What does a price chart show?

A price chart is a record of trades that actually happened. The horizontal axis is time, the vertical axis is price. Every point you see is a moment when a buyer and a seller genuinely agreed on a price. Careful, though: the scale of the vertical axis can make the same data look like a different market — squeeze the axis and the move looks flat, stretch it and the move looks violent, so part of the steepness you see comes from the scale rather than from price.

You read a chart from left to right: the rightmost data is the most recent. Most charts do not plot every single trade; they show summaries of fixed slices of time. That summarising job is done by candlesticks, which you will meet in the next lesson.

Now the most important part: a chart shows the past, not the future. Technical analysis is the craft of turning past behaviour into probability scenarios; it is not fortune-telling. Nothing in this course will tell you what will happen — it teaches you to ask, properly, what has happened and what the chart looks like right now.