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Range bars

Bars that close after price has travelled a fixed distance, so every bar has the same height and time varies.

A range bar completes once the distance from its high to its low reaches the chosen range. A 10-tick range bar on a futures contract closes as soon as the bar spans 10 ticks, then a new bar starts.

In fast markets you get many bars per minute; in quiet markets a single bar can last an hour. That makes volatility visible as bar frequency rather than bar size, and it keeps indicator inputs on a constant scale.

The trade-offs: gaps can produce bars larger than the setting, backtests on range bars are easy to get wrong because the bar boundaries depend on the data feed's tick granularity, and comparing results across brokers can be impossible. Range bars change the look of a chart far more than they change the underlying edge.

Related: tick-chart, renko-chart, volume-bars, timeframe

See it drawn

Original diagrams for the ideas on this page. Illustrative, not real market data.

A range beside a trendOne chart swinging between a flat floor and ceiling, another stepping upwards inside a pair of sloping lines.Range-boundresistancesupportprice bounces between two levelsTrendingthe trend channelhigher highs and higher lowsA range has two flat edges; a trend has two sloping ones.
Range versus trend. On the left price keeps bouncing between the same floor and ceiling, which is a range. On the right each high and each low is higher than the last, inside a pair of sloping lines called a channel.

Educational only, not advice. Spotted an error? Post in Site Feedback.