What Is a Candlestick? A Beginner's Guide to Reading Price Charts
Candlesticks compress hours of buying and selling into one glance. Learn what open, high, low and close tell you — and what they don't.
Every candlestick tells the story of one time window: where price opened, how far buyers and sellers pushed it, and where it settled. That's it. Four numbers — open, high, low, close — drawn in a way your eyes can scan quickly.
The body is the distance between open and close. A tall body means one side dominated. The wicks (shadows) show the extremes price reached before being pushed back — places where the other side fought back.
What candlesticks do not do: predict the future. Patterns like 'engulfing' or 'pin bars' are observations about order flow within context, not spells. Professional traders treat them as one input among many — alongside levels, trend, volatility and risk.
The fastest way to internalize this isn't reading more definitions — it's identifying candles on real charts and getting feedback on your reads.
Practice this interactively — free
The “Candlesticks” path turns this into short chart exercises where you make the call and see what actually happened next.
Common questions
- Are green candles always bullish?
- A green candle means price closed above where it opened during that window. It says nothing certain about the next candle.
- Which timeframe should beginners use?
- Start with daily charts — less noise, slower decisions, fewer emotional traps than fast tick charts.
- Do candlestick patterns really work?
- Evidence is mixed and context-dependent. They describe what happened, not what must happen. Risk management matters far more.