Graph time is the length of the time used to display candlesticks or OHLC bars on historical graphs. Most commonly, daily data is used (i.e. the daily Open, High, Low and Close) but you may wish to change this either to remove daily volatility from your charts, or simply to make the charts more readable. The main settings used are Dynamic, Daily, Weekly and Monthly.

Let’s have a look at this in more detail; but first let’s make sure we are using bars or candles on the Historical Graph by pressing the ‘Display OHLC bars’ button or the ‘Display candlesticks’ button . If you do not have these buttons on your Graph toolbar, right click in the graph and select Graph Design. On the Price tab select ‘OHLC bars’ or ‘Candlestick’.

By default the Historical Graphs are set to use a ‘Dynamic selection of scale’. You will know if this is selected on your graph by looking in the top left corner to see if it says ‘(dyn.)’:

With this option selected, whenever you zoom in or out on the graph, the amount of data used to draw each bar or candle will change dynamically to best fit the data onto the graph. Remember, to zoom in, left click and drag over a section of the graph to select it. To zoom out to the full history, double left click in the graph. The more history you are viewing, the more days, weeks or months are used for each bar or candlestick.

A graph displaying the full history of the share may use bars of many weeks or months:

A graph only showing a few months of data may use daily bars or candles instead:

Instead of trying to zoom in to get daily or weekly bars on the graph, you can set the time periods used. This means that regardless of the range of data you are seeing on the graph, you will always use the graph time period selected (i.e. Daily, Weekly or Monthly). This applies to the current Graph Setting only.

To set the graph to always show daily bars, press the ‘Use daily bars for the graph’ toolbar button: . If you don’t have this, go into the Graph Design dialog, then to the Time tab and select ‘1 day’, or use the keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+1.

You will notice that the ‘(dyn.)’ is removed, and regardless of whether you are looking at the full history of the graph, or if you are zoomed into a shorter time frame, the graph will always show you 1 day bars/candles.

To change to one week bars/candles, press on the toolbar or Ctrl+5 on your keyboard (we use ‘5’ for five trading days). Zoom in and out on the graph to see that this remains as the selected graph time.

Weekly bars/candles will always use Monday’s Open price as the Open and Friday’s Close as the Close – if there is a Bank Holiday then that day is omitted from the week and the Weekly bar/candle will only use 4 days of data (or 3 over Christmas).

To change to one month bars/candles, press on the toolbar. There is no keyboard shortcut set up by default for this – however you can set one up yourself. See Tutorial 11 – Make ShareScope your own for more information on setting up keyboard shortcuts. If you don’t have the button though (Tutorial 11 will also show you how to add/remove toolbar buttons) you can select ‘1 month' on the Time tab in the Graph Design dialog.

For Monthly bars/candles the Open is the Open on the 1st trading day of the month, and the Close is the Close on the last trading day of the month.

Besides using different graph times to change the amount of data used in drawing bars and candles, the graph time can also be used when adding analytics such as Moving Averages or indicators like MACD to the graphs.

When you add an indicator you should see the following option in the indicator dialog:

By default, all analytics and indicators are calculated using Daily data, regardless of the graph time used. Click on the ‘Daily’ button to view your other options:

The ‘Daily’ and ‘Weekly’ options will always use this as the Data source, regardless of the time periods used on the graph. Choose ‘Graph time period’ to have the indicators use whichever period is set on the graph (notice that ‘1 month’ is displayed greyed out as the graph is currently set to ‘1 month’ bars/candles). The ‘Graph time period’ option also works with the ‘Dynamic selection of scale’ time period – so as the graph time changes depending on the amount of data displayed on the graph, so the indicators and analytics will change how they are calculated.

Selecting ‘Graph time period’ and adding an MACD indicator to the graph, the indicator title tells you the period being used in its calculation:

The ‘Bars’ advises us that it is using the same period as the graph (in this example, 1 month candles).

The example below is using weekly data on the same graph, look at the indicator title for confirmation:

On the Time tab in the Graph design dialog you can also select between 1-5 trading days or 1-4 weeks.

Note that using the 2-5 days options here will use every trading day and will skip Bank Holidays – so a 5 day bar will always use 5 days and may start on a Thursday and end on a Wednesday (or even the following Friday if it should fall this way over Easter). This differs from the week options which will always be calculated from Monday to Friday and will still include Bank Holiday days.

Toolbar buttons and keyboard accelerators are also available for these other graph time periods.

Remember, if you have any trouble finding or using any of these features, please don’t hesitate to call our Customer Support team. They will be delighted to help.