#Cryptocurrency#cryptohopper#candlestick+2 more
Candles are the oldest piece of trader technology we still use. The Japanese rice market invented them in the 1700s, and pretty much every chart you’ve ever seen — TradingView, Binance, CryptoBot, your broker, your exchange — is still drawing them. Every indicator anyone cares about is a function of candle data. Every backtest is a loop over candle data. If you want to reason about the history of a market, rather than just the current state, candles are the only data type that does it.
This article is a practical walkthrough of candle (OHLCV) data: what’s inside one, how to pick a timeframe, how indicators fall out, and how to use them cleanly through the CryptoBot Market Data MCP without torching your weekly quota.
Every candle summarises what happened in a fixed time window — one minute, five minutes, one hour, four hours, one day. For that window you get five numbers:
That’s OHLCV. Five numbers. A series of them, evenly spaced in time, is what a chart is made of. Everything else is derived from this.
The genius of candles is the compression. A one-hour window on a busy pair might contain tens of thousands of individual trades. OHLCV squeezes that down to five numbers that preserve almost everything a trader actually cares about: where did it start, how high did it go, how low, where did it finish, and how much traded through. The gritty tick-level detail is gone, but the shape is intact.
Timeframe choice is the single most-important decision in any candle-based workflow, and it gets under-thought constantly. A quick mental map:
1-minute and 5-minute candles are noisy. They react to individual large trades, microstructure effects, liquidity holes. Good for execution analysis, short-term scalping, or building intra-day signals. Bad for making trend judgements.
15-minute and 1-hour candles are the workhorse. Most intraday technical analysis lives here. Indicators on 1h candles are responsive enough to matter and smooth enough to trust.
4-hour candles are the swing-trader sweet spot. Long enough to filter noise, short enough to catch multi-day moves. Most grid-bot range-finding and swing-trade analysis uses 4h.