Reading Candlestick Charts
Every candle packs four numbers: open, high, low, close.
Written and reviewed by the Fundezy team · how we produce this
A candlestick is a summary of a fight. Over its timeframe, price opened somewhere, traveled up and down, and closed somewhere. Those four numbers — O, H, L, C — are all a candle contains.
Anatomy
- The body spans open → close. Filled/red bodies closed lower than they opened; hollow/green bodies closed higher.
- The wicks (shadows) stretch to the high and low — the excursions that got rejected.
A long lower wick with the close near the high says: sellers pushed price down, buyers slammed it back up. The candle is a sentence; learn to read the relative sizes rather than memorizing 50 named patterns.
What a single candle can't tell you
Candles have no memory of context. The same "bullish" candle at fresh highs means something entirely different at multi-week support. Context (trend, level, timeframe — Course 01) comes first, candle shape second.
On the Fundezy chart
Open the Trade Terminal and the chart offers four renderings of the same OHLC data:
- Candle — the full four-number story; the default.
- Line — closes only; best for a clean trend read.
- Bar — OHLC as vertical line + ticks; the pre-candlestick classic.
- Area — closes shaded under the line; good for presentations.
Hover any candle to see its exact O/H/L/C values. Notice on the candle view how the close line (white) threads through the bodies — that's the price path you actually trade on.
Two habits worth forming now
- Read closes, not bodies. Where price closes relative to a level is the signal; intrabar pokes through support that close back above it are noise, not breaks.
- Zoom before you judge. A dramatic M1 candle is invisible on H1. Confirm any pattern you care about on a higher timeframe.
By the numbers
Candlestick charting was systematised by the 18th-century Japanese rice trader Munehisa Homma and reached Western traders with Steve Nison's 1991 book Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques. Every candle compresses exactly four numbers — open, high, low, close — and this platform renders the same OHLC dataset four ways: candle, line, bar and area.
Practice in the simulator
Hover candles and compare all four chart types — apply what you just read with simulated money.
Check your understanding
3 questions · answer all, then submit.