When the bar at a level is quiet

Still life of printed bar shapes on burgundy cloth beside a brass weight

Volume on an intraday chart is the amount of trading in that bar, drawn beside price. At the desk we treat it as a record of who showed up, read next to the bars on either side.

A local comparison

Look at the volume bar that sits on your level, then look at the bar before it and the bar after it. A tall price candle with a short volume bar at a prior high is a different picture from a tall price candle whose volume bar dwarfs its neighbours. The first can be a brief tag. The second is a crowd.

We do not ask the room to hold last month's average in its head at the same time. The eye drifts into arithmetic and leaves the level. Local comparison is enough for the fundamentals.

The quiet bar deserves its own sentence

Small volume at the prior low, close off the low, tells you the level was met without a crowd. It does not tell you what the next bar will do. The note is there so that later, when you review the day, you do not invent a battle the volume does not show.

Evening three uses one session and three comparisons, spoken aloud, then written. People hoping for a coloured arrow find the hour slow. The slowness is the lesson. It keeps the hand from annotating every bar.

Sit with the intensive