Candlesticks
The four prices inside every candle, and what the shape of one tells you about the fight behind it.
Our charts carry price and nothing else. No oscillators, no moving average ribbons, no indicator stack. So reading price properly is not a starting point you move past, it is the skill itself, and it starts with one candle.
Four prices in one bar
Each candle covers one slice of time and records four things: where price opened, how high it got, how low it got, and where it closed.
Body and wick
The thick body spans the open and the close. The thin wicks reach out to the high and the low. Body and wick tell you different things. A long body says one side was in control from start to finish. A long wick says price got there and was rejected, so someone was waiting with size at that price.
That rejection is the useful part. A long upper wick means buyers pushed up and got pushed back down. A long lower wick means sellers pressed and buyers absorbed it. Those wicks tend to cluster around the same prices, which is where the next lesson picks up.
Green and red
Green means the candle closed above where it opened, red means it closed below. A green candle can still be a bad session for buyers if it closed near its lows after a big push up, and a red candle can be constructive if it held a level all day. Colour alone is not a read.
The timeframe is a choice
On a daily chart, one candle is one trading day. On a 15 minute chart it is 15 minutes. The same stretch of price looks calm on one and violent on the other, and neither is more real than the other. What changes is what you can see: the higher timeframes show you the structure that matters, and the lower ones show you the timing inside it.
Our published charts show intraday and daily views of the same name together for exactly this reason. A level that only exists on a five minute chart is not much of a level.
What a single candle does not tell you
There is a long catalogue of named candle patterns and most of it will not help you. One candle in isolation is a fact about the last few minutes, not a forecast. What we take from candles is where price was accepted and where it was rejected, over and over, at the same numbers.
Educational content only. Trading options involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for every investor. Nothing on this page is financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security.