Closing a Trade in Crypto Markets

Close is the closing price – one of the main data points used to track the performance of an asset.

What is close?

The close price is one of the four main data points used in day trading in the stock, cryptocurrency and other markets to track the performance of an asset. The other three are the opening, high and low prices, and all four together are known as OHLC.

Before the advent of electronic communication networks in 1969, stock trading was conducted exclusively during regular market hours, such as 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. for the New York Stock Exchange. As a result, it was possible to clearly delineate asset performance by day: trading opened and closed at certain price points, and during each day there were easily identifiable highest and lowest prices.

Thanks to the development of electronic trading, after-hours trading became available, albeit at much lower volumes than trading during regular hours. Nevertheless, this has not made OHLC metrics obsolete - their usefulness for market analysis is that they are still tracked within normal market hours.

Cryptocurrency exchanges, which emerged in the early 2010s shortly after the invention of cryptocurrencies themselves, have maintained 24-hour trading from the beginning, thanks to two facts: these platforms are exclusively online, and the assets listed on them run 100% of the time. Despite this, they still provide their users with OHLC data, most often in the form of candlestick charts.

Specifically, the closing price is often considered by traders to be the most important of the four metrics, as it is used as a standard benchmark for evaluating an asset’s performance over various time periods.