Yeah, it can work but we first will need a zoom function. Would love them too as they can provide useful information.
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The zoom in both is the standard pinch, you can also set what one candle represents like 1m, 1h, 4h, 1d etc
It would be great to start if Freetrade charts had zoom but the curves are rubbish so zooming them would need them to be point to point too to get a better understanding.
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Everyone knows how to read a line chart. Theyāre self explanatory and give a quick view into a stocks past.
Candlestick graphs with volume are not self explanatory and most people donāt know how to read them. Once you learn, theyāre not that difficult.
I could see candlesticks as a Freetrade Plus feature, but in a free account I think it would be counter to the companies goals of getting everyone investing. The simplicity of a line chart is good, candlesticks would scare some off.
Even in Plus, though, candlesticks could be viewed as a tool to try and time the market, which FT seem to stay away from. Just a thought, theyāre obviously more informative just in general.
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I donāt think anyone is suggesting to remove the 1D, 7D, 1M, 1Y, MAX line charts they are useful for everyone.
You would simply have another button above the chart to access the candle chart version like the competitor that shall not be named. That way itās not putting anyone off the average retail trader.
It does need a few other key things in conjunction to make it useful like live prices and actually showing the best ask, and not a delayed mid price. Stop and limits too. Without those itās kinda pointless.
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I really like the charts as they are but it would just be an added bonus to have the candlesticks am I wrong? Something for everyone I guessā¦?
Infact I have just come across the rival of freetrades people are talking about for the simple reason I wanted to know if it was actually available on an app for us Brits. I dare say its tempting to check out if I feel like making shorter term trades. Anyway fingers crossed the option is there one day (soonish)
These have come up a couple of times in our support chats & I can understand why day or swing traders / people who believe in technical analysis might try to use them.
But Iām not aware of any situations where these might be help someone make a long term investment decision so Iām wondering whether anyone in the community knows of any? To be clear, Iām not suggesting that there arenāt any - this could just be a knowledge gap.
For anyone whoās not familiar with candlestick charts, according to Wikipedia
A candlestick chart is a style of financial chart used to describe price movements of a security.
Like a combination of line-chart and a bar-chart: each bar represents all four important pieces of information for that day: The open, the close, the high and the low. Being densely packed with information, they tend to represent trading patterns over short periods of time, often a few days or a few trading sessions.
Hereās a couple of examples of what one of these charts look like, from a random website thatās designed for day traders:
I find these very useful in terms of understanding the volatility (which normal graph cannot show if the close prices are similar).
I also believe that not every Freetrade user will benefit from these and there could a nice amicable solution - a toggle!
Mybe something like this?
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Thanks! So how does that feed into your decision making process for making a long term investment?
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Long term - very low relevance for me personally but I am sure it may be different for more knowledgeable investors.
Short term - priceless. And not having to go to Yahoo finance for it would be great. By short I do not only mean day-trading, but a bit of swing trading. For instance, when Nvidia was 45% down recently, it went up 25% within a week (was a nice gain there!). Candlestick was quite useful 
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Ok great, itās this that Iām really curious about 
hopefully thereās some (even more) āknowledgeable investorsā who can share more about this..
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I like them, but I suspect thatās mainly because I expect to see them. They are useful in swing trading, which is something I think freetrade will be very good for, you donāt need to buy and hold everything forever. And even on a long term trade you may want to use a bit of technical analysis to choose an entry point
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For my investments, I donāt use them. The ability to change the date period (and hence frequency) of a line chart combined with high / low prices over a period, are sufficient for me.
However, even for long term investments, Iām sure smarter people than me would use them as a market entry tool.
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Iām sure they are useful (or reassuring) for expert investors.
The counter argument would be that as most investors are investing for the long term and are non-expert, unless theyāre decumulating they should probably simply follow a ājust keep buying periodicallyā strategy, and so they donāt even need to see daily open/close prices, let alone the movement within the day.
I donāt swing trade and Iām not expert. I donāt look at the prices at all, nor do any stock analysis - for 95% of my portfolio anyway. (I do try think about the things like aims, risk attitude, investment behaviour, asset allocation etc though.)
FTās mission is something like opening up investment to everyone, so the consideration will be whether adding detail to something makes it better or worse for that customer base.
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For me, these fall under the āOther places have them, so Freetrade shouldā category. Which I think of as a bad category in general.
On the long timeline youāre looking at for Freetrade buying, these donāt provide any useful info that a the existing chart canāt.
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I think they are completely and utterly useless. Investing in a company should be viewed like buying the entire enterprise, not based off short-term āindicatorsā. Donāt think they add value, and they provide unnecessary ānoiseā for new and existing investors.
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The do work on longer timescales, itās not just a short term indicator and you can see at a glance if the company went up or down in the last day/week/month or whatever timescale you are looking at. I donāt see that as useless or unnecessary noise
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Doesnāt their normal graph show that anyway? If you look at the general trend it gives you as good an idea as the candlestick would for long term investing, without all the extra noise
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I agree with this, these are not useful for investment and therefore should not be a focus. To my mind the existing graphs are already too biased toward short term moves in price (days/weeks) and need to move more toward a long term view.
As Freetrade offers very low cost trading there will always be pressure from people who want to use it to trade over days or weeks, but while itās fine if people want to use the platform for that, Freetrade should resist catering to that market if you see your core value as long term investing - the more features added for short term trading, the farther Freetrade strays from that mission of opening up long term investment to everyone.
Also once a feature is added it has to be supported forever (dev costs, cops costs), so there is a significant cost beyond just the time for the initial work.
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I donāt see it as noise, if the price went up yesterday itās a green bar, if it went down itās a red bar. I see that as simple to read information.
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It does, but without showing all the information. Day one stock opens at Ā£100 and closes at Ā£101. Day two it opens at Ā£101 and closes at Ā£102. A normal graph would show circa 1% growth per day (exagerated figures).
If a candlestick for the same company would show a fluctuation from Ā£100 to Ā£80 then back to Ā£101 on day one and from Ā£101 to Ā£120 and then back to Ā£102 on day two, that is a completely different perspective. For example, there may be people who do not like volatile companies in their portfolio and a candlestick will be a perfect solution to show that.
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