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Forex Currency Charts
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Currencies are quoted in pairs. The first listed currency is known as the base currency, while the second is called the counter or quote currency.
Base Currency is the currency in which an investor or issuer maintains its book of accounts. In the FX markets, the US Dollar is normally considered the 'base' currency for quotes, meaning that quotes are expressed as a unit of $1 USD per the other currency quoted in the pair. The primary exceptions to this rule are the British Pound, the Euro and the Australian Dollar.
Bid - An expression indicating a desire to buy a commodity at a given price; the opposite of Offer.
Ask - Also called Offer. Indicates a willingness to sell a futures contract at a given price.
There are 3 main types of charts in forex. They are the line chart, bar chart, and candlestick chart.
The line chart is constructed by connecting daily closing prices.
The bar chart is a depiction of the price performance of a currency pair, made up of vertical bars at set intraday time intervals (e.g. every 30 minutes). Each bar has 4 'hooks', representing the opening, closing, high and low (OCHL) exchange rates for the time interval.
The candlestick chart is a variant of the bar chart, except that the candlestick chart depicts OCHL prices as 'candlesticks' with a wick at each end. When the opening rate is higher than the closing rate the candlestick is black (sometimes - red). When the closing rate exceeds the opening rate, the candlestick is white (sometimes - green).
Technical indicators (for example, RSI, MACD, Bollinger bands, Stochastic) help to analyse the price movements, expressed in forex charts.
The Relative Strength Index (RSI) is a popular oscillator. The name Relative Strength Index is slightly misleading, as the RSI does not compare the relative strength of two securities, but rather the internal strength of a single security. A more appropriate name might be Internal Strength Index. Relative strength charts that compare two market indices, which are often referred to as Comparative Relative Strength.
Indicator of Bollinger borders (BOL) is represented by two lines, which are built on the distance equal to certain amount of standard deviations. Since the value of standard deviation depends on volatilessness of the price, the lines controls their width automatically. The width increasing when the market is more vilatile and decreasing when the market is less volatile.
MACD - is the most famous indicator, which is built on the basis of difference of the average values. This indicator was suggested by Jerald H. Appler as the difference between two exponentially smoothed averages (EMA).
MACD is the most effective under conditions when the market swings with high amplitude in trading. The most frequently used signals of MACD are intersections, overbuying/overselling states and divergences.
The Stochastic Oscillator (STO) shows the moments, when the price reaches the border of its trade diapason within predefined period of time (this is an indicator of speed of changing or the Impulse of Price). It contains of 2 curves: the fast (%K) and the slow (%D).