Synthetic candles: when your chart is lying politely

For majors, charts are built from real exchange candles: every bar carries a true open, high, low, close and volume. But thousands of long-tail coins aren't listed where clean OHLC data is served. For those, most charting products do the same quiet thing we do — reconstruct bars from a series of sampled close prices. The difference is whether the product tells you.

What a synthetic bar actually is

When only closes exist, the "open" is the previous sample, and the "high" and "low" are just the highest and lowest samples inside the bucket — not the extremes the market really printed. Wicks shrink or vanish. Intrabar spikes disappear entirely if they happened between samples.

What that breaks

• Candlestick patterns — hammers, engulfings and dojis are defined by wick and body geometry that synthetic bars don't preserve. A "hammer" on reconstructed data is noise wearing a costume.
• Stop placement — "below the wick low" is meaningless when the wick low is an artifact of sampling.
• Volume profile — sampled volume smears across price levels; the POC you see may not be where volume actually clustered.

Our policy: label, don't pretend

When a coin's chart falls back to reconstructed data, getcoinsight shows an explicit notice that the candles are synthetic and that pattern detection and volume profile on that chart are unreliable. The alternative — rendering them indistinguishably from real bars — wins a prettier screenshot and costs the user real money. Trend, moving averages and momentum readings survive reconstruction reasonably well; wick-level analysis does not, and we would rather tell you which half of the toolbox you are holding.