What a candlestick tells you

A candlestick is one unit of time — a minute, an hour, a day — drawn as a picture of the fight between buyers and sellers.

Four prices make a candle:

• Open — the first trade of the period.
• High — the furthest price up.
• Low — the furthest price down.
• Close — the last trade of the period.

The body is the block between open and close. A bullish candle (close above open) means buyers won the period; a bearish candle (close below open) means sellers did. The bigger the body, the more decisive the move.

The wicks (the thin lines) show where price tried to go but got rejected. A long lower wick means sellers pushed down but buyers slammed it back — often a sign of demand. A long upper wick is the reverse.

Read the story, not the shape. A hammer at the bottom of a move tells you sellers ran out of steam. The same candle in the middle of nowhere means nothing. Context — where the candle prints — is everything, and it's what the rest of this curriculum is about.