Chart type

The candlestick is the default for a mechanical reason, not an aesthetic one. Almost every rule in this system is written in the language of candle anatomy. A true break of structure is a close with at least 50 percent of the body past the wick of the structure point. A sweep is a wick beyond the protected level followed by a close back inside it. Entry confirmation is a rejection candle, which is read entirely from where its body sits relative to its wick. Your stop covers a protected high or low by 2 pips, and that high or low is a wick extreme, not a close. Body, wick, open, close. Remove any one of those four and the rules stop being computable. ### Why a line chart cannot run this system A line chart plots the close and nothing else. It is clean, and it is honest about what it shows, but it deletes the wick. On a line chart there is no sweep, because a sweep is a wick. There is no rejection candle, because the rejection lives in the wick. There is no 50 percent body test, because there is no body. It can be useful for seeing the shape of a leg from a distance. You cannot take a single entry in this system from one. Bar charts carry the same four values as a candle, drawn as ticks rather than a filled body. Nothing is lost. If you read bars faster than candles, read bars. ### Heikin-Ashi's specific lie Heikin-Ashi candles are not raw prints. The close you see is an average of the period's open, high, low and close, and the open is an average of the previous Heikin-Ashi candle's own open and close, so every candle is partly derived from the one before it. The result is a smoothed picture that strips out chop and makes trends look continuous. That smoothing is the whole problem. The body you are looking at is not a price the market actually traded, so Heikin-Ashi will paint clean runs across periods that, on the real chart, closed the other way. The close back inside is exactly the value it invents, and the close back inside is the half of a sweep that makes it a sweep. Measure a 50 percent break, or a 2-pip stop, against that body and you are measuring against something that never printed. Use it as a second opinion on bias if it helps you. Never as the chart you execute from. The beginner mistake is chart-type shopping: flipping between types until the setup looks like the one you wanted. Set the chart up once, mark only what matters, then stop fiddling and trade it. The chart type is part of that discipline, not a dial you turn when the trade is not there.