What's with the long tails?

I’ve notice this before on the short timescales, when the new candlw is formed, it often has a long tail, which you never see print. I know at a top or a bottom, you get “pin bar” formations sometimes, but tis is every single bar appearing to be a pin bar although the solid colour never goes down there. I don’t often see long wicks on the other side. Sorry if this is covered in the second half of teh pips school.

Can anyone explain in a convincing way please ?

I’ve noticed some rather big price jumps in EUR/USD today. One minute I would see a price, then the next second it would jump 3-5 pips and then jump back to where it started immediately after. My guess is high volatility today.

But if so, why only tails ? I was thinking the prices move faster than my feed, but again why only tails ? Why are the prices at the top of each bar ? :confused:

I expect it’s something to do with the orders, Like “Buy at market” / “Sell at market” so the computers fill each order at many different prices, but do these tails show us anything about the strength of demand or supply ?

Well, when a bar like that forms, it shows us there is more buying pressure than selling pressure. Bears force the price down and then the bulls say “not going to happen” and force it back up.

Sorry I edited whilst you were psting, so you may not have seen the second paragraph.

I think the only thing we can determine from this is that there were more buyers than sellers, and it seems to be pretty consistent so I would expect prices to trend up from that. However, that is just my uneducated opinion.

If there were more buyers than sellers, the price would have gone off the top of the page, but the entire day was bounded by about 40 pips or less. No the balance is very even today. So why the tails ?

What does a candlestick show you? Each one shows the open, close, high and low, right? For price to move down, there must be more sellers than buyers, correct? The inverse is true for price to move up, in that there must be more buyers than sellers, right?

So for a low price to be set, and then the bar close higher, wouldn’t there need to be more buyers than sellers to move the price up from the low to where it closes?

As for bouncing off the page, a price is only set when there is a transaction meaning there needs to be a seller and a buyer. If no one is selling, then it doesn’t matter how many buyers are wanting to buy - the price won’t move. So for a bar to open, price falls, and then climbs back up means there must be more buyers than sellers for the duration of that bar.

Edit: Also looking at your chart, it seems that most tails are only 1-3 pips long. Hardly huge moves in my opinion.

If there were more buyers than sellers, then some of teh “Buyers” would offer some of their recent “Buys” at a higher price and would sell to willing “Buy at market” traders If there were still more buyers than sellers this would repeat until some of the other buyers would move in and any shorts were forced to cover. This is the way market tops are formed, when nobody wants to buy any higher price - Everybody is fully “bought” who wants to and there is a lot of shorts already in the market through selling lots they don’t own, to willing buyers :relaxed:

That is a ONE minute chart though and the real bodies hardly move, so why would sellers sell 3 pips (30 pippettes) away from a nice stable price level - and that whether price is advancing or retreating ?

Hmmm ! Just a thought, but in the old days trading the Dow, the daily charts registered highs and lows were never reached in the 24 hours - I sat up for the whole 24 hours once, to check and it was true. Turned out this was due to the way it was calculated. On the real time data, it was the price of the Dow. But in the day data, it took the low of the day for each share and added them together. Same for the high. :cry:

Anyway, it’s telling me I’m to quote a lot of your replies all at once to reply to :grin:

So let’s see if anyone else has any ideas. :sunglasses:

As I know pin bar that appear will not always become valid confirmation as reversal time, sometime occured false pin bar signal, if there are so many candle occur long wicks , it’s can mean if so many market participant work as short term trading might they will open and closed with big volume transaction

In a candle you will find opening price , closing price, highest price, and lowest.Since you are showing small time frame this may happen. It may be for high volatility. Slipage may happen at this time of trading. It may be for technical reason or others. I never face such experience.

Nasty whipsaw and bad volatility, can you say whip it. Its the algos/quants, they use math models and take 1-3 pip profit, no stops, that is why you see them clustered together at a certain price. this is why we have to choose our market well, when we see this, unless we are at 30 sec timeframe, it is not worth the time to trade it.

The Ever Whippin It Up VIPER

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These comments are absolutely ridiculous! Sorry, but really - this is just a load of old nonsense.

Is there nobody in this forum with any real trading experience who can actually tell the OP what’s happened, here?!

It’s an artifact.

The chart posted doesn’t represent the prices at the time. There has been a technical error or anomaly in either the data-feed from which the chart is compiled, or the way the software displays it.

It’s not real, people!

For heaven’s sake stop trying to explain away an obvious technical issue by comments about the market!

All you’re demonstrating by claiming that it’s “common” or has a specific meaning is that you have no recognition at all of an obvious technical glitch. :scream:

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Not sure I would make that claim… I checked several different feeds and they all show the same data. I find it hard to believe that different systems would experience the same exact glitch at the same time. The screenshot from the OP shows us a feed from FX_ICD from TradingView.com.

I looked on my phone via Oanda’s app and saw the same behavior. Now it is possible that Oanda presents the FX_IDC feed but Occam’s Razor suggests that @TradeViper’s explanation is more plausible than a technical glitch.

I am no expert, but I am fairly certain that brokers and data feed providers spend top dollar to ensure accuracy of the data, since inaccurate data can cost them quite a bit of money.

Hehehe, I know folks who are doin some of it.

The Ever In The Know VIPER

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Sorry mate, I never face such experience. It may be for technical error.

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I think the only way @TradeViper s solution wouldl be right is if all these big players were doing this is to hit sell @ market to drive the price down, then hit Buy at market and pull th eprice up again and rely on selling at better prices than the buy back.

I’m really not convinced that would work and if it did, within the vast lumps of money, why not reverse the system when price was rising to benefit from the underlying market movement. This is not happening.

A further notable “coincidence” is that every one of those tails starts at an exact pip value and most seem to be at 2 pips behind the real bar (ie price ends in a zero) There is one exception, a little doji bar in the minute following 20:20. Wicks on the upside do not show this, they are pretty random and just end where they end. I cannot believe that any trading resource would cause this “Zero effect”, but why it should occur due to a computer recording system either - I don’t know !

BUT those long tails and the zeros plus my previous experience on the DOW Futures leads me to believe the “Glitch” more than the “Computer trading” theory.

I do hope someone can come up with a reason why such a “Glitch” cannot be cured ?

And I’m still open to the Computer trading argument if someone can explain how and why that would work and make money.

I know this seems like a trivial question and should seemingly not affect much, but I have just downloaded all the 1 minute data back to the year 2000 and was going to build up the timescales from it. This error, if it is an error is going to significantly effect any system I come up with which includes candlesticks.

I am no programmer, but I’m quite good in Excel and that will draw candlestick charts.

I am sure those of you who do know programming can see for yourselves that anything involving the “LOW” price in a calculation or algorithm is scewed by this anomaly, including back testing on any data from the same source which seems as others have said to be ALL DATA !

[Edit - this effect shows in all the smaller timescales - the 5 minute right up to the 4 hour, all the lows of teh bar all end in zero.

Interestingly the 1 day bars do not do this ! ] so the 1 day bars are NOT a summation of teh movements of the smaller timeframes. ]

Interestingly @_bob in his trading price thread, does not show these tails on his tick based candlesticks - I wonder why ?