Crypto glossary
Chart timeframes
A chart timeframe is the period each candle or bar represents, from one minute to one month, and it shapes which trends and signals a trader sees.
On a 1-hour chart, each candle shows the open, high, low and close of one hour; on a daily chart, of one day. Common settings run from 1 and 5 minutes for scalpers, through 15 minutes, 1 hour and 4 hours for intraday and swing traders, up to daily, weekly and monthly charts for longer-term investors. Crypto exchanges usually close daily candles at 00:00 UTC, since the market never shuts.
The same asset can be in an uptrend on the weekly chart and a downtrend on the hourly one. Multi-timeframe analysis deals with this by reading the higher timeframe for direction and key levels, then using a lower one to time entries. Signals on higher timeframes are generally considered more significant because each candle aggregates more trading.
Lower timeframes contain more noise and generate more trades, which raises fee costs and the odds of reacting to random moves. Mixing timeframes without a plan, such as entering on a 5-minute signal against a daily trend, is a frequent source of losses.
Example
A trader sees BTC above its rising 200-day average on the daily chart, so she only looks for long setups. She then waits for a pullback to support on the 1-hour chart to enter.