Why your Polymarket chart looks 'off' — and how to read it right

1. Different material: real fills vs a snapshot line

Polymarket's native chart is primarily a probability line drawn from periodic price snapshots. TruthTickTerminal's candles are built from executed trades — every bar's open, high, low, close, and volume come from actual fills. A snapshot line glides through quiet periods and smooths spikes; a fill-based candle shows exactly where contracts traded, including wicks the snapshot line never sees.

Neither is 'wrong'. If you want the shape of sentiment, the line is fine. If you're timing entries, the fills are the truth.

2. Time resolution: 1m vs 5m vs 15m vs 1h vs D

A 5-minute candle is not five 1-minute candles glued together visually — it's one bar whose open is the FIRST fill in the window and whose close is the LAST. Switching resolution legitimately changes shapes: a violent 1m spike can disappear inside a calm-looking 1h bar.

Buckets are aligned to UTC boundaries. A daily bar runs midnight-to-midnight UTC, not your local midnight, so a 'day' here can differ from a 'day' on a chart aligned to your timezone. When comparing two charts, always match BOTH the resolution and the alignment before concluding data differs.

3. Tick candles vs time candles

TruthTickTerminal also offers tick bars — 1T through 100T — where each bar closes after a fixed NUMBER of trades instead of a fixed time. Prediction-market activity is bursty: nothing for an hour, then fifty fills in a minute around news. Tick bars expand busy periods and compress dead ones, so they will never visually match a time-based chart. That's their job.

If your chart 'looks weird' compared to Polymarket, check the toolbar: if a T-suffixed timeframe is active (the BTC 5m/15m windows default to tick bars), you're on tick candles.

4. Zero-volume bars in old history

Bars older than the trade archive are backfilled from Polymarket's midpoint price history and intentionally carry zero volume — we don't fabricate volume we didn't witness. If the left side of a long chart shows price without volume, that's the honest boundary between midpoint history and real-fill history, not missing data.

5. Orderflow alignment: footprint vs candles

The footprint's buy/sell volumes always sum to the bar's total volume — they're the same fills grouped by price and aggressor side. If a footprint looks misaligned with its candle, check that you haven't switched the chart side: YES and NO contracts are mirror images (a 30¢ YES fill is a 70¢ NO fill), and each side charts its own contract's fills.

On the Bitcoin up/down windows, also remember each 5-minute window is its OWN market with its own tape. When the window rolls, the chart starts the new contract's history — the previous window's candles belong to a market that just resolved.

Still looks wrong?

If you've matched resolution, alignment, side, and candle type and the data still looks incorrect, it might actually be incorrect — brief feed gaps can delay fills for a few seconds before reconciliation backfills them (see the data accuracy page). A hard refresh re-pulls the full tape for the market. If something persists after that, contact us through the terminal and include the market and timeframe — we read every report.