Real body
BodydefinedThe thick rectangle, spanning the open and close. A long body means one side dominated the whole period; a short body means price ended roughly where it started, whatever happened in between.
Reading a chart
Reading a candle
Every candle packs four prices — open, high, low, close — into one shape. Learn to read the shape and the rest of the reference gets easier.
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How these fit together
Every candle is four prices compressed into one shape, and the two parts of that shape answer different questions. The body measures conviction — how far the period travelled from open to close. The wicks measure rejection — how far price got before being pushed back. Which of the two dominates is usually more informative than the colour, and both only mean something relative to the candles around them and the timeframe you are looking at.
- Long body → one side controlled the whole period; short body → a stalemate
- Long wick → prices tried and rejected; the longer the wick, the firmer the rejection
- Same data, different timeframe → four 1-hour candles become one 4-hour candle, and the pattern changes with it
- Wick at a level → a long lower wick at support and a long upper wick at resistance mean opposite things
- Volume beneath the candle → decides how much any of the above is worth
Wicks (shadows)
WickdefinedThe thin lines above and below the body, reaching the period's high and low. They show prices that were tried and rejected — a long upper wick means sellers pushed price back down, a long lower wick means buyers stepped in and lifted it.
Green candle
BullishdefinedThe close is above the open, so price rose over the period. The bottom of the body is the open, the top is the close.
Red candle
BearishdefinedThe close is below the open, so price fell over the period. The top of the body is the open, the bottom is the close.
Candle timeframe
IntervaldefinedEach candle covers one interval of whatever timeframe the chart is set to — a minute, an hour, a day. The same shape carries very different weight on a 1-minute chart than on a daily one.
Confirmation
ContextuntestedA pattern is a hint about the balance of buyers and sellers, not a trigger. Traders generally wait for the next candle to confirm the move and check whether volume backed it up — a pattern on thin volume means much less.
How to read the evidence tag
Every entry here carries one of three tags. The tag rates the evidence behind the claim the entry makes — not how popular the tool is, how old it is, or how confident the people teaching it sound. Close to half of the entries on this site sit on the weakest tier — including every one of the eighteen Smart Money Concepts, which are drawn here in the same ink as Wilder’s ADX and deserve to be told apart from it. That is the honest position rather than an oversight.
- defined33 entries
True by arithmetic. This entry describes a calculation or a piece of terminology, and makes no claim about what price will do next. Nothing here can be wrong except a typo.
- studied56 entries
The predictive claim attached to this entry has been tested in peer-reviewed research. Being on this tier does not mean it works — across the literature these edges are typically small, unstable between markets and periods, and often gone after costs.
- untested87 entries
Widely taught and widely believed, but no published test of the claim was located while building this page. Treat it as a description of what traders do, not as evidence that doing it pays.
The line between studied and untested is drawn by whether a peer-reviewed test of the specific claim could be found, and those tests are listed on the Sources page under “Evidence and base rates”. If you know of a published test of something tagged untested, the tag is wrong and should change — that is the point of labelling it at all.