but an unadjusted chart shows a fake crash on the ex-date. Charting tools fix this by multiplying all the earlier prices by an adjustment factor.

Some tools also adjust for dividends. The common method multiplies earlier prices by (1 minus dividend / close before the ex-date). A ₹12 dividend on a share that closed at ₹600 gives a factor of 1 minus 12/600 = 0.98, so an old price of ₹550 becomes ₹539. Dividend adjustment shows the return you would actually have earned. Without it, a high-dividend share looks worse on a chart than it was to own.

When to use which: use adjusted prices for long-term comparisons and any backtest. Use actual traded prices when you care where real orders sat, such as a level the share bounced from last month. Most apps let you switch, often under a setting called "adjust for corporate actions" or similar. Know which one you are looking at. Dividends, bonus issues, splits and buybacks explains the dates behind these adjustments.

A simple checklist for every chart

Before you draw a single line or look for a pattern, answer these:

1. What is the time frame? One candle is how long?
2. What period is shown? Where does the chart start and end, and does that choice flatter the story?
3. Linear or log? Use log for anything long or anything that has doubled.
4. Adjusted or not? Have bonus issues and splits been handled? Dividends?
5. Which exchange? NSE or BSE, and are you comparing like with like?
6. What is the price band and series? A share on a 5% band or in trade-for-trade behaves differently from an ordinary one. See Reading a stock quote.
7. Where is volume? A move on tiny volume deserves less weight.
8. Any gaps or flat candles? Find out what caused them: results, a circuit lock, a corporate action or a holiday.

Only then move on to trends, support and resistance and patterns, which the Technical Analysis Guide covers starting with reading price bars and trends.

What charts can and cannot tell you

A chart is an honest record of what traded. It shows where buyers and sellers met, how fast the price moved and how much changed hands. That is useful for timing, for setting stops and for seeing when a story in the news is or is not showing up in the price.

A chart does not show why. It knows nothing about a company's debt, its promoters' pledged shares or the order book behind next quarter's results. Two companies with identical charts can be very different businesses. Use charts alongside the business side of the course, which starts with The three financial statements, not instead of it. Whether chart patterns predict anything is a separate question with mixed evidence, covered in the guide's chapter Does technical analysis work?

Try it

Open a chart of the Nifty 50 index on the NSE website or in your broker's app. First set it to a daily candlestick chart for the last three months, then a weekly chart for five years, then a monthly chart for the longest period available. For each, note how many candles you see and how big the biggest move looks. Next, switch the five-year chart between linear and log scale and write down what changes. Finally, find a company that issued bonus shares or split its shares in the last few years (the "corporate actions" section on NSE lists them) and look at its chart with and without adjustment. Find the date of the fake crash on the unadjusted chart and check it against the record date in the announcement.

Sources

• NSE: Market timings (pre-open session and normal market)
• NSE circular 73362 (18 March 2026): Closing Auction Session in the equity cash segment
• SEBI Annual Report 2025-26, Chapter 4: Secondary markets (VWAP close and the closing auction)
• All India Radio News (16 October 2026): SEBI revises timings of the Closing Auction Session
• NSE: Price bands
• NSE: Corporate actions (bonus, split and dividend records)