Market noise

Market noise is the name given to movement on a chart that a reader is not attempting to explain — small fluctuations carrying nothing they can act on, which would look different on a chart drawn a moment later. The word is a judgement about what is being looked for rather than a category the market publishes: the same movement is noise to someone reading a weekly chart and the entire subject matter of someone reading a chart of individual ticks. The practical point is one of proportion. As the period of each bar shrinks, the distance price travels for reasons the reader cares about shrinks with it, while the spread and ordinary fluctuation do not, so the share of the chart that a given reader would call noise rises. That is why the same rule, applied unchanged to a shorter timeframe, produces more crossings and more signals without necessarily producing more of what it was written to find.