What Is a Candlestick and How Do You Read One?

A candlestick shows four prices for a period — the open, high, low and close — in a single bar. The body spans the open and close; the thin wicks (or shadows) reach up to the high and down to the low. A close above the open is usually drawn light or green (an up candle); a close below the open dark or red (a down candle). Educational, not financial advice.

Anatomy of a candle

• Body — the range between the open and the close.
• Upper wick — from the body up to the high.
• Lower wick — from the body down to the low.

A long body means a decisive move; a small body with long wicks means the period was indecisive — price went both ways and closed near where it started.

What a candle tells you

A single candle summarises the tug-of-war between buyers and sellers for that period. A long lower wick, for example, shows sellers pushed price down but buyers pushed it back up by the close. It describes what happened, not what happens next.

Do not over-read one candle

Individual candles are noisy. Their meaning depends on where they appear — a long-wicked candle at a support or resistance level says more than the same candle in the middle of nowhere. Context and market structure decide relevance.

Practise reading them

Our free Daily Trading Quiz gives you new chart-reading questions every day — a low-friction way to sharpen how you read candles and levels. The Price Action course covers it in depth.

Takeaway

A candlestick shows open, high, low and close in one bar — body for the open-to-close range, wicks for the extremes. Read it for the story of buyers versus sellers, but always in context, never a single candle alone.

Educational only — not financial advice. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell.