HLC Bars Chart

HLC Bars Chart - An HLC Bars Chart is a variation of the bar chart that shows only the High, Low, and Close prices for each period, omitting the Open. Visually, it looks like a bar chart without the little left-hand tick (since open price isn’t marked), with only a right-hand tick indicating the close. In HLC charts, bars are often colored simply by whether the close was above (often green) or below (red) the previous bar’s close. This format was an early innovation from simple line charts – by adding high/low ranges to each close, traders gained insight into intraperiod volatility while still focusing on closing price. Relevance to EAs: For automated trading, an HLC chart provides nearly the same data as a standard OHLC bar chart, just without the open price. Many forex robots don’t explicitly need the open price of a bar for their logic (since strategies often use close-to-close changes or highs/lows for breakouts and volatility measures). In cases where the open price is irrelevant to the strategy, an EA monitoring an HLC chart would function identically to how it would on a normal bar chart. For example, a momentum-based EA might only care that the close is higher than the previous close (to signal bullish momentum) and how large the high-low range was (to gauge volatility) – both of which HLC bars provide. By ignoring the open, the HLC view simplifies price action to “range and result” of each period. This can reduce noise for certain automated strategies that treat the opening price as arbitrary and focus on where price traveled (high/low) and finished (close). Overall, while HLC charts aren’t fundamentally different for algorithmic calculations, they reinforce the emphasis on closing prices – which many robots already prioritize as key data points.