Anatomy of a candle: body and wick

You can read open, high, low and close from any candle and say whether buyers or sellers won the period.

The alphabet of the market

If a chart has ever felt like noise, start here. A chart is made of hundreds of small shapes, and every one of them follows the same simple logic.

That shape is the candle. Each one tells the story of a single period: where price started, where it ended, and how far it was pushed in between. Learn to read one candle and you can read every candlestick chart, whatever the asset and whatever the timeframe.

How a candle is built

A candle is drawn from four prices of its period: open, high, low and close. It has two parts.

The body: what they agreed on. The thick part of the candle is the body. It spans the open and the close. Its color shows who won the period:

A bullish candle closed higher than it opened. Buyers won the round. Here it is green.
A bearish candle closed lower than it opened. Sellers won the round. Here it is red.

On a bullish candle the open is the bottom of the body and the close is the top. On a bearish candle it is the other way round.

The wicks: where they fought. The thin lines above and below the body are the wicks, also called shadows. The upper wick reaches the highest price of the period, the lower wick the lowest.

A long wick means price traveled far in that direction but did not stay there. Traders often read a long upper wick as selling pressure at higher prices and a long lower wick as buying interest at lower prices. On its own, a wick is a piece of information, not a signal.

A note on colors. Green and red are the most common choice, but every platform lets you change them. Older charts use hollow and filled bodies, and some markets, for example mainland China, traditionally show rising prices in red. Always check the legend.

One hour, one candle

A fictional stock, one hourly candle:

Opens at 50.00
Dips to 49.50 early in the hour
Climbs to 53.00
Closes at 52.40

The result is a bullish candle. The body runs from 50.00 at the bottom to 52.40 at the top. The lower wick reaches down to 49.50: sellers had a short moment. The upper wick reaches 53.00: buyers pushed higher but could not hold the top, and price slipped back to 52.40 by the close.

Read in one sentence: buyers won the hour clearly, but gave some of it back at the end.

Common mistakes

"Green means price rose the whole time." It only means the close was above the open. The wicks show what happened in between.
"A long wick means the trend will reverse." A long wick shows a rejected move inside one period. What it means depends on where it appears and what follows.
Reading color only. Two green candles can tell very different stories. Body size and wick length matter just as much. That is the next lesson.
Ignoring the timeframe. A candle on a one-minute chart and one on a weekly chart describe very different amounts of trading.

The takeaway

The body shows where price started and ended. The wicks show how far it traveled in between. Read both.

Check yourself

Quick quiz

4 questions. Instant feedback, nothing is saved.

1A candle is green. What is certain?

Green only means close above open. In between, price may have dropped well below the open, which the lower wick would show.
2Tap the point that shows the lowest price of this period.

Tap the chart.

The end of the lower wick is always the low, whatever the candle's color.
3A red candle has a long upper wick and closes near its low. What happened during the period?

The long upper wick shows prices far above the body were reached. The close near the low shows they were not held.
4Order the four prices of a bullish candle from top to bottom.

Use the arrows to put them in order, then check.
Correct order: high → close → open → low

On a bullish candle the close sits at the top of the body and the open at the bottom. The wicks extend to the high and the low.

of 4 correct.

Sources

Steve Nison, Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques (New York Institute of Finance, 1991)