Reading NSE price charts: candles, volume and time zones
- Zoom out to the full five years first; note the long-term direction before anything else.
- Identify the last major swing high and low — that range frames the present price.
- Check the last few strong moves for volume confirmation.
- Only then compare with fundamentals and the prediction reasons — charts describe behaviour, not value.
Every stock and fund page in the app opens with the same object: a five-year chart of daily candles. Chart reading is a skill with a low floor and no ceiling, but three ideas — candles, volume and sessions — cover most of what a research tool can tell you before you ever place a trade.
A candle is four numbers
Each daily candle packs the session’s open, high, low and close. The body spans open to close: green means the close finished above the open, red the reverse. The thin wicks mark the day’s extremes. A tall green body with tiny wicks is one-way demand; a small body with long wicks on both sides is indecision or a fight. One candle means little — sequences are where meaning appears: successive higher lows over months is an uptrend regardless of any single dramatic day.
Volume is the lie detector
Volume is the day’s traded quantity, drawn as bars under price. A 6% rally on triple the usual volume reflects broad participation; the same rally on a fraction of normal volume is a move made of thin air that often retraces. The classic confirmations: breakouts from multi-month ranges want high volume; drifts into new lows on dying volume often mark seller exhaustion. In India, also learn each stock’s rhythm — many mid-caps trade half their volume in the first and last half-hour.
Sessions, closes and IST
The NSE trades 09:15–15:30 IST on weekdays. Bharat Markets AI shows every tooltip in IST, and daily candles are anchored to the NSE session. Daily candle data becomes complete only after the session closes — intraday, today’s candle is provisional and is deliberately not stored as final by our pipeline until the session ends. That is also why the "data as of" timestamp on predictions matters: it tells you which close the analysis is standing on.
What we plot (and do not plot)
Our stock charts use exchange daily candles; fund charts plot NAV history, which updates once per business day and therefore has no intraday wicks — a "red NAV day" means the portfolio’s measured value fell, not that anyone traded the fund. We keep the chart honest to the underlying data: no smoothed overlays or projections are drawn on top of real prices.
A beginner-safe routine
- Zoom out to the full five years first; note the long-term direction before anything else.
- Identify the last major swing high and low — that range frames the present price.
- Check the last few strong moves for volume confirmation.
- Only then compare with fundamentals and the prediction reasons — charts describe behaviour, not value.
Read next: how our predictions are computed. More guides:
P/E, P/B, ROE, RoCE, debt/equity, margins and dividend yield explained for Indian stocks — what each number means, typical ranges, and the traps beginners fall into.
What the 0–100 score, the Very Weak to Very Strong bands and the bear/base/bull percentages mean, how the model is built, and the mistakes that make people over-trust predictions.
How Direct and Regular plans of the same Indian mutual fund differ, what expense ratios do to long-term returns, which one fits you, and how the app labels plans.