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Higher timeframe

A longer chart interval used for context; its levels and trend tend to dominate shorter-term signals.

One daily candle broken into four six-hour candlesA tall daily candle on the left and the four six-hour candles that make it up on the right, with dashed lines linking the day's open to the first candle and the day's close to the last.ONE DAILY CANDLEFOUR 6-HOUR CANDLEScloseopenhighlow=00:0006:0012:0018:00one dayThe same trading, summed up in one bar or spelled out in four.
How timeframes stack up. A daily candle is not different data, only coarser data: it opens where the first six-hour candle opened, closes where the last one closed, and its wicks reach the highest and lowest prices any of the four touched.

When traders say a level is higher-timeframe, they mean it was formed on a daily, weekly or monthly chart and is therefore visible to far more participants than a 5-minute swing point.

Higher timeframe bars contain more information per bar and produce fewer, slower signals. That reduces noise and transaction costs, but also means a stop must be wider and a mistake takes longer to reveal itself.

A practical use: mark weekly and daily swing-highs and swing-lows, the prior-day-high-low, and the weekly-open on your intraday chart. Most intraday reversals happen near something, and that something is usually a higher timeframe reference rather than an indicator crossing.

Related: multi-timeframe-analysis, lower-timeframe, timeframe

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