I am studying David H. Weis' book "Trades About to Happen: A Modern Adaptation of the Wyckoff Method" on reading price actions. Near the end of the book, Weis introduced wave charts. On TradeStation, I found Kagi chart which is pretty much similar to his wave chart. Meanwhile, I did not find much discussion on Kagi on this forum. And this led some doubt whether Kagi is a good choice compared to the routine time-based charts.

Here are what I like about Kagi:

1. it is very easy to read the waves of prices, large or small. If there are very volatile price moves within a time-based bar, Kagi will show the detailed up and down waves.

2. the total coverage volume, price change and time duration are clearly summarized. On the time based charts, these information are spread over several bars, and the information can not be read intuitively.

The things I don't like about Kagi:

1. The time information is mostly lost.

2. Due to point 1, the trend line and channel analysis seems challenging

3. Large effort, small effect scenarios are totally buried, which is a critical information.


I just wrote some python code to draw a variant of Kagi chart, which includes all Kagi information but whose x-axis is the date and time. And now trend line and channel analysis are possible.

Weis proposed to overlap his wave chart with small time based chart, like 1-min chart. Then all above three drawbacks can be addressed. However, visually this is a total overkilling.

Can I receive some comments and insights from the wise minds here? Thanks a lot!

I started to play with Kagi charts a few weeks ago. It is very good to keep you in the trade when the market is trending (what happens quite often recently).

The longer the time frame, the less chops you get. For example today using 5 mins Kagi charts you could have stayed in a short trade for 20+ ES points in the afternoon. But when the market is sideways, it will give you lots of false signals...

I thought Kagi weren't based on time frames???