Day trading charts can be based upon several different criteria, with the most popular being time, ticks (number of trades), volume (number of contracts), and price range. All four types of charts use the same market information (price, volume, etc.), but they display the information slightly differently.
Time
Charts based upon time make a new price bar (or candlestick, line, etc.) at specific time intervals. Popular short term time intervals include 1 minute, 3 minutes, and 5 minutes, and popular long term timeframes include 1 hour, 1 day, and 1 week. Time based charts are named for the time interval that they are based upon. For example, a chart that is based upon a 1 minute timeframe is known as a 1 minute chart. Shorter timeframe charts often look like zoomed in versions of longer timeframe charts, because there are more bars for the same amount of time, but with the same prices. For example, a 1 minute chart would have 5 price bars for every 1 price bar of a 5 minute chart, even though both charts would have the same prices and the same open, high, low, and close for the 5 minute time interval.
