How to Read a Forex Chart
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008The forex chart is among the most essential tools in a forex trader’s arsenal. Simply put, it is a graph of a particular currency pair’s performance over a given period of time. Reading forex charts is key to a trader’s business, so it’s important to know how to read them and understand what they mean.
Every forex chart will be labeled with a currency pair: EUR/USD, USD/GBP, etc. Remember, all forex trading deals with different countries’ currency in relation to each other. The EUR/USD chart, for example, tells you how the euro and the U.S. dollar compare.
Along the bottom of the chart is the timeline — 15 minutes, an hour, a day, a week, or some other period. Going up the right-hand side are incremental amounts. For the EUR/USD chart, the amounts might be 1.2531 at the bottom, going up to 1.2561 at the top. And of course the middle of the chart shows what position the EUR/USD pair held at what time.