A candlestick is one row in the conversation between buyers and sellers. Every candle answers four questions about its time window: where price opened, where it closed, the highest level reached, and the lowest. Those four numbers — open, high, low, close — are the OHLC, and they''re every candle''s identity.
The thick part of the candle is the body: it spans the open to the close. The thin lines that sometimes extend above and below the body are the wicks (also called shadows or tails) — they mark the high and low, the levels price touched but didn''t hold. A candle whose close sits above its open is called bullish (commonly drawn green); a candle whose close sits below its open is bearish (commonly red). Colour is convention, not truth: what matters is the open-to-close direction, not the pixel hue.
The close carries more weight than any other point on the candle, because it is the consensus the time window left behind. Wicks tell you where price was rejected: a long upper wick after a rally means buyers pushed price up but couldn''t hold it into the close. A long lower wick after a sell-off means sellers pressed price down but couldn''t hold the loss.
Candles are read in sequence, not in isolation. A single candle is a sentence; patterns are paragraphs. The same green candle that looks bullish on its own can be the last gasp of a failed rally in context. This is the first idea beginners must internalise: the candle isn''t the signal; the candle is information, and the signal lives in how candles relate to each other and to the levels around them.
Time frames change everything. The same market across one-minute, hourly, and daily candles tells three different stories at the same time. Pick a time frame before you start reading — most beginners benefit from higher time frames (4-hour, daily) because shorter ones are noisier.