# Charts
> How to read the Ozmium chart on the Risk screen - candles, timeframes, indicator chips, candlestick patterns, and what a BUY or SELL marker actually means.
Source: https://docs.ozmium.org/guides/charts/
Keywords: how to read candlestick chart, crypto chart indicators explained, rsi macd cvd explained, buy sell signal meaning, ozmium risk chart
Updated: 2026-07-28
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![The Ozmium chart view for BTC-USD showing candlesticks with a liquidation line, an RSI, MACD and CVD pane, timeframe selection, and a notice that signals are being calibrated and are experimental.](/img/ozmium-btc-chart-signals.webp ">> The chart, its indicator pane, and the markers drawn onto the bars.")

The chart on the **Risk** screen is the same one that sizes a position, so what it shows and what the
ticket does are never two different opinions. This page explains how to read it.

:::warning The markers are experimental
Every signal, marker, and score described below is **unproven**. There is no established
out-of-sample edge, none of it is financial advice, and the app labels it as experimental on the
chart itself. Read it as one input among several.
:::

## Picking a Market

The market picker opens a searchable list of every tradeable pair. Tabs narrow it by class - crypto,
forex, metals, energy, indices, equities - and the **star tab is your favorites**.

Tapping the star on any row favorites that market. The star swallows the tap so it never opens the
market by accident, and favorites are stored per device rather than against your wallet, so nothing
about your list touches the chain or leaves the browser.

## Candles and Timeframes

Two controls change what you see, and they are independent of each other.

| Control | What It Sets |
|---|---|
| Candle Size | How much time one bar covers: 1m, 5m, 15m, 1H, 4H, 6H, 1D, 1W, 1M, 1Y. |
| Range | How much total time is on screen, from three minutes out to the market's entire life. |

Because they are separate, one-minute candles across a full day and daily candles across a year are
both valid views. Your choice is remembered per market, so returning to a pair reopens it the way you
left it.

A candle size is offered only when the market has actually existed long enough to draw one. A pair a
few months old will not offer yearly bars, because three bars is the minimum that can be read as a
chart at all.

Zoom far enough out and the chart switches from candles to a line. Past roughly four hundred visible
bars the candles overlap into noise, so the line is the honest rendering.

Switching timeframe keeps the old bars on screen while the new ones load. You never get a blank
chart, and the previous view stays readable until the replacement is ready.

## Reading a Candle

Each candle covers one interval and reports four numbers: where the interval opened, where it closed,
and the highest and lowest it traded. The body spans open to close, green when the close was higher
and red when it was lower. The thin wicks above and below reach to the high and the low.

A long body means one side controlled the whole interval. A small body with long wicks means price
went somewhere and came back, which is a different market than the one that simply went up.

## Candlestick Patterns

Specific shapes and sequences have names, and the chart marks them when they appear. Tapping any
marked formation opens its clinical definition alongside a citation, so you can read the textbook
source rather than take the app's word for it.

| Pattern | What It Describes |
|---|---|
| [Bullish Engulfing](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bullishengulfingpattern.asp) | A small red candle fully engulfed by the next, larger green one. Buyers overwhelm the prior session after a decline. |
| [Bearish Engulfing](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bearishengulfingpattern.asp) | A small green candle fully engulfed by the next, larger red one. Sellers overwhelm the prior session after an advance. |
| [Hammer](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hammer.asp) | A small body at the top with a long lower shadow after a downtrend. Sellers pushed price down and buyers reclaimed it. |
| [Hanging Man](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hangingman.asp) | The same shape after an uptrend, where the long lower shadow instead warns that selling is appearing. |
| [Shooting Star](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/shootingstar.asp) | A small body at the bottom with a long upper shadow after a rally. Buyers drove price up and were rejected. |
| [Doji](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/doji.asp) | Open and close virtually equal, forming a cross. Neither side won the session. |
| [Morning Star](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/morningstar.asp) | A three-bar bottoming reversal: large red, a small-bodied pause, then a large green closing back into the first. |
| [Evening Star](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/eveningstar.asp) | The topping equivalent: large green, a pause, then a large red closing back into the first. |
| [Three White Soldiers](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/three_white_soldiers.asp) | Three consecutive long green candles, each closing higher. Sustained buying. |
| [Three Black Crows](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/three_black_crows.asp) | Three consecutive long red candles, each closing lower. Sustained selling. |
| [Piercing Pattern](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/piercingpattern.asp) | A red candle, then a green one opening below the low and closing above the red body's midpoint. |
| [Dark Cloud Cover](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/darkcloud.asp) | A green candle, then a red one opening above the high and closing below the green body's midpoint. |
| [Marubozu](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/candlestick.asp) | A long body with no meaningful shadows. One side controlled the entire session, open to close. |

## The Indicator Chips

Underneath the price, the indicator pane draws several measurements on a shared scale, and each one
appears as a tappable chip. Tapping a chip opens its definition and citation, the same way a pattern
does.

| Chip | What It Measures |
|---|---|
| [Trend](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/trendanalysis.asp) | Direction and persistence of the move. |
| [RSI](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rsi.asp) | Momentum on a 0 to 100 scale. Conventionally, above 70 reads as overbought and below 30 as oversold. |
| [MACD](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/macd.asp) | The relationship between two moving averages, used to spot momentum shifts. |
| [Stochastic Oscillator](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stochasticoscillator.asp) | Where the close sits within its recent high-low range. |
| [Williams %R](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/williamsr.asp) | A related momentum reading on an inverted scale. |
| [Moving Average](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/movingaverage.asp) | The average close over a window, here twenty bars. |
| [Bollinger Bands](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bollingerbands.asp) | Bands set a number of standard deviations from that average, so width is volatility. |
| [Rate Of Change](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pricerateofchange.asp) | How fast price has moved over a window, regardless of direction. |
| [ADX](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/adx.asp) | How strong a trend is, without saying which way it points. |
| [OBV](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/onbalancevolume.asp) | Running volume weighted by whether each bar closed up or down. |
| [CVD](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/volume.asp) | Cumulative volume delta, the running difference between buying and selling pressure. |
| [Open Interest](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/openinterest.asp) | How much leveraged position is currently open in this market. |

A [divergence](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/divergence.asp) is when price and an indicator
disagree - price making a new high while momentum does not, for instance - and both the pane and the
markers treat that as meaningful.

## What BUY and SELL Mean

A marker on a bar is a **directional read**, and the two words map directly onto the two things you
can do with a perpetual:

| Marker | Direction | The Position It Suggests |
|---|---|---|
| **BUY** | Long | You profit if price rises, and are liquidated if it falls far enough. |
| **SELL** | Short | You profit if price falls, and are liquidated if it rises far enough. |

**SELL does not mean sell what you own.** On the Risk screen it means open a short, which is a new
position rather than an exit. Closing an existing position is a separate action.

Each marker carries a **conviction** value rather than being a yes or no. That number comes from
combining every indicator above into one weighted read, where each input leans bullish or bearish and
carries its own weight. Agreement across many inputs produces high conviction; a single indicator
firing alone produces low conviction, and the marker is drawn faintly to say so.

Several conditions deliberately suppress a marker or force it to neutral:

- **Regime gating.** A long signal in a market whose broader trend is down is downgraded rather than
  shown, because the setup and the environment contradict each other.
- **Macro blackout.** Around scheduled high-impact events, directional reads are withheld.
- **Thin books.** Crowd positioning is only read as a signal when there is enough open interest to
  mean anything, and never gets to outvote the measured indicators.

The last constraint is worth stating plainly: **crowd positioning is capped at half the influence of
the measured signal**, because it is the one input that cannot be backtested. Gains publishes no
positioning history, so a live book read against an old bar would be an anachronism.

### What They Look Like in Practice

![The Ozmium chart for silver at 250x, showing consecutive BUY markers placed at successive lows through an advance, with the RSI, MACD and CVD pane beneath.](/img/ozmium-silver-buy-signals.webp "BUY markers on XAG-USD, each placed at a local low ahead of the advance.")

Four consecutive BUY markers on silver, each landing at a local low before the move. The liquidation
line for the open position is drawn above the price, and the indicator pane carries RSI, MACD, and
CVD across the same window.

One chart is not evidence of an edge, and this page has already said the markers are unproven. It is
shown because it is what a working signal looks like when it works, and because reading the markers
against the pane beneath them is the skill this page is trying to teach.

## Where the Data Comes From

None of this is invented, and none of it is a single feed taken on faith.

| Layer | Source |
|---|---|
| Onchain State | Base mainnet, read directly over JSON-RPC. Balances, positions, pool state, and pending orders come from the contracts themselves rather than from an intermediary. |
| Perpetual Markets | [Gains Network gTrade](https://gains.trade), for pair parameters, open interest, and the live book. |
| Lending Markets | Morpho and Aave, for vault and market state. |
| Spot Prices and Routes | [Coinbase Developer Platform](https://www.coinbase.com/developer-platform), alongside [Coinbase Advanced Trade](https://www.coinbase.com/advanced-trade) market data. |
| Equities, Indices, Forex, and Commodities | Public market data feeds covering the non-crypto classes [gTrade](https://gains.trade) lists. |
| Reference and Corroboration | Public aggregators, used to cross-check rather than as a primary. |

Two rules govern how those are combined. **A figure is never reported more confidently than its
source supports**, so a failed read holds its last known-good value and marks it stale instead of
printing a zero. And **no single feed is trusted alone** where a second one exists to check it, which
is why a price that two sources disagree about is treated as uncertain rather than averaged into
false precision.

The specific weighting, cross-checking, and signal construction are not published.

## The Backtest Panel

The signal panel can replay the strategy over the loaded window, recomputing the verdict at each bar
from only the information available at that bar and checking how often the direction matched the next
candle. That produces a win rate over the tested window.

Treat it as a description of that window and nothing more. It is not a forecast, the sample is small,
and a strategy that fit one window is not thereby correct about the next.

## Related

- [Risk](/guides/leverage/)
- [Trade](/guides/trade/)
- [Terms And Risk](/company/terms/)