The Bar Chart
As illustrated on the left, the top of the vertical line indicates the highest price a security traded at during the day, and the bottom represents the lowest price.
The opening price is shown on the left side of the bar and the closing price is displayed on the right side of the bar.
A single bar like the one to the left represents one day of trading.
This chart was supplied by BigCharts.com
The advantage of using a bar chart over a straight line graph is that it shows the high, low, open and close for each particular day. This is the type of chart we will be using to display various indicators throughout this tutorial.
There are two more types of charts that are also frequently used for technical analysis that are similar to the bar chart. The first we will look at is called "Candlestick Charting".