Bar Replay: practise trading on past market data, bar by bar
Bar Replay in SuperCharting hides the future and replays past bars one at a time, with play, step and nine speeds, so you can practise reading the chart.
Bar Replay lets you go back to a point in the past, hide every bar after it, and then reveal the chart one bar at a time, as if the market were happening again. You make your read before each new bar appears, which makes it one of the best ways to practise without risking money. In SuperCharting you open it with the Replay button in the top toolbar or Shift + R.
What Bar Replay does
When you start a replay on a chart:
- Every bar after the starting point is hidden, together with the part of each indicator that belongs to those bars.
- Play reveals one bar after another at the speed you choose; Forward reveals exactly one.
- Indicators, strategy results and script drawings are shown only up to the last revealed bar, so nothing from the future leaks onto the chart.
- Your drawings stay; you can draw new trend lines, Fibonacci levels or position tools while the replay is paused.
- When you exit, the full chart comes back, including any live bars that arrived while you were replaying.
The replay runs on the bars the chart has loaded. To replay an older period, scroll back on the chart first so that history is loaded (up to 40,000 bars per chart), then start the replay.
The replay toolbar
When Bar Replay is on, a toolbar appears under the chart:
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Select bar | arms the chart: the next bar you click becomes the starting point |
| Arrow next to it (Select starting point) | Bar, Date… (type a date and time), First available date or Random bar |
| Play / pause | reveals bars one after another; click again to pause |
| Forward | reveals the next bar |
| Replay speed | 10x, 7x, 5x, 3x, 1x, 0.5x, 0.3x, 0.2x or 0.1x |
| Update interval | the replay step, which is one bar of the chart's interval |
| Jump to real-time chart | reveals everything up to now |
| Exit Bar Replay | closes the replay and restores the chart |
The speeds are bars per second: 1x is one bar every second, 10x ten bars a second, and 0.1x one bar every ten seconds. You can change the speed while the replay is playing.
Update interval
The replay always moves one bar of the chart's own interval at a time. On a 15-minute chart, each step adds one 15-minute bar. The menu also lists 1 tick, 1 second and 1 minute; choosing them shows a message, because the market history here comes as whole bars, not the trades inside them. To replay in smaller steps, switch the chart to a smaller interval before starting.
Alerts, the tester and paper trading during replay
- Alerts do not fire on replayed bars. Alerts watch the live market, so a price alert at a level that the replay crosses stays silent, as on other charting sites. They keep working for live prices while you replay.
- Strategy trades drawn on the chart appear only up to the revealed bar, so you can watch a strategy's entries and exits arrive as the replay plays.
- Paper trading uses live prices, not replayed ones, so orders in the paper trading panel are not filled at replay prices. Use the long and short position tools from the drawing tools to plan replay trades, and keep a written log.
How to use Bar Replay in SuperCharting
- Open the chart, for example NSE:BANKNIFTY on 5 minutes, and scroll back to the week you want.
- Click Replay in the top toolbar (or press Shift + R). The replay toolbar opens and the cursor turns into a pointer, ready for you to pick the starting bar.
- Click a bar, for example 09:15 on a Monday. Everything after it disappears.
- Set Replay speed to 1x for your first session.
- Press Play, and press it again to pause when you want to think. Use Forward to step one bar at a time near your decision points.
- Mark your plan with a horizontal line or a long position tool before each decision.
- Press Exit Bar Replay (or Shift + R again) to return to the live chart.
To pick a precise starting point, use the arrow next to Select bar, choose Date…, type the date and time, and press Select. Random bar drops you somewhere you do not remember, which is the most honest practice.
A practice routine
A routine that many traders use with replay:
- Choose one setup to practise, for example the first pullback after the opening range on NSE:NIFTY 5 minutes.
- Start the replay at the open on a random day and play at 3x until the first 30 minutes are done.
- Pause. Draw the opening range with a rectangle and decide where you would enter, where the stop goes and where the target is.
- Step forward with Forward and note what happened: target, stop, or neither by the close.
- Repeat for 20 days and count the outcomes.
The count tells you how the setup behaved in those 20 days. It does not promise the same in future; past results do not guarantee future results. For a rule-based test of the same idea, write it as a strategy and run it in the Strategy Tester.
Example
On XAUUSD 15 minutes, start a replay at 13:00 UTC on a day with US data. Pause before 13:30, draw a Fibonacci retracement over the morning swing and mark the 0.618 level. Play at 1x through the release and see whether price respected the level, ran through it, or never reached it. Then try the same on two other release days.
Things to know
- Replay works on the active chart of a multi-chart layout. The other charts keep showing live data.
- It works on every chart type, including Heikin Ashi and Renko: the bricks are rebuilt as the bars are revealed.
- On a phone screen the Replay button is hidden to save room, so use a desktop or tablet browser for replay sessions.
Frequently asked questions
Will my alerts trigger during a replay?
No. Alerts watch live prices only; replayed bars never trigger them.
Can I replay further back than what the chart shows?
Scroll back first to load more history, then start the replay. The starting point can be any loaded bar.
Do indicators repaint during replay?
Each indicator is shown only up to the last revealed bar. Scripts that use future data by design can still look different from live behaviour.
Can I replay tick by tick?
No. The replay moves one bar of the chart's interval at a time. Use a smaller interval, such as 1 minute, for finer steps.
Does replay change my saved layout?
No. Exiting restores the full chart, and your drawings made during replay are kept.