The original text on candlestick charting was Seiki Shimizu's "The Japanese Chart of Charts," translated to English by Gregory Nicholson. Therein it is clear that the original and still then current application of candlestick charting and theory was to the daily chart. Subsequent supposed applications of them to any other time frame are in my opinion simply fraudulent, a bald attempt to extract money from unwary traders for books, consulting and web memberships. This fraud is clear because only the daily chart can be said to have a clearly significant high, low, open and close. Ascribing any such significance to one hour or fifteen minute or five minute charts is ludicrous. But traders do it anyway because it is so easy to click on the time scale for the desired chart. I propose that with today's fast data providers like ESignal there is an alternative to slavish adherence to the practice of the herd: chart in a much faster time frame and compress it to appear like the timeframe you want. For example, I am viscerally comfortable with one minute charts. So to get the full shape of price history without the irrelevant distortion of candlesticks, I chart in one second and compress it, adding one minute time ticks for reference. Attached is an example of ten minutes from this morning. You will note that this inaugural post does not contain the text h.e.r.s.h.e.y, so it is unlikely that the ego-driven perpetually roving bots trying to extract significance from insignificance will disturb us here.
