SV · Chart types
Range bars
Also called: price range bars, constant range bars
Range bars close when price has traveled a fixed distance rather than when a fixed amount of time has passed, removing time from the horizontal axis.
Definition
A range bar is a chart bar that closes once the difference between its high and low reaches a fixed size, for example 50 price units or 0.5% of price. A new bar then opens. Time plays no part in when a bar starts or ends.
The result is a chart in which every bar has the same height range, quiet periods compress into few bars, and active periods expand into many.
Intuition
Time bars give equal space to quiet and busy periods, so a fast move can be squeezed into one candle while hours of drift take up half the screen. Range bars allocate space by price activity instead, which makes trend structure and consolidation easier to see and reduces the visual noise of low-activity periods.
They belong to a wider family of activity-based bars, alongside tick bars (a bar every N trades) and volume bars (a bar every N units traded).
How it's calculated
For a range size R:
- Open a bar at the first trade price.
- Update the bar's high and low with each trade.
- When
High − Low ≥ R, close the bar at the price that completed the range, and open the next bar at the following price (implementations differ on whether the next bar opens at the close or at the next trade).
R can be fixed in price units or set as a percentage of price, or scaled by recent volatility (for example a fraction of average true range) so bars stay comparable as conditions change. Range bars need trade-level or fine-grained data to be built correctly; reconstructing them from one-minute candles is an approximation because the order of the high and low inside each candle is unknown.
How to read it
Read the number of bars formed per hour as a crude activity measure: many bars mean fast movement, few bars mean quiet conditions. Runs of same-direction bars describe trends in price terms rather than time terms.
Because time is removed, indicators computed on range bars (moving averages, oscillators) have different statistical properties from the same indicators on time bars and need their own parameter choices.
Common mistakes
- Building range bars from coarse candles and treating them as exact.
- Comparing indicator settings tuned on time bars with the same settings on range bars.
- Choosing a fixed range that becomes too small or too large as volatility changes.
- Forgetting that gaps can produce bars whose open is far from the prior close.
In Saqrid
SV supports custom timeframes including crypto range bars that close on price movement, plus tick and volume bars on supported crypto pairs.
Open SV.