Comparand looks at the latest stretch of one coin's chart and finds the past stretches of that same coin, on the same exchange, that looked most like it. For each match, it shows what the price did next. A bar, also called a candle, shows the open, high, low and close price over a set time. You pick the coin, the exchange, the candle size and how many candles to compare. The default is 48 one-hour candles, which covers two days.
This topic covers how to run a search, how to read what comes back, how to check the data under it, and how Comparand differs from other chart tools.
What did we measure?
- The window length changes the matches a lot. We ran 300 hourly searches per market, 2020 to September 2026, with 48 and then 96 candles ending at the same moment. On Binance BTCUSDT, only 1.96 of the ten closest matches stayed the same. On Coinbase ETH-USD, only 1.52 stayed.
- The ten matches often disagree. Across 12 markets and 3,600 searches with 48 hourly candles, the middle match move pointed the right way 24 hours later 50.22% of the time. Always guessing "up" scored 50.92%. In 62.72% of searches, 4 to 6 of the 10 matches went up. So we read the matches as a range of past outcomes, not a vote.
- Each exchange gives its own result. The same Bitcoin test, 300 searches each, picked the next-day direction right 50.67% of the time on Binance BTCUSDT and 47.33% on Coinbase BTC-USD. That gap is within what chance can do at 300 tests. Under it, Coinbase BTC-USD was a median +3.26 bp above Binance from September 2019 to October 2026, across 62,342 paired hourly closes. A basis point (bp) is one hundredth of one percent. This is why a search only compares a coin with its own past on one exchange.
- Data gaps differ by exchange. To October 20, 2026, Binance BTCUSDT hourly bars had 0 missing hours since September 2019. Coinbase BTC-USD had 55 missing hours since July 2015.
These are past cases, not a forecast.
Where should you start?
- Start with How to find past crypto charts that look like today's. It walks through the five choices in a search.
- Then read Why chart pattern matching should stay on one exchange to see why Bitcoin on Binance and Bitcoin on Coinbase are kept apart.
- How to check crypto data quality and where it came from shows four checks for any price data: missing bars, unfinished candles, exchange gaps and file fingerprints.
- Comparand vs TradingView: which fits chart pattern search? says what each tool does better.
- TradingView similar pattern scripts vs past-case search compares community scripts like LuxAlgo's Echo Forecast with a list of single past cases.
- Comparand vs TrendSpider: two ways to find past look-alikes compares a single consensus path with a list of each case and what followed.