Bar Replay

How It Works

Bar Replay lets you rewind any chart to a historical date and then play it forward one candle at a time. The chart renders exactly as it would have appeared at that moment in time, so you can practice making trading decisions with zero hindsight bias. Every indicator, overlay, and drawing tool works in replay mode just as it does on a live chart.

Use Cases

Bar Replay is one of the most effective tools for improving your chart-reading skills. Here are the most common ways traders use it.

Practice Trading Without Risk

Paper trading on live markets is slow — you have to wait for setups to develop in real time. With Bar Replay, you can compress weeks of price action into minutes. Rewind to a volatile earnings week, a breakout from a consolidation range, or a major trend reversal and practice making entry and exit decisions as though you were there live. You build pattern recognition faster because you control the pace.

Test How You Would Have Read Price Action

It is easy to look at a historical chart and say "I would have bought here." But would you really? Bar Replay removes hindsight bias by hiding future candles. You see only what was available at the time and make your call before revealing the outcome. Over dozens of replays, you develop an honest understanding of your strengths and weaknesses as a chart reader.

Study Historical Moves

Want to understand how Tesla behaved during its 2020 run? How Bitcoin traded around its all-time high? How the S&P 500 collapsed and recovered during COVID? Rewind to the start of any major move and step through it candle by candle. Watch how indicators like MACD, RSI, and moving averages behaved at each stage. This kind of deliberate study is how professional traders refine their edge.

The Playback Controls

When Bar Replay is active, a dedicated playback control bar appears on the chart. It's fully draggable — position it anywhere so it never covers the price action you're studying — and it gives you precise control over how the replay advances.

• Play / Pause — toggle automatic playback on or off. When playing, new candles appear at the interval set by your speed slider.
• Step Forward — reveal exactly one candle. Useful when you want to analyze each bar individually before moving on.
• Step Backward — hide the most recently revealed candle. Lets you re-examine the previous state of the chart if you want to reconsider a decision.
• Speed Slider — adjust how fast candles appear during auto-play. Drag the slider from slow (one candle every 2 seconds) to fast (multiple candles per second) to match your study pace.
• Date-Offset Controls — jump or skip within a replay session. When nothing interesting is developing, leap ahead by a set amount of time instead of stepping through every quiet candle.

Paper Trading Simulator

Bar Replay is more than a chart viewer — it's a full paper trading simulator. Place trades during a replay session and manage them exactly as you would live, with the market unfolding candle by candle in front of you.

• Buy & sell orders — go long or short at the current replay price, add to a position, or flatten it as the session develops.
• Stop losses & take profits — attach a stop and a target to any position. They appear as dashed levels directly on the chart, and intrabar fill detection checks each candle's full range — if price touched your level inside the bar, the order fills, exactly as it would in a live market.
• Live P&L tracking — watch open profit and loss update with every candle, just like a real position on your account.
• Post-session stats — end the session and get a summary of how you traded: your trades, wins and losses, and overall P&L. The numbers don't lie, and that's the point.

Start Anywhere in History

Date Picker

Start a replay at any past date. Pick the moment you want to study and the chart rewinds to exactly that point — the future candles are hidden until you reveal them, so your decisions are made with only the information a trader had at the time.

Random Date Mode

Even with the future hidden, it's hard to be objective when you recognize the chart — you remember what Bitcoin did in 2021 or how a famous earnings gap resolved. Random Date mode fixes that: it drops you at an unrecognizable moment in history, so you're trading the price action in front of you and nothing else. It's blind practice, and it's the most honest read on your skill you can get.

What Timeframes Work

Bar Replay supports every timeframe available in ChartingLens. Whether you trade on 1-minute scalping charts or weekly swing charts, you can replay historical price action at your preferred resolution.

• Intraday — 1m, 3m, 5m, 15m, 30m, 1h, 2h, 4h timeframes for day-trading practice
• Daily — the most popular timeframe for swing trading replay sessions
• Weekly & Monthly — ideal for studying long-term trends and macro turning points

You can also switch timeframes mid-replay. If you start on the daily chart and want to zoom into the 1-hour view for a specific day, the replay state is preserved — you will see only the candles up to your current replay position on the new timeframe as well.

Free vs Premium vs Pro

Bar Replay is a Premium feature designed for serious traders who want to accelerate their learning curve. It's included in both Premium ($14.99/mo) and Pro ($29.99/mo).