BTC-USD spot

What am I looking at?

The price

• Candlesticks — each candle is one period of trading (1 hour up to 1 week, your pick). Green means the price closed higher than it opened; red means it closed lower. The thin wicks show the highest and lowest prices reached.
• Volume (the bars underneath) — how many dollars actually changed hands in each period. This is the reality check: a big price move on heavy volume means a lot of people agreed with it; the same move on thin volume often fades.
• Log scale — the vertical axis shows equal percentage moves as equal distances, which is the honest way to look at an asset that has grown many-fold.

Trend overlays (the buttons above the chart)

• MA 50 & MA 200 — moving averages: the average closing price of the last 50 and 200 candles. They smooth out the noise so you can see the underlying trend. When the fast (50) line crosses the slow (200) line, traders pay attention.
• EMA 21 — the same idea, but weighted towards recent prices, so it turns faster. Crypto traders tend to prefer these over plain averages.
• Bollinger 20 — a band drawn two standard deviations above and below the 20-period average. In plain terms: it stretches when the market gets volatile and squeezes when it goes quiet. Price near the top edge is unusually high relative to recent behaviour — not a sell signal on its own.
• VWMA 20 — a 20-period average that gives heavier candles more say. Where it sits versus the ordinary MA tells you whether the big volume came in on the way up or the way down.
• Prior high/low — the highest and lowest price of the last completed day (on 1H/4H) or week (on 1D). These are the levels price tends to react to, because everyone can see them.

The lower panel (pick one)

• MACD — the gap between a fast and a slow average (the standard 12/26 version), plus its own 9-period average, the signal line. The bars show the distance between the two: bars shrinking means the move is losing steam, and the two lines crossing is the signal traders actually watch.
• RSI 14 — a 0–100 "speedometer" of the last 14 candles. Above 70 the market may be overheated (overbought); below 30, oversold. The dotted guides mark those levels.
• Stoch RSI — RSI put through the same treatment again, which makes it far twitchier. It reaches the extremes much more often, so it is used for timing rather than for judging the trend.
• ATR 14 — average true range: how far this thing typically moves in one period, in dollars. This is the practical one — it is what traders use to size a position and decide how far away a stop-loss has to sit to avoid being clipped by ordinary noise.
• Open interest — the total value of futures contracts currently open. Rising open interest with rising price means new money is backing the move; price rising while open interest falls usually means people are just closing bets. Binance publishes roughly the last 30 days, so this panel is shorter than the others.

The futures strip (top of the page)

• Funding rate — on crypto futures, one side pays the other every 8 hours to keep the contract tied to the spot price. Positive means the bulls are paying the bears — the crowd is leaning long, and leaning crowds sometimes get pushed over. Negative is the reverse. This has no equivalent in stock markets; it is one of the few genuinely crypto-native things on this page.

The takeaway

• Indicators describe the past — they don't predict the future. Nothing here is financial advice, and none of it is a recommendation to buy or sell anything.
• Every indicator on this page is a different way of rearranging the same two numbers: price and volume. Agreement between them is not confirmation — it's arithmetic.
• Prices are live spot quotes from Binance and can differ slightly from other exchanges.