In order to trade price effectively, one must first accept the continuous nature of the market, the continuity of price, the continuity of transactions, the continuity of the trading activity that results in those transactions. The market exists independently of you and of whatever you're using to impose a conceptual structure. It exists independently of your charts and your indicators and your bars. It couldn't care less if you use candles or bars or plot this or that line or select a 5m bar interval or 8 or 23 or weekly or monthly or even use charts at all. And while you may attach great importance to where and how a particular bar – or candle – closes, there is in fact no "close" during the market day, not until everybody turns out the lights and goes home, which doesn't happen until the end of the week with the NQ, ES, et al."

Therefore, trading by price, or at least doing it well, requires getting past all that and perceiving price movement and the balance between buying pressure and selling pressure independently of the medium used to illustrate or reveal the activity.

Once the continuous nature of these movements is understood, the idea of wondering – much less worrying – about what a particular bar – or candle – "means" is clearly ludicrous (including where it "opens" and "closes" and what it's high is and so forth), and eventually the trader may come to the realization that all those people who've been insisting that these bars have some cosmic meaning have been trying to sell him something, i.e., DVDs and courses and software and seminars (box lunch included) and so forth that explain what these meanings allegedly are.

If the continuous nature of these movements is not understood, then the trader spends and wastes a great deal of time over "okay so this bar is higher than that bar but lower than this other bar, and price is going up (or down or nowhere), so . . .". Price is a movie, not a slideshow