MT4 Trendlines change depending on timeframe of same chart...?

In MT4 I pull up the Monthly chart and draw my trendlines. Let's say it shows the line at 1.3525 for today.

When I click the 4H chart that same line is now showing at 1.3325 for today.

Has anyone else experienced this or could anyone tell me why this might be happening?

I have the parameter for "show on all timeframes" checked. But the line is in a completely different place depending on if I'm viewing the monthly or the 4H chart.

each end of the line moves in time, because the time isnt available on other time frame

that changes the value everywhere except the 2 end points of the trendline, a solution is adjust the tl ends on the smaller tf

since ur drawing on monthly, the end of the line could move alot, maybe even a whole day

This is a known design flaw of mt4. due to the way it draws the candles into the chart it may happen that for example one hour is not composed of exactly 60 M1 Candles, most often there are less candles on lower timeframes than should be theoretically expected. MT4 will just completely leave out candles for which it has not received at least one tick. If the Market doesn't move between 12:00 and 12:02 there will be no 12:00 and no 12:01 candle, if it doesn't move until 12:06 there will be 6 Candles missing on M1 and one Candle on M5.

Since this happens randomly and not evenly distributed during the day (or even the week) because there are quiet times with less volatility where this is more likely to happen, the time axis on lower timeframes is not linear! The time axis on the M1 chart is not a zoomed in version of the H1 chart with a constant zoom factor, it is something completely different.

If you anchor your line on two candles that are 10 Hours away there might not necessarily be 600 M1 candles between them if you switch to M1. It might be only 500, but the rest of the day may have less missing candles. Naturally the slope (pips per minute) of the same line will change when you switch time. on the H1 chart it is x pips per 600 minutes, on the M1 chart it is steeper, there it may be x pips per only 500 minutes.

Brokers who use linear time (oanda for example) have no missing candles and such effects do not happen, but unfortunately they [oanda] do not provide charts that reach long enough into the past to draw weekly or even monthly lines.

This non-linear time problem adds to the effect of rounding errors that tomhliles already mentioned but might exceed it sometimes by orders of magnitude, especially on the more exotic pairs that have fewer ticks and longer periods of low volatility.

There is no other workaround than trying to anchor the lines as accurate as possible with points sufficiently far away from each other and the last point not too far in the past OR only use higher timeframe lines only on higher timeframes.

Another solution would be a script that will modify all history files and fill in the missing candles so that time becomes linear and comparable across all timeframes. Such a script exists, I have seen it on some forum but I don't recall the name.

Thank you so much for your answers.

I am just experiencing the trendline problem in my current GOLD chart on MT4:

I have drawn a trendline on D1 from 24 March 2010 (1085.08) - 19 April 2010 (1123.76) connecting the daily lows. On H4, it matches precisely today's lows (20 May 1010, 1175.08), however on _D1_ it does NOT (chart displays significant space between today's low and the trendline).

Browsing through the quotes in the History Center, I've found that there are candles for Sundays on D1. In addition, it seems that my broker has changed the process: Sunday candles have not been provided since a few weeks. I simply deleted all of the Sunday candles.

This has solved the problem, the trendline now aligns quite precisely between H4 and D1.

The reason seems to be obvious: On the D1 chart, a Sunday candle uses the same horizontal space as a weekday's candle, but this is not consistent with the lower timespace (e.g., on H1, there is only one candle on Sunday). As mentioned here before, this results in a non-linear scale of time.

I am using a live account with ActivTrades, the system is running with Central European Time (during summer = GMT+2).

I don't know if this is a general solution for this problem, but in my case it helped!