A candlestick chart shows four prices for a chosen period: the open, the high, the low and the close. Each candle summarises that interval, whether it is five minutes of the London open or a full day on the FTSE 100. Read those four numbers and you can see what buyers and sellers did, rather than guessing from a line.
The chart is a record, not a set of secret signals.
The Four Prices on Every Candle
The body is the rectangle between the open and the close. If the close is above the open, the period finished higher than it started. If the close is below the open, it finished lower. Brokers colour this differently; the meaning is the close versus the open, not the shade of green.
The thin lines above and below the body are the wicks, sometimes called shadows. The top of the upper wick is the high. The bottom of the lower wick is the low. Price traded there; it did not stay there.
On GBP/USD, a one-hour candle that opens at 1.2700, trades to 1.2735 and 1.2688, then closes at 1.2692, explored both sides and finished almost where it began. That is indecision, not a reason to act on its own.
Body Versus Wick, in Plain English
A wide body means most of the period was spent moving from open to close. A long wick means price was rejected from an extreme. Context decides whether that matters.
A small body with wicks on both sides, often called a doji, means the open and close were close together. It can appear in quiet mid-morning trade, or just before a UK data release. The same shape does not mean the same thing at 08:05 and at 11:40.
Do not hunt for named patterns before you can describe a single candle in words. If you cannot say “this daily FTSE candle closed in the lower third of its range”, you are not ready to name formations.
Timeframe Changes the Story
A five-minute candle is a snapshot of noise. A daily candle is a full session, including the London cash hours for the FTSE and whatever New York did to sterling later. Beginners often mix them: they take a five-minute reversal as if it cancelled a three-day trend.
Choose one working timeframe and one higher timeframe for context. If you trade the London session, the 15-minute chart might be the working view and the four-hour chart the map. The daily close still matters, because that is the candle other participants will still see tomorrow.
A free traders assessment can help you check whether you are reading one timeframe consistently, or jumping charts until a candle looks friendly.
Read Sequences, Not Isolated Bars
One candle is a sentence. A row of candles is the paragraph. Three strong closes in the same direction on GBP into the New York overlap tell a different story from one large candle sandwiched between two opposite ones.
Look at where the close sits inside the range. Closes near the high of the candle, repeated, suggest buyers were still present at the end of each period. Closes near the low suggest the opposite. Then look at whether those closes are happening into a level you already marked, such as Monday’s London high.
None of this predicts the next tick. It describes who had control at the close, which is the only fact the candle can offer.
Common Beginner Mistakes
The first is treating every wick as a reversal. Wicks appear all morning when spreads are wide and stops are sitting above the London high. The second is changing candle colours or timeframes until the last bar agrees with a hunch. The third is ignoring the session: a large FTSE candle at 08:02 is often the auction finding a price, not a completed story.
A simple drill: after each London close, write the range, where it closed, and whether it broke the prior day’s high or low. Do that for ten sessions before adding indicators.
If that drill already feels unclear, a free traders assessment can highlight whether you are reading price or reacting to the last colour you saw.
Conclusion
A candlestick is open, high, low and close for a period you chose. The body shows the journey from open to close. The wicks show the extremes that did not hold. Read them on a timeframe that matches your hours, in sequence, against levels you marked in advance.
Samuel and Co Trading starts chart reading at this level for a reason. If you can describe what the last London candle did, you can start to build rules. More patterns will not fix a chart you cannot yet read.
