Chart Styles: Candles, Bars, Line, Area and Heikin-Ashi
Each style discards something different. Knowing what a style is throwing away is what stops it from misleading you.
MadStockAlerts Research · Updated August 28, 2026
What to take away
- Candles and bars carry all four prices; line and area carry only the close.
- A line chart is cleaner precisely because it hides intraday conflict.
- Heikin-Ashi averages prices, so its bars do not show real levels.
- Never place an order from a Heikin-Ashi price; it is not a price that traded.
- Hollow candles encode two facts at once.
MAD Academy Training Video · 0:46
Five Ways to Draw the Same Session
Candles, bars, line, area and Heikin-Ashi encode different amounts of the same data, and one of them is not raw price at all.
This lesson is part of a Stock Alerts + Tools plan.
What each one keeps
| Style | Shows | Discards |
|---|---|---|
| Candlestick | Open, high, low, close | Nothing, but hides the order events occurred in |
| OHLC bar | The same four prices | The same; a denser rendering |
| Line | Close only | All intraday range |
| Area | Close only, shaded | The same as line |
| Hollow candle | All four, with direction from the prior close | Nothing |
| Heikin-Ashi | Averaged values | The actual traded prices |
When a line chart is better
A line chart of closes is frequently the clearest way to see structure, because it removes the intraday noise that candles preserve. On a long history the difference is substantial: a candle chart of ten years is mostly ink.
Closing prices also carry a genuine claim to primacy. The close is the price the market settled on after a full session of disagreement, it is the price the closing auction produced, and it is the price index funds and settlement systems use.
Scroll the chart sideways to see all of it.
- SMA 20
Heikin-Ashi, and its one serious hazard
HA close = (open + high + low + close) / 4; HA open = (previous HA open + previous HA close) / 2
The averaging smooths a chart considerably and makes trends visually obvious, which is the appeal. Consecutive candles of one colour with small wicks read as a clean trend where an ordinary candle chart shows a messier picture.
Not a real price
A Heikin-Ashi open or close is a computed average, not a price at which anything traded. Reading a support level off one, or placing a stop at one, uses a number that does not exist in the market. Keep an ordinary candle chart alongside it for anything involving actual levels.
The smoothing also introduces lag. Because each bar's open is derived from the previous bar, the series carries information forward and turns later than the underlying does, which is the same trade-off every smoothing makes.
Hollow candles
Hollow candles encode two facts at once: the colour comes from the change against the previous close, and the fill comes from whether the close beat the open.
A hollow red candle is a period that closed below yesterday but above its own open, which an ordinary candle chart cannot express. That combination is exactly the ambiguity described in reading a candlestick, resolved by adding one visual dimension.
The workspace carries every style above, so the same period can be read several ways without leaving the layout.
Style controls on Pro Charting — for membersBar charts, and why some readers prefer them
An OHLC bar carries exactly the same four prices as a candlestick and draws them differently: a vertical line from low to high, a tick to the left at the open and a tick to the right at the close. There is no filled body, so no bar is visually heavier than another.
That is the argument for them. A candlestick body is a solid block of colour whose visual weight is proportional to the distance between open and close, which means a chart of candles draws the eye to large-bodied days whether or not those days were the important ones. A day that opened at the low and closed at the high on ordinary volume is a large red or green block; a day that gapped four percent and then went nowhere is a small one. The second day moved the price more.
Neither style adds or removes information. Every reversal pattern in the candlestick vocabulary is present on a bar chart, and can be read from it. What changes is which bars the eye is pulled toward first, and that is a real effect rather than a matter of taste.
Bar charts also stay legible at higher densities, because the marks are thin. A year of daily bars fits comfortably in a width where a year of candles becomes a solid block of colour, which is why long-range charts in research publications are more often bars or lines than candles.
Area, baseline and mountain charts
An area chart is a line chart of closing prices with the region beneath it filled. The fill carries no information at all, and the choice is entirely presentational: the eye reads a filled region as a quantity, which suits a chart whose subject is a level rather than a series of individual sessions.
A baseline chart fills relative to a reference rather than to the bottom of the panel, colouring the region above the reference one way and below it another. The reference is usually the first value in the window, which turns the chart into a picture of return over that window rather than of price. That is genuinely a different question, and it is the right style for one specific job: comparing several securities from a common starting point.
The general point across all of these is that a style is a rendering of one underlying series. Switching styles never produces new information and never removes any that was in the closes, so the only sound reason to switch is that a particular question is easier to answer in a particular rendering.