How to Mark Up a Chart Cleanly

The same chart, marked two ways

A mark-up is the set of lines and shapes you draw on a chart. The clean kind has few of them, and each one means something. On the left, twelve lines in eight colours cross the price and none can be read, because nothing says which are levels, which are trend lines and which are guesses. On the right, three marks: one level, one trend line, one shaded zone. Each is a different kind and a different colour, and the price is still the biggest thing on the screen.

Three kinds of mark

The rule that keeps a chart clean is one look per kind. A level — a price the market has turned at before — is a dashed horizontal line, in gold. A trend line, joining the rising lows or the falling highs, is a solid sloping line, in blue. A zone, a band of prices rather than one price, is a pale shaded rectangle with no outline. Use the same three looks on every chart, and a glance says what each mark is. A fourth colour means something on the chart has no kind.

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