Gann Fan: Gann Angles, Chart Scale and How to Draw the Fan

A Gann fan is a set of straight lines drawn from one major swing low or swing high, each rising or falling at a fixed ratio of price to time. The central line, the 1x1, moves one unit of price per unit of time; the others move faster or slower. TradingView describes the tool as part of the method that W. D. Gann developed around 1935, together with the Gann box and the Gann square. Traders read the angle that price holds above or below as a gauge of how strong a trend is.

Gann angles: what 1x1, 2x1 and 1x2 mean

Each line of the fan is a Gann angle, written as a ratio of price to time. On TradingView, the 1x1 represents “one unit of price for one unit of time”, the 2x1 moves “up two points per day”, and the tool can show angles up to 16x1. The diagram above follows the same order: the first number is price, the second is time, so the 2x1, 3x1, 4x1 and 8x1 are steeper than the 1x1 and the 1x2, 1x3, 1x4 and 1x8 are flatter.

MetaTrader 5 writes the ratio the other way round. Its help page lists the 1x2 at 63.75 degrees and the 2x1 at 26.25 degrees, so its 1x2 is the steep line that TradingView calls 2x1. Before you compare two charts or two articles, check which order they use.

The first number of each angle is the price it moves per bar, in 1x1 units, divided by the second: the 2x1 moves 2 units per bar, the 1x2 moves 0.5, the 1x8 moves 0.125. The slopes in the second column are the arctangents of the ratios, the angle each line actually makes when one unit of price and one bar take the same space on screen. The degrees in the third column are the rounded values that circulate with Gann's work: each pair adds up to 90, but they differ from the true slopes by up to about one degree. Either way, a degree only has a meaning on a square chart, which is why the scale comes first.

The scale decides everything

The 1x1 rises one unit of price per bar, but nothing in the market says what the unit is. MetaTrader 5 asks for it in a “Pips Per Bar” setting and says the two axes must have the same scale, with the 1x1 drawn at 45 degrees. TradingView suggests a way to find it: take the difference between two main points, top to top or bottom to bottom, and divide it by the time the market took to travel between them.

The drawing shows why the unit matters more than the angle. The price path is the same in both cases; at scale A the 1x1 is twice as steep as at scale B, so the same rally falls through one line and rides on the other. A trader who has not written down the unit can pick, after the fact, whichever scale makes the line look respected.

The chart below applies a stated rule to daily Bitcoin. The fan starts at the lowest swing low of the window (a low with 10 lower bars on each side): July 1, 2026, at 57,800.19. Its 1x1 is drawn through the most extreme swing high that followed, September 21, 2026, at 87,395.67, reached 82 bars later. That gives a unit of 360.9 per bar.

The second chart keeps the same anchor but uses a round 1,000 per bar, a value chosen only to show what a different scale does.

How to draw a Gann fan

1. Pick the pivot: a clear swing low for a rising fan, a swing high for a falling one.
2. Fix the unit of the 1x1. Either measure it from a past swing, as TradingView suggests and as the first chart does, or set a price per bar and keep it for that market and timeframe.
3. Draw the fan. On TradingView the tool takes two points; in MetaTrader 5 you click the start point, drag along the 1x1 and adjust “Pips Per Bar”, with the “Downtrend” box ticked for a falling fan.
4. Check that the 1x1 stays at the same slope when you zoom. If it moves with the zoom, you are reading screen angles, not Gann angles.
5. Write down the unit before you look at what price did next, so that the scale is not chosen to fit the outcome.

How traders read the fan

• The angle price holds. According to TradingView, a market above its 2x1 is more bullish than one that only holds the 1x1, and staying above a rising angle keeps the trend bullish.
• The 1x1 as the key line. MetaTrader 5 says Gann thought the 1x1 was a powerful support line in a rising trend and saw its break as an important turn signal.
• The next angle. Both sources report Gann's view that, once price breaks an angle, it tends to move to the next one.

On the first Bitcoin chart, the close fell below the 1x1 on July 23 and below the 1x2 on July 31, which fits the “next angle” idea. Price then did not reach the 1x4: it climbed back above the 1x1 by August 21. Between July 6 and September 4 the close moved from one zone of the fan to another 11 times, so a reader could find a break, a hold or a return to the 1x1 at almost any date. This fan could only be drawn after the September 21 high was confirmed, ten bars later, so its July and August readings are hindsight. It is one fan on one market over four months, not a test.

Limits of the Gann fan

• Scale. The lines have no fixed position until you choose the price per bar, and two reasonable choices can give opposite readings.
• Choice of pivot. A fan from another low draws a different set of lines.
• Many lines. With nine lines spreading from one point, price is always near one of them.
• No measured edge. Our bench tests chart patterns detected by fixed rules, not drawing tools, and we found no published study of the fan's lines.

The fan belongs to a family of tools. The W. D. Gann page covers the man and his method, the Gann Square of 9 works with price levels, and the Andrews pitchfork is another tool that projects lines from swing points. A plain trendline drawn through two lows is a simpler way to measure the same slope. More tools of this kind are in technical analysis.