What is a candlestick? How to read candles

A candlestick is the basic building block of a price chart — a single shape that shows you four things about a period of trading at a glance: where price opened, where it closed, and the highest and lowest it reached. Once you can read one candle, you can read a chart, because a chart is just thousands of them in a row.

The anatomy of a candle

Every candlestick has two parts:

• The body — the thick part. It spans the open and the close. If price closed higher than it opened, the body is green (or hollow); if it closed lower, red (or filled). The body tells you who won the period: buyers or sellers.
• The wicks (or shadows) — the thin lines above and below the body. They show the high and low reached during the period, even if price didn't close there. A long upper wick means price pushed up but got rejected; a long lower wick means it dropped but got bought back.

That's it. Four prices — open, high, low, close — in one shape. The Japanese rice traders who invented candlesticks in the 1700s worked out that this simple picture captured the emotional tug-of-war of a market better than a plain line ever could.

What candles tell you

A big green body with small wicks: buyers dominated, cleanly. A big red body: sellers dominated. A small body with long wicks on both sides: a fight with no winner — indecision. A candle with a long lower wick and small body near the top: price fell but buyers stepped in hard, often a sign of a bounce.

You don't need to memorize the dozens of named patterns the internet loves. What matters is reading the story: who's winning, and is that changing? A run of strong green bodies is an uptrend with conviction. When the bodies shrink and the wicks grow, conviction is fading. That read — momentum building and fading — is most of what candles are for.

Candlesticks vs Heikin-Ashi

Standard candlesticks show raw price, every twitch and gap. That's honest but noisy — in a trending move, ordinary candles still flicker red and green, which makes the trend hard to hold. Heikin-Ashi candles solve this by averaging, so a trend shows as a clean run of same-colored candles. I trade Heikin-Ashi for exactly this reason: it filters the noise so the momentum read is clearer. Both are candlestick charts; one just smooths the picture.

How I use candles

I read them for momentum, alongside market structure for trend. The candles tell me whether a move has strength behind it or is running out; the structure tells me direction. No indicators — just the shapes price is drawing. Every session I trade this way goes on a public record, so you can see the read in action rather than take my word for how candles work.