From candle patterns to measured chances: how Kunkafa reads a market now

A run of green candles feels like a trend, and a trend feels like permission. That is greed reading a chart. Read the same chart after a bad week and every candle looks like a warning — that is fear, and both readings can wreck the next decision. Kunkafa does not take a side. It maps the paths, how far each one could run, and the chance of getting there. This page used to explain how the candles themselves were read; that question has been retired, and what follows is what replaced it.

What was retired

The old question was: will the next candle close up or down? It is gone, and so is the smoothed-candle idea it was built on, in which each bar was averaged against the one before it to make the direction easier to see.

Two things were wrong with it. The first is that the answer was not usable. Knowing that the next bar leans up tells you nothing about how far the price could travel, or by when, and those are the only parts anyone actually needs. A lean with no distance and no clock attached is a mood, not a forecast.

The second is worse. Smoothing made the chart legible by moving it away from the prices that were actually traded, so the forecast was graded against the smoothed picture rather than against the market. It could be right about a drawing and wrong about the money. Anything checked against a construct will flatter itself, and it took a while to admit that out loud.

If you arrived here looking for candle patterns, nothing below is a pattern. It is the same market, measured differently.

A forecast is four things

How far, which way, how long it has, and the chance it gets there. Every forecast in Kunkafa Predictions carries all four, and none of them means much without the other three.

• How far — the move as a change from today’s price, written as a percentage, so it reads the same on a share and on a currency.
• Which way — up or down, with the other side one glance below. If one is 61%, the other is 39%, and the second number is the one people skip.
• How long it has — the duration the move has to happen in. The same distance is a different proposition in an afternoon than it is in a year.
• The chance it gets there — how likely the price is to reach that level within that duration, counted against how often similar forecasts actually did.

How to read the ladder

Across, one row at a time. The ladder has three columns — change, duration, chance — and a single row says one complete thing: the price could move this far, within this long, with this chance. Rows above the current price are the up paths; rows below are the down paths; they are on screen at once because a market that could rise 4% could also fall, and you cannot weigh one without the other.

Beside the ladder, the price line carries the same levels drawn as a band around it, so the numbers and the picture are the same forecast rather than two views that might disagree.

Three filters sit above it. Only show forecasts at least this strong keeps the weaker readings out of the list. How far it has to go narrows the distances to the ones worth your attention. Both, Up or Down restricts the direction. All three change the list you read.

Every duration, on one screen

The duration control is a ceiling, not a choice between separate charts. Drag it from five minutes up to “up to 7 years”, through Scalping, Day trading, Swing and Investing, and you are raising the longest duration you want to see rather than switching markets.

This matters more than it sounds. A market can lean up over the next hour and down over the next quarter without contradiction, and someone who only ever looks at one length of time will read one of those as the whole truth. Raising the ceiling shows the short paths and the long ones in the same view.

The record, beside every forecast

How similar forecasts performed sits under each one, covering the last day, 7 days, 30 days and all time, with four counts:

• Forecasts evaluated — how many finished and could be counted at all.
• Strong enough for this filter — how many cleared the strength you selected.
• Finished in the forecast direction — how often the price ended the period on the side the forecast leaned.
• Reached the selected movement level — how often it travelled the whole distance, which is the harder question.

Each finished forecast ends in one of a few plain states: it reached the movement level, it passed the movement level, the period ended ahead, the period ended behind, or it is still running. Nothing is scored as a near miss.

Below 100 finished examples the panel refuses to quote a rate at all and says so instead: Not enough past examples to estimate performance reliably. A rate under 1% is written as under 1%, because the gap between 0.4% and 0.9% is not something we can honestly claim to know. Freshness is shown the same way, as Updated 4 minutes ago rather than a countdown, because a clock ticking towards zero manufactures urgency that the market has not asked for.

Why this is the more honest question

Because every part of it can be marked against what the market actually did. A level either was reached or it was not. A duration either ran out or it did not. A stated chance can be counted across thousands of finished forecasts and compared with how often the move arrived, and when the two disagree the number is corrected rather than defended. That loop is described on the methodology page, and the running totals are on the results page, updated daily.

It also sets expectations that a next-candle call quietly avoided setting.

A screen that leaned decisively every hour would be describing itself rather than the market. Most of the time the honest answer is that both paths remain open and neither is worth acting on, which is dull to look at and the reason the exceptions are worth noticing. Why that is a feature of markets rather than a shortcoming is worked through in why price prediction is impossible, and what to do with a number you cannot be sure of in understanding uncertainty.

What to look at first

Open a market you already have an opinion about, in the demo, which needs no account, and look for the row that disagrees with you. Note how far the other direction could run and how likely that is, then decide whether your opinion survives it. That is the whole use of the thing.

Nothing is metered, so looking costs nothing and no counter moves while you read; what a plan changes is how many durations, follows and alerts you get, which is set out in the FAQ and priced on the plans section of the home page. Word-by-word definitions of everything on the screen live in the glossary.

Forecast, not advice. For the rational investor: emotion out, scenarios in.