Forming Bar (the Unclosed Candle)

The right-most bar on a chart is still being built. Its open is fixed, but its high, its low and its close all change with every incoming quote until the period ends, so whatever shape it currently has is provisional. A pattern visible on the forming bar can disappear before that bar closes, and an indicator that takes the forming bar into its input changes value along with it. This is the ordinary mechanism behind the complaint that a signal vanished. Nothing was removed: the reading was always of an incomplete period, and the completed period turned out different. It is also the honest half of what a study that redraws its past output is doing, and the reason many readers take values only from closed bars. Whether a given tool uses the forming bar or the last closed one is a property of the tool, stated in its documentation or its settings, and it changes what the same tool reports on the same chart.