Until recently I have only paid casual attention to candlesticks in my trading but I got interested a couple of weeks ago after reading a post and have been looking a little closer. Yesterday I had three different charting platforms running simultaneously and lo and behold the candles were different on all three. What looked like a doji on one platform had a fairly large body in another. I know Nihaba and a couple of others give a lot of significance to these candles but how do you know your candles are accurate? I would think that daily candles would match pretty close but it appears to me that as you shrink the time frame, small delays in data could alter your candles significantly and make them much less reliable.
What were the 3 programs you were using? Also, some programs stop recording prices at the close of market, others will add AH prices Make sure you're comparing apples to apples....and you know the rest.
easyrider wrote: > ... the candles were different on all three... The atoms of finance are tick data: each market transaction is time stamped. So one must look there to see how [O,C.H.L] data is derived.
Easyrider, I've mentioned such also before along with showing in the past (via screenshots of charts at different times of the trading day for QCharts, eSignal and TradeStation)... How the candlesticks can change by end of the intraday is odd sometimes...more noticable via data vendors that have multiple servers and the ability to switch servers. Yet...your talking about the difference between one data vendor in comparison to another... I also see this and is a pain in the butt especially when talking intraday candlestick analysis with another trader in realtime... I may have one thing and he/she has something different... Simply because he/she is using a different data vendor. I guess it boils down to knowing how reliable your data vendor is...knowing such requires time or extensive research. The question is how does a intraday candlestick trader compensate or determine if that trade signal is really (for example) a Bullish Engulfing when your trading pal only sees a white small body with long upper and lower candlestick shadows... Well...that's where the emphasis on what the prior few candlestick patterns were doing along with volume analysis can help tremendously in compensating for inconsistent data. Simply, for example, I've taken Long positions when one data vendor shows a Bullish Engulfing pattern while another doesn't... taken the trades via confirmation from another criteria (volume analysis, market breadth analysis et cetera). Something else...some of the best intraday candlestick patterns aren't based upon one candlestick nor a two candlestick pattern... They are based upon a 3 or more candlesticks within a particular pattern. Therefore, I tend to use candlestick patterns that involves more than 3 candlesticks and that are more dependent upon volume, market breadth analysis... reason why I consistently say don't trade candlesticks all by themselves without any confirmation strategy. Such are less likely to be affected by inconsistend info within a particular time interval from one data vendor to the next. Last of all...I see more consistency among the higher price data vendors like Bloomberg, Bridge, FutureSource than I do for the less expensive data vendors like QCharts, eSignal, SierraCharts et cetera. Why? I don't know. NihabaAhsi