Where the data comes from

Prices come from OANDA, a regulated broker, as real recorded market data. They are not generated, smoothed or reconstructed.

Candles, not ticks

The underlying data is candles — open, high, low, close and volume for each period — down to five-second resolution, going back years rather than days.

In tick-by-tick mode, each candle is built from the one-minute candles inside it. That is very close to watching it live, but it is not every individual tick, and between two one-minute closes the exact path is not known.

The no-future rule

This is the rule the whole product rests on:

A candle is never shown until it has finished, at your current clock time.

So on the 1-hour chart at 14:20, the 14:00 candle is still forming and is not displayed. Showing it would hand you information no real trader had.

The rule holds when you change timeframe. Switching from 5-minute to daily mid-session cannot reveal the rest of the day — the cut-off moves with you.

Non-standard timeframes

Some timeframes come straight from the provider; others — 3-minute, 45-minute — are built by combining smaller candles. A built candle is only shown once every candle inside it has closed, so the no-future rule holds there too.

Economic news

Release dates for the major US indicators — employment, CPI, PPI, GDP, retail sales, PCE — come from the Federal Reserve’s own release calendar, going back to 2005. Weekly jobless claims and the energy inventory reports are computed from their published schedules.

Markers appear on the chart as the clock reaches them, never before, and the top bar counts down to the next one in simulated time.

Honest limits

• Between one-minute closes, the exact price path is unknown.

• Spread is a typical figure per market, not the real spread at that instant.

• Overnight financing and swap charges are not modelled.

• Your fills are never affected by the size of your order — in a real market a large order moves the price.