What does OHLCV stand for?

Open, High, Low, Close, and Volume. The first four are prices observed during a fixed interval, and volume is the total quantity traded in that interval.

What is the difference between OHLCV and a tick?

A tick is a single market update: one trade or quote at a specific moment. An OHLCV bar aggregates all the ticks within an interval into five summary values, which makes it smaller and easier to chart but removes the order of individual trades.

Which interval should I use?

The interval should match the analysis horizon: minute bars for intraday work, daily bars for swing and position analysis, and weekly or monthly bars for long-term research. Shorter intervals return many more records for the same range.

Does OHLCV work the same across asset classes?

The concept is identical for stocks, forex, crypto, and commodities. On SiftingIO every market uses the same OHLCV schema and timestamp convention, so one parser handles them all.

What is OHLCV data? Candlestick bars explained

What is OHLCV data?

OHLCV data is the standard format for summarizing how a market moved over a period of time, and it is the structure behind candlestick charts, most backtesting tools, and historical data endpoints. Each record condenses a fixed interval into five values, open, high, low, close, and volume, together with a timestamp. The sections below explain what each value represents, why interval bars are used instead of raw trades, and how the choice of interval affects the data.

5 min readData concepts

Key points

OHLCV stands for Open, High, Low, Close, and Volume, measured over a fixed interval such as one minute or one day.

Each bar, or candle, condenses many individual trades into five values and a timestamp.

Shorter intervals carry more detail but more data; longer intervals are lighter but smooth out movement.

OHLCV is the standard input for charts, technical indicators, and backtests across every asset class.

What each value represents

A single OHLCV bar describes one interval of time. The open is the price at the start of the interval and the close is the price at the end, while the high and low mark the extreme prices reached in between. Volume is the total quantity traded during the interval. Together these values record where the price started, where it finished, how far it moved, and how much activity occurred.

Open: the first traded price in the interval.
High: the highest traded price in the interval.
Low: the lowest traded price in the interval.
Close: the last traded price in the interval.
Volume: the total quantity traded during the interval.

Why interval bars are used

Markets generate a continuous stream of individual trades, often thousands per second for an actively traded symbol. Storing and rendering every trade is costly and difficult to interpret. A bar condenses an entire interval into a single fixed-size record, which keeps historical data compact, comparable across symbols, and fast to chart. The trade-off is granularity: once trades are aggregated into a bar, the order in which they occurred is no longer recoverable, and only the four price points and the total volume remain.

Choosing an interval

The appropriate interval depends on the time horizon being analyzed. Intraday analysis typically uses seconds or minutes, swing analysis uses hours or days, and long-term research uses days, weeks, or months. A common approach is to load daily bars for a broad view and switch to minute bars for closer inspection. Shorter intervals produce far more records for the same date range, which increases storage and transfer requirements.

OHLCV and the live price

A live quote reflects the current price, whereas an OHLCV bar summarizes a completed or in-progress interval. The two are typically combined: historical bars provide context, and a live feed updates the most recent bar as it forms. The close of the current bar continues to change until the interval ends, at which point the bar is finalized and a new one begins. This is why the most recent candle on a live chart appears to move continuously.

On SiftingIO

OHLCV on SiftingIO

SiftingIO serves historical OHLCV bars over REST under one JSON schema for stocks, forex, crypto, and commodities, with identical field names and timestamp conventions in every market. A request specifies a symbol, an interval, and a date range, and returns an array of bars suitable for charting or backtesting. For live data, the latest prices stream over WebSocket, allowing the current bar to be formed client-side, so historical and live data share one credential and one structure.

Crypto data US stocks data Historical bars in the docs