Bar plotting

Introduction

The plotcandle() built-in function is used to plot candles. plotbar() is used to plot conventional bars.

Both functions require four arguments that will be used for the OHLC prices (open, high, low, close) of the bars they will be plotting. If one of those is na, no bar is plotted.

Plotting candles with `plotcandle()`

The signature of plotcandle() is:

plotcandle(open, high, low, close, title, color, wickcolor, editable, show_last, bordercolor, display) → void

This plots simple candles, all in blue, using the habitual OHLC values, in a separate pane:

To color them green or red, we can use the following code:

Note that the color parameter accepts “series color” arguments, so constant values such as color.red, color.lime, "#FF9090", as well as expressions that calculate colors at runtime, as is done with the paletteColor variable here, will all work.

You can build bars or candles using values other than the actual OHLC values. For example you could calculate and plot smoothed candles using the following code, which also colors wicks depending on the position of close relative to the smoothed close (c) of our indicator:

You may find it useful to plot OHLC values taken from a higher timeframe. You can, for example, plot daily bars on an intraday chart:

Note that:

• We set the behind_chart parameter of the indicator declaration to false. This causes our script’s candles to appear on top of the chart’s candles. Selecting “Visual Order/Bring to Front” from the script’s “More” menu achieves the same result.
• The script displays candles only when two conditions are met:
  • The chart is using an intraday timeframe (see the check on timeframe.isintraday in the plotcandle() call). We do this because it’s not useful to show a daily value on timeframes higher or equal to 1D.
  • The request.security() function returns non na values (see gaps = barmerge.gaps_on in the function call).
• We use a tuple ([open, high, low, close]) with request.security() to fetch four values in one call.
• We create a lighter transparency for the body of our candles in the bodyColor variable initialization, so they don’t obstruct the chart’s candles.

Plotting bars with `plotbar()`

The signature of plotbar() is:

plotbar(open, high, low, close, title, color, editable, show_last, display, force_overlay) → void

Note that plotbar() has no parameter for bordercolor or wickcolor, as there are no borders or wicks on conventional bars.

This plots conventional bars using the same coloring logic as in the second example of the previous section: