When the bar is wide and the volume is thin

A wide bar draws the eye. In the Dunsan-ro room we leave it unmarked until someone has said, out loud, whether the volume column under it is tall or short. The order matters. Price announces itself. Participation has to be named second, or it gets skipped.

Distance is not effort

Effort, in the way we use the word, is the height of the volume column. Result is how far price travelled. A wide bar on a short column means the result was large for the participation that showed up. That can happen in a quiet midday stretch on a liquid KOSPI name, when a few orders move the print because the book is thin, not because a crowd arrived.

Students often write “strong” in the margin because the bar is wide. On evening one we cross that word out and ask for a comparison: strong compared with which earlier column? If the prior ten columns are taller, the wide bar is not a surge of participation. It is a large move on light attendance.

What we write instead

The note we want is plain. “Wide bar, volume below the last ten columns, close near the high.” Or “wide bar, volume below the last ten, close back in the middle.” Those are different events. The first says a small amount of participation was enough to hold the extreme. The second says the extreme was not kept. Neither sentence tells you to buy or sell. Both can be checked against the next bar.

If you only have time for one habit between clinics, make it this comparison: column height against the distance travelled, written before any adjective. The adjectives can wait until the fourth evening, when you already have a packet full of plain notes.

Sittings that practice this kind of note are listed under clinics. The pace of the four-evening clinic is on the ledger.