TradingRightReading Price Charts Bar by Bar
“Reading price charts bar by bar” is the foundational skill of price action: instead of reacting to lagging indicators, you learn to interpret each candle as it forms and understand what buyers and sellers are doing in real time. This free video course collects a full playlist of lessons that walk through that skill step by step. Watch it below, then practice what you see using bar replay inside TradingRight.
What the course covers
Bar-by-bar reading is less about memorizing patterns and more about building a running narrative of the chart. Across the playlist you'll develop the core reads that price-action traders rely on:
- Bar anatomy — how to interpret a candle's open, high, low and close, and why the close matters most.
- Trend bars vs doji bars — telling momentum from indecision at a glance. (See our guide on Reading Candlestick Bars.)
- Context first — judging whether the market is trending or in a trading range before acting.
- Signal bars, entries and stops — how a single bar sets up a trade with defined risk.
- Following the story — reading sequences of bars for follow-through, pullback depth and bar overlap.
Why bar-by-bar reading is the core skill
Every strategy in price action — breakouts, channels, range fades, reversals — is ultimately expressed through individual bars. If you can read the bars accurately, the higher-level patterns become obvious; if you can't, no indicator will rescue you. That's why this is the first skill to build and the one worth returning to. It also transfers across every instrument and timeframe, because a strong trend bar means the same thing on a 1-minute future and a daily stock.
The 15 chapters
The series follows Al Brooks' book Reading Price Charts Bar by Bar, chapter by chapter. Here's the full roadmap — watch each one in order in the playlist above.
Price Action
The foundation: what price action is and how to read a chart one bar at a time — interpreting each candle's open, high, low and close instead of relying on lagging indicators.
Trendlines and Trend Channels
Drawing trendlines and channels, and using their boundaries to enter with the trend and recognize when momentum is starting to weaken.
Trends
Spotting bull and bear trends, judging trend strength, and the "always-in" direction that keeps you trading on the market's dominant side.
Pullbacks
Reading pullbacks within a trend — shallow vs. deep, and the high/low-1 and high/low-2 patterns — so you enter on the dip instead of chasing.
Trading Ranges
Recognizing balanced, sideways markets, fading the edges (buy low, sell high), and why most breakout attempts out of a range fail.
Breakouts
What a strong breakout looks like, the follow-through that confirms it, and how to avoid the false breakouts that trap traders.
Magnets
The price "magnets" — measured-move targets, prior highs and lows, gaps and round numbers — that pull price toward them and make natural targets.
Trend Reversals
How trends end: the patterns and conditions that make a reversal credible, and why most apparent "reversals" are really just deep pullbacks.
Minor Reversals: Failures
How failed setups and failed breakouts work — and how a failure in one direction often becomes a high-probability trade in the other.
Day Trading
Applying bar-by-bar reading intraday: choosing timeframes, the rhythm of the trading day, and adapting the concepts to faster charts.
The First Hour
Why the opening hour behaves differently, the common opening patterns, and how to handle (or sidestep) early-session volatility.
Day Trading Examples
Worked intraday examples that tie the earlier chapters together on real charts, bar by bar.
Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Charts
Using higher-timeframe charts for context and for swing- and position-trade decisions.
Options
A short look at bringing price-action reading into options decisions.
Best Trades
The cleanest, highest-probability setups worth waiting for — the A+ trades that bring the whole series together.
How to study it with TradingRight
Passive watching builds familiarity; deliberate practice builds skill. Get the most from the course by pairing each lesson with hands-on reps:
- Watch a lesson and note the specific read it teaches (for example, "shallow pullbacks in a tight channel").
- Open bar replay in TradingRight and reveal a historical chart one bar at a time, narrating what each new bar adds before you peek ahead.
- Paper trade the setup from the lesson with a proper stop and size, so execution becomes automatic. See Practice with Bar Replay.
- Check it against the engine — compare your read to how TradingRight scores the strategy rules on the same bar, and use the Strategy Rules FAQ when a rule isn't clear.
Turn the lessons into screen time
Replay real charts bar by bar and practice every read from the course inside TradingRight.
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