What a single candle tells you

A candlestick summarises one period of trading — a minute, an hour, a day — using four prices: the open, the high, the low, and the close. The thick part is the body, drawn between the open and close. The thin lines above and below are the wicks (or shadows), marking the extreme high and low reached during the period.

When the close is above the open the candle is bullish (usually green); when the close is below the open it is bearish (usually red). The colour alone tells you who finished the period in control.

Body and wicks: the real signal

The proportions matter more than the colour. A long body shows strong, one-sided conviction. A small body shows indecision — buyers and sellers finished close to where they started.

  • Long upper wick: price pushed up but sellers rejected the highs. Often a sign of exhaustion near resistance.
  • Long lower wick: price dropped but buyers absorbed the dip and pushed back up. A common bottoming clue near support.
  • Tiny body, long wicks (a doji): a balance of power and a frequent precursor to a turn or a pause.

A handful of patterns worth knowing

  • Engulfing: a candle whose body completely covers the previous one, signalling a momentum shift.
  • Hammer / shooting star: small body with one dominant wick — a rejection of lower (hammer) or higher (shooting star) prices.
  • Doji: open and close nearly equal; indecision that gains meaning at extremes.

Timeframe changes everything

The same candle means different things on different charts. A dramatic 1-minute reversal is noise on the daily chart. Always read a candle in the context of its timeframe and the trend around it — a single candle is a sentence, not the whole story.

Crypto trades 24/7, so there is no daily open or close tied to an exchange session the way there is in stocks. The "daily" candle simply uses 00:00 UTC as its boundary on most platforms.

Reading candles alongside RSI

Candles describe what price did; RSI describes how strong the move was. A long bearish candle that drives RSI below 30 on RSI Monitor tells you the sell-off was both decisive and stretched. A long lower wick forming while RSI is oversold is a far stronger reversal clue than either signal alone.