Anatomy of a Candlestick for Beginners (PDF)

Every chart is made of little boxes with lines sticking out, and people talk about big bodies, long wicks and rejection as if the shapes predict what comes next. You are not sure what a candle even shows, let alone what its shape means.

This guide takes one candle apart from zero: open, high, low and close, the body and the wicks, how the candle size changes the picture, and what ten coins' candles say about shape. It is 37 pages, written for someone who has never traded, with every word explained before it is used.

Every idea is drawn with the words on the picture: one candle with every part named, the hour of price movement behind it, green against red, hollow and filled styles, the body and wicks measured as shares of the range, and four short candles combining into one longer one. A real Solana candle is labelled price by price and a real Litecoin wick is marked. Then the measured pages: the shape of an ordinary candle on ten coins, how breakout candles differ, and four tests of whether a big or thin body changes the result. You measure real signal candles yourself, and it ends with a checklist to run before reading anything into a candle.

WHAT'S INSIDE

- One candle, from zero: Open, high, low and close, the body and both wicks, each labelled on the picture and on a real Solana candle.

- Measuring a candle's shape: Body and wicks as shares of the range, worked with example prices.

- What an ordinary candle looks like: On ten coins the middle 1-hour candle had a body of 43.59%, an upper wick of 23.68% and a lower wick of 25.00% of its range.

- Does a big body mean conviction?: Four tests on real prices. None cleared the strict bar; big-body 1-hour breakouts reached target 34.48% of the time against 33.30%.

- Reading real candles yourself: Measure the signal candle on real Chainlink, Avalanche and XRP charts, then answer three quizzes.

WHAT YOU'LL BE ABLE TO DO

- Name the open, high, low and close of any candle.

- Work out a candle's body and wick shares from its four prices.

- Explain how several short candles make one longer one.

- Read a claim about candle shapes next to what was measured.

AN HONEST NOTE

No guide can tell you what the next candle will do, and this one does not try. None of the four body tests cleared the strict bar, and the guide says so. Candles drawn large with round prices are examples; every dated chart is real. No win rates to follow, no profit figures, no promises. Educational, not financial advice.

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