What one candle tells you

Four prices in one shape

A candle summarises one slice of time — one minute, one hour, four hours, one day — whatever timeframe the chart is set to. It records four prices: where that slice opened, the highest and lowest prices traded, and where it closed.

The thick part is the body, from open to close. On this app's default colours a candle that closed higher than it opened is green (drawn hollow in these lessons), one that closed lower is red. The thin lines are wicks or shadows: prices that were reached but not held.

Read it as a short story

Every candle is a record of a fight between buyers and sellers. Three questions read it:

1. Who won? Close above the open: buyers. Below: sellers.
2. By how much? A long body relative to recent candles means one side controlled the whole period. A tiny body means neither did.
3. What was rejected? A long upper wick means price went up and was pushed back down — sellers were waiting above. A long lower wick means buyers were waiting below.

"Long" and "small" are always relative. A $300 candle on Bitcoin is quiet on the daily chart and violent on the 1-minute chart. Compare a candle with the ones around it, or with the ATR (average range, covered later).

Why the close matters most

Until a candle closes, it is still changing. A hammer at minute 50 of a 1-hour candle can become a large red candle by minute 60. The close is the price every trader on that timeframe agreed the period was worth — which is why support, resistance, breakouts and patterns in NexusCore all wait for a close, and why the countdown next to the price shows how long the current candle has left.

Common mistakes

• Reading an unfinished candle as if it were final.
• Judging size without context — compare with recent candles.
• Reading one candle alone. A candle is a word; the sentence is the trend and the level it sits at.