Whether you currently possess bitcoin or want to acquire some, you'll eventually want to know how much the crypto coins are worth in your preferred currency.
Later on, you'll want to know whether to keep your coins or sell them for a profit. However, examining price charts and comprehending financial terminology may be somewhat difficult, particularly for the novice. The Bitcoin price chart at Coin Culture serves as an excellent introduction to the fundamentals.
What is the current price of bitcoin?
The best location to get the current bitcoin price (currency symbol: BTC or XBT) is on the exchange from whence you purchased them (Bitstamp, Bitfinex, and BTC-e are the most popular exchanges at the moment), or on Coin culture's own Bitcoin Price Index. Knowing the present price of bitcoin is one thing; but, you'll soon want to know where prices will go in the future.
Techniques for forecasting price trends
Forecasting the price fluctuations of anything traded on an exchange is a high-stakes game of probability — nobody is always correct. Numerous traders have lost significant sums of money, if not their whole life savings, in such endeavours. Fundamental analysis and technical analysis are the two primary methods for forecasting price movement. While fundamental analysis investigates the underlying dynamics that drive an economy, a firm, or security, the technical analysis makes forecasts about the future direction of prices using previous market data, especially historical prices and volumes seen on price charts.
Where can I locate bitcoin price charts?
Rather than just looking at a table of numbers, you'll want to use bitcoin price graphs to see how the price and volume have changed over time. The Bitcoin price chart at Coin Culture is a good place to start.
A simple pricing chart:
The price line is drawn using the closing prices for any specified period (a month, a week, a day, or an hour, for example). This kind of chart may be used to quickly assess how prices have been doing recently, but traders want further data to make conclusions.
The chart of candlesticks:
Candlestick charts exhibit additional information in addition to the closing price: each 'candle' displays the beginning price, the low and high prices for the specified period, as well as the closing price. Additionally, the colour of the candle body shows whether the closing price was greater than the starting price (often a green bar referred to as an 'up-bar') or less than the opening price (typically a red bar referred to as a 'down-bar'). Although the candlestick chart is a member of the OHLC (open high, low close) family of price charts, there are a plethora of different chart types/styles available to fit any skilled trader's desire. Another form worth noting is the range chart which is not time-based (NTB). However, beginners may find them less natural and more challenging to understand. There is a plethora of information for the expert trader's eyes in candlestick charts, like whether a candle's width is wide or narrow, where the closing price is about between the high and low. Together with the patterns formed by groups of candlesticks, this is the basis for traders' trend biases: bullish (increasing prices), bearish (falling prices), or sideways range. After learning how to interpret (bitcoin) price charts, it's a good idea to begin tracking bitcoin's price growth daily. Eventually, you will begin to see certain patterns on the charts - most likely the trending behaviour of pricing. You may recall later that this was the moment at which you were introduced to the art of technical price analysis.
