How does one determine the width of a candlestick bar?
Very common question. There is no any rule of thumb. This solely depends on your trading strategy. I will share my own experience. My day starts with the daily chart, if I have a signal, either I open my position or I check 30 minute chart to make sure that it won't go too much against my trade. and I open my position. If I am waiting for the signal the minimum timeframe is 4 hours for me. I use 30 minutes to find the best time to enter the market. So, this is totally something special for my trading strategy, that is why those things can change based on the different strategies. I also check weekly and monthly charts to confirm trend. I have been busy with forex since 2007 and I am a verified investor on etoro At the end, I never use 1,5,15,60 minute charts as they are against my strategy. You could theoretically use any time period unit, but 1 minute and 30 minute  seem to be the most common and useful.  Especially for active traders.  This also has the added advantage of giving you useful insight into the trade volumes throughout the day; assuming that is also included on the chart.  I think most include that as a bar chart across the bottom. Here is a great example for crude oil on dailyfx:  https://www.dailyfx.com/crude-oil Notice that the chart has time options at the top left which include 1 minute, 30 minutes, 1 hour, and 1 day. There's no rule of thumb but the purpose of candlesticks of any kind (fixed, volume weighted etc.) is to display the intra-period price action. So if you'd fit 3 years worth of 1 minute bars on a chart, candlesticks become useless and you might as well use a line chart.
"tl;dr:  Sears is failing because the CEO is running the company into the ground for personal profit.  There have been many, many articles written on the issue.  The CEO is having the stores sell their property, at a discount, to one of his other companies, then having the stores pay rent.  Except boutique stores actually pay more money than Sears does.  So whenever a store closes, his other company can rent the space out for almost double.  Oh, and he encouraged a corporate culture where the department heads use those screen protectors hospitals use to keep each other from spying on their laptops during meetings.  The way IT works, some departments actually contract out to a 3rd party rather than going through corporate, since it's cheaper.  Yes, departments individually have an IT budget, and are required to have their own ""Contract"" to use in house IT.  It's so bad that, many employees say they are explicitly barred from helping another department.  So, customers feel snubbed and end up balking because there's no one to help them, or to run the register.  That's the power of a bad CEO that the board refuses to fire." "You don't need an ""MBA"" to evaluate the performance of a bar.   There is usually a dumb ratio for any industry which sets the expected turnover and bottom line. Basically one figure that can be given to an experienced bar owner and he'll know that the top and bottom line should be. Not knowing the bar industry, your area or grade of location etc I'd guess cost of sales (i.e. drink), you apply that against the typical gross margin % and you'll know what the turnover figure should be, and apply it to the typical net profit % and know what the bottom line should be. Wouldn't surprise me if an experienced guy could figure all that out just from the floorspace area and rent, with a bit of local knowledge.  It should go without saying that if these are underperforming, it doesn't tell you why. Maybe your manager is swindling you, maybe he's crap, maybe the owners took crappy decisions like inappropriate fit out, crap marketing, crap location, etc, forcing manager to price low.  Also bear in mind that the average includes all the really experienced bar owners so it can already be a tough target." "First, there are MLM businesses that are legitimate and are not Ponzi schemes; I actually work with one (I will not name it lest I give the impression of trying to sell here). One thing I learned was how to respond when a prospect raises objections related to the actual scams, which are abundant; the answer being to point out, and you mentioned this yourself, that in an illegitimate scheme, there is no actual product being offered - the only thing money is ever spent on is the expectation of a future profit. Ask your friend, ""Would you buy the product this company sells, at the price they ask, if there were not a financial opportunity attached to it?"" If not, ""How can you expect anyone else to buy it from you?"" There are only 3 ways he can respond to this question: he can realize that you're right and get out now; he can change the subject to the concept of making money by climbing the ranks and earning off of a salesforce, in which case it's time to educate him on Ponzi; or he can claim to be able to sell something he doesn't believe in, in which case you should run fat, far away. If he does indicate that he would be a customer even without the chance to sell the product, then offer him the chance to prove it, by giving you one sales pitch on the condition that he is not allowed to breathe a word about joining the business. Do him the courtesy of listening with an open mind, and decide for yourself whether you could ever be a customer. If the possibility exists, even if not today, he has found one of the few legitimate MLM companies, and you should not try to stop him. If not, you'll have to determine whether it's because the product just isn't for you, or because it's inherently worthless, and whether you should encourage or discourage your friend going forward." They have ETFs for most of what you listed above.  Except the deep-fried candy bars.  You know that's just a distributed candy bar that is THEN fried right?  They have a few religious ETFs as well as some socially responsible ones.   There is no reason to make one based on a single person's preference though - ETFs make their money on fees.  For that they need VOLUME.   Move Volume = More Money  Also, there are over 1,411 ETF's in the US as of 2014.  That means there are a lot of options already. You could always create your own if you are a great salesperson though. Source "&gt;The scales on the chart are not consistent, even in regards to stats the author purports to be comparable  Scales (and especially missing zero-points) are one of the easiest ways to manipulate the perception of viewers of charts &amp; graphs.  Especially when we are dealing with exponential things -- even the choice of linear vs logarithmic can generate entirely different reactions to the same data.  Add in cherry-picking and ""normalization"" of data, and such things are rife with the possibility of being misleading (often in ways that the creators of the charts themselves are entirely unaware of)." "Is there ever any ambiguity on what that that exact strike is in delta space, or does everyone back it out from the pricing model the same way?  I ask, because in my product nearly everyone runs a heavier delta to the put (the severity of that varies). So on trades that are ""tied up"", everyone participating on it can have slightly different deltas that they are modeling" Here's another attempt at explanation: it's basically because parabolas are flat at the bottom. Let me explain.  As you might know, the variance of the log stock price in Black Scholes is vol^2 * T, in other words, variance of the log stock price is linear in time to expiry. Now, that means that the standard deviation of your log stock price is square root in time. This is consequential.  For normally distributed random variables, in 68% of cases we end up within one standard deviation. So, basically, we expect our log stock price to be within something something times square root of T. So, if your stock has a vol of 16%, it'll be plus/minus 32% in 4 years, plus/minus 16% for one year, plus/minus 8% for 3m, plus/minus 4% for 3-ish weeks, and plus/minus 1% for a business day. As you see, the decay is slow at first, but much more rapid as we get closer.  How does the square root function look? It's a sideways parabola. As we come closer to zero, the slope of the square root function goes to infinity. (That is related to the fact that Brownian motion is almost surely no-where differentiable - it just shoots off with infinite slope, returning immediately, of course :-) Another way of looking at it is the old traders rule of thumb that an at-the-money option is worth approximately S * 0.4 * vol * sqrt(T). (Just do a Taylor expansion of Black Scholes). Again, you have the square root of time to expiry in there, and as outlined above, as we get closer to zero, the square root drops slowly at first, and then precipitously. Thank you very much for this thoughtful response.  In my opinion the judges care more about the why behind your valuation rather than a how.  Anyone can use a formula, but it takes so much more to understand why to use the formula.    Personally, the 'why' is going to be the toughest part for me understand and wrap my head around.  Once again thank you for the advice and the tip.