What one candle is telling you: body, wicks, open/close/high/low

A whole candlestick chart is just a lot of candles lined up — but the thing you really need to learn first is how to read one of them. A single candle looks simple, a block with two thin whiskers, yet it records four prices and two moods. Get this one candle straight, and the patterns and trends that come later are all just extensions of it.

One candle hides four prices

When we were starting out, we'd stare at a single candle too, wondering what on earth the thing was supposed to mean. It turned out it squeezes all the price activity over one slice of time into four numbers, which traders call OHLC — Open, High, Low, Close.

Look back at the diagram above: the thick block in the middle is the body, and its two ends are the open and the close; the thin lines poking out top and bottom are the wicks, marking the extremes the price touched. The body always sits between the open and the close; the wicks always sit outside them. The colour tells you which end is which — when it's green (up), the close is on top and the open below; when it's red (down), it's the other way around.

The trap around those red/green colours we cover in more detail in how to read a candlestick chart. If you haven't seen it, give it a quick scan first so you don't read the colours backwards.

What the body says: strength

Of the four prices, the length of the body reflects which side — buyers or sellers — had more force over that slice of time. The body is just the distance from open to close. A big distance means the price was pushed in one direction from start to finish; a small one means open and close ended up close together and neither side moved it much.

Here's a way to picture it. Say there's a green daily candle with a long body, running from the open all the way up to a high close — that's telling you buyers had the upper hand that day and the price was more or less carried up in one go. Flip it: a long red body is sellers leaning on it all day. The longer the body, the clearer that side's strength.

But don't turn "lots of strength" straight into "it'll keep rising/falling". A long body only tells you what just happened; it says nothing about how the next candle goes. Treat it as a statement, not a prophecy.

One line is enough to remember: the body shows strength, the wicks show the back-and-forth. Those two run through every pattern you'll meet later.

What the wicks say: prices that got rejected

Wicks are the part beginners most often skip over, even though they carry a lot. A wick marks "a place the price went, but couldn't hold".

Take the lower wick. If a candle has a long one, it means the price dropped a fair way during that slice but got pulled back up by the close. In other words, that low got "rejected" — someone was buying down there and pushed the price back up. By the same logic, a long upper wick says the price spiked up, couldn't hold the high, and fell back, blocked by selling pressure up top.

So wicks read as "the back-and-forth": the price probed around during the slice and got pushed back from some level. The longer the wick, the more flatly that probe was rejected. It's also why some experienced people watch the wicks even more closely than the body — they hold the traces of that slice's tug-of-war between buyers and sellers.

Here's a way to picture the difference. Two candles can have the exact same body — say both opened at the same price and closed a touch higher — and still tell very different stories. One has barely any wicks: the price went straight from open to close with little fuss. The other has a long lower wick: the price first fell hard, scared a few people into selling at the bottom, then got hauled all the way back up to close in the same place. Identical bodies, opposite experiences. If you only read the body you'd call them the same candle; the wick is what separates "a calm drift up" from "a save after a scare". That's information you don't want to throw away.

That said, the wick on a single candle on its own only tells you so much. It's more reliable read together with the candles before and after it, and together with where on the chart it sits. Put a few candles together and you get a pattern.

A few typical shapes

Combine different ratios of body and wick and you get the handful of candle shapes beginners run into most. Learn these three; the rest are variations.

Note that these shapes are only "what's there", not "signals". The same long lower wick can mean completely different things in different places on the chart. They only mean something read alongside the position and the trend — which is exactly what a few common candle patterns goes into. Here, all you need is to tell these few shapes apart at a glance.

How to read one yourself

Finally, here's a plodding method. Take any unfamiliar candle, run through it, and over time it turns into instinct:

1. Colour first: green or red? (You've already confirmed what green and red mean on your screen.) This tells you whether the slice rose or fell.
2. Then the body length: a fat body means one side had real force over the slice; a thin body means open and close were close together, with no real direction.
3. Then the wicks: which side's wick is long? A long upper wick = a spike that got pushed back; a long lower wick = a drop that got bought back; both long = back-and-forth tugging.
4. Position last: where on the whole chart does this candle sit — high up or low down? What do the candles before it look like? A single candle always gets read inside its context.

That's the four steps. At first you'll pull each one apart slowly; after a few dozen, one glance tells you what the candle is saying. Don't chase speed — reading charts is a slow skill.