A candlestick chart is one of the most common ways price is displayed, because a single candlestick compresses four pieces of information — the open, high, low, and close price for a given period — into one shape.

Anatomy of a candle

Each candle has a body (the thick rectangle) and often one or two thin lines above and below it called wicks or shadows:

• The body spans from the open price to the close price for that period.
• The upper wick marks the highest price reached during the period.
• The lower wick marks the lowest price reached during the period.
• The body's color indicates direction: typically green (or unfilled) when the close was higher than the open, and red (or filled) when the close was lower than the open.

What a "period" means

Every candle represents a fixed window of time — a minute, an hour, a day — set by the chart's timeframe. A daily chart shows one candle per trading day; an hourly chart shows one candle per hour, covering the exact same underlying price history in far more granular detail.

Reading a sequence, not just one candle

A single candle tells you what happened in one period. The more useful skill is reading several candles together: a series of candles with progressively higher closes suggests sustained buying pressure over that stretch; long wicks in one direction can suggest a period where price pushed further before being pulled back. This is descriptive, not predictive — a pattern describes what already happened, and how reliably any given pattern predicts what happens next is genuinely debated and varies by context. Candlestick reading is a vocabulary for describing price action clearly, which is the first step before any further analysis — not a signal system on its own.