Charts
Updated 7 October 2026, 4 min readThe same hour of gold can look calm as a line and busy as candles. The chart type decides what you see of each bar, and the timeframe decides how much time goes into one bar. Both sit at the left of the chart toolbar in eTrader Web, both are one click to change, and neither touches your orders, your indicators or your drawings.
The six chart types
The chart type picker is the row of small icons next to the timeframe list. Hover over one to see its name.
| Type | What each bar shows |
|---|---|
| Candlesticks | Open, high, low and close, with a filled body in the up or down colour. The default. |
| Hollow Candles | The same four prices, with rising candles drawn as an outline so falling ones stand out. |
| Heikin-Ashi | Smoothed candles worked out from the real ones. Runs of one colour are easier to see, but the open and close drawn are averages, not traded prices. |
| OHLC Bars | A vertical line from low to high, with a tick to the left for the open and a tick to the right for the close. |
| Line | One line through the closing prices. Nothing else. |
| Area | The line chart with the space under it shaded. |
Because Heikin-Ashi redraws the bars, the OHLC readout and the chart can disagree with the price on your ticket. When you need the real open and close of a bar, switch back to candles or bars.
Every type has its own colours in Settings, from Chart Colours at the bottom of the chart type menu: fill, wick and outline for candles, Up and Down for Heikin-Ashi and for bars, and a Line Color and an Area Color. The charts, indicators and drawings guide covers that sheet.
Timeframes
The timeframe list on the web terminal is a drop-down with ten entries:
- Tick, first in the list: no bars at all, every price change as it arrives. It has its own guide.
- M1, M5, M15, M30: one, five, fifteen and thirty minutes per bar.
- H1, H4: one and four hours.
- D1, W1, MN: a day, a week and a month.
On the iPhone and Android apps the timeframes are a strip you swipe sideways above the chart, with Tick first.
When you change the timeframe, the chart jumps back to the live price and fits the price scale again, so you never land on an empty stretch of the new timeframe. How far you had zoomed in stays the same. History loads for the new timeframe on its own: years of daily and hourly bars, and about two months of minute bars. Scroll left for more.
The bar countdown and the price lines
Under the Bid tag on the right-hand price scale, a small timer counts down to the close of the current bar. On M5 it reads minutes and seconds, on H4 hours and minutes, on D1 and above days and hours. It follows the Broker's clock, not your computer's, so it reaches zero at the same moment the new bar opens on the Server. When the market is closed there is no bar forming, so the countdown disappears and the chart shows a Market Closed flag.
Two dashed lines run across the chart. The Bid line is the price you sell at and the one every bar is drawn from. The Ask line above it is the price you buy at, and the gap between them is the spread. Each line carries a small Bid or Ask label with its price, drawn on top of your order, alert and drawing labels so it is never hidden. Their colours can be changed under Chart Colours. If you prefer a cleaner chart, open Settings from Chart Colours, at the bottom of the chart type menu, and switch off Show Ask Line. The same sheet has Show OHLC Info for the readout at the top left.
Zooming and moving around
- Scroll the mouse wheel over the chart to show more or fewer bars. On a tablet or phone, pinch.
- Drag the chart left to look back in time. It returns to the live price when you let it.
- Drag up or down on the price scale to stretch or squeeze the prices.
- Double click the price scale to reset the view: the default number of bars, fitted to the screen.
- Switch on Free move in the toolbar to drag the chart in any direction and have it stay there. Switch it off to go back to following the price.
What eTrader remembers
The web terminal keeps the last instrument, timeframe and chart type you used, and opens on them next time. With more than one chart on screen, each chart keeps its own. That means you can have gold on H4 candles next to gold on M5 bars, and the chart layouts guide shows how to set that up.
Indicators follow the timeframe you are on. A 20 period moving average on H1 covers twenty hours, and the same indicator on M5 covers a hundred minutes. If an indicator suddenly looks different after a timeframe change, that is why. Indicators and drawings are not drawn on the tick chart, because it has no bars for them to use.