Timeframes: what changes between 5m and 1d
Caliente Signals · Updated
A timeframe is how much time one candle covers. A strategy picks one and stays on it. There are six:
- 5m, 15m and 30m — Pro
- 1h, 4h and 1d — on every plan, free included
Changing it changes two things. The first is how often a rule can fire, since a rule can only become true at a close. On 1d that is one chance a day. On 5m it is 288.
The second is easier to miss. Your indicator settings count candles, not hours, so SMA(50) covers about seven weeks on the daily chart and about four hours on the 5-minute one. The same number in the same box is asking a different question on each timeframe.
Speed has a price attached
More closes means more fires, and more fires means more round trips. Every round trip pays the fee twice.
So a rule can behave quite differently on 4h and 5m without a single thing about the logic changing. When you move a strategy to a faster timeframe, read the whole backtest again rather than assuming it carries over, and pay particular attention to what happened to the number of trades.
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Caliente Signals is an alert tool, not an investment advisor. Nothing on this page is financial advice, and past performance is not indicative of future results.