What a price actually is
A price is not an expert opinion or the result of a calculation. It is the most recent agreement between someone who bought and someone who sold. Nothing more. If you are wondering whether a share is “expensive”, you are asking the wrong question — the market does not tell you what the company is worth, only what two people agreed on a moment ago.
That small distinction changes everything. The market is not an opponent playing against you. It is a crowd of people and machines renegotiating every second — and a kverk learns to read how that agreement moves.
Analogy: Picture a market stall selling apples. The price of an apple is not a property of the apple. It is a number one seller and one buyer happen to agree on right now. Ten more buyers turn up and the number jumps — the apple has not changed.
Why prices move
Movement comes from imbalance. When more people want to buy than to sell at a given moment, buyers have to offer more to convince someone, and the price rises. When sellers dominate, the opposite happens. News, earnings, mood, panic and somebody simply needing their money back all reach the market through one channel only: buy and sell orders.
That is why hunting for a “reason” behind every move is wasted effort. Most small wiggles have no story at all — they are just orders that happened to meet in a different order than they did a minute ago. Only when a move repeats and holds does asking why start to pay. And even then the answer usually arrives after the fact.
A candle: four numbers in one picture
KVERX charts are drawn as candles. One candle summarises one period — five minutes, an hour, a day — with four numbers: the open (first trade), the high, the low and the close (last trade). The body is the distance between open and close; the thin lines above and below are the wicks: where price went and failed to stay.
Picture the body between open and close, a wick up to the high and down to the low, and a volume bar underneath.
Colour is just shorthand: a lighter body means it closed above where it opened, a darker one the reverse. A long upper wick is a small story in itself — buyers tried to lift the price and sellers pushed them back.
A candle is a summary, not the truth. Anything could have happened inside those five minutes; the candle remembers four numbers. Two completely different paths — one calm, one violent — can draw the very same candle. The longer the period a candle covers, the more it forgets.
The fifth number: volume
Alongside the four prices sits one more figure — volume, how many units changed hands during the period. Volume does not tell you direction, it tells you participation: how many people were actually part of that agreement. A one-percent move on heavy volume is a different animal from the same move on almost none.
For a kverk, volume is not trivia. The simulator uses it to work out what a trade will cost: the average money volume over the last 20 candles is the base from which both the spread and the price damage of a large order are derived. When a candle is ten times thinner than usual, trading inside it is markedly more expensive (chapter 7).
How long one candle is: the tempo
How many minutes or hours a candle covers is not a property of the market but a choice. In a kverk DNA it is the tempo element and it has three values: five minutes, one hour, one day. The default is an hour. The tempo decides how often the kverk wakes up to make a decision at all.
The five-minute tempo is reserved for crypto. Equity data reaches us on roughly a fifteen-minute delay, and deciding every five minutes on numbers a quarter of an hour old would make no sense. Even in crypto, though, a faster tempo does not mean more opportunity — mostly it means more trades and more costs paid.
The price a kverk sees is not the price it gets
One rule of the simulator is worth knowing right at the start: a kverk decides when it knows the closing price of a candle, but its order is filled at the opening price of the next one. Between the decision and the fill there is always a stretch of time in which the price can move.
This is not spite. If orders filled at the closing price, the simulator would be fortune-telling — the kverk would buy at a number that was not yet reachable when it decided. That single trick is what turns most “brilliant” tests on history into results that fail in real life.
A KVERX EXAMPLE
A kverk never sees the picture. It sees exactly those four numbers plus volume, for the last few dozen periods, and computes its senses from them — “momentum”, say, or “volatility”. When the Journal says FERDA decided “at the close of the candle”, it means literally that: it received the last complete set of four numbers and only then made up its mind. In the “Why” card for the same trade you then see the opening price of the following candle, which is where it actually filled.
Remember one thing: a price is a record of the past. Everything else — a kverk included — is a guess about what follows from it.
QUIZ · QUESTION 1 OF 3
the quiz unlocks nothing — it is for youWhat does a share price tell you?
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The academy is written and maintained by Caroline Technologies, the company behind KVERX. What it says about KVERX follows the product’s own rules — see How it works. Nothing here is investment advice: Risk warning.