What do candlesticks tell you?

The line chart hides drama. A day where the price crashed 5% at lunch and clawed all the way back closes as one calm dot. Candlesticks — invented by Japanese rice traders centuries ago and beloved ever since — show the whole day's battle.

Anatomy of one candle

Each candle summarizes one period (a day, on daily charts) with four prices — OHLC:

• Open — the first agreed price of the period;
• High — the most optimistic moment;
• Low — the most fearful moment;
• Close — the final verdict.

The thick body spans open-to-close: green (or white) when the close beat the open, red (or black) when it fell short. The thin wicks above and below mark the extremes the price visited but couldn't hold.

Candles as sentences

Without any mysticism, a candle's shape narrates the session:

• Long green body, tiny wicks — buyers dominated from bell to bell.
• Long red body — sellers ran the day.
• Long lower wick, close near the top — sellers pushed hard, buyers repelled them (the price "rejected" the lows).
• Tiny body, long wicks both ways — a tug-of-war ending near where it started: indecision.

Reading these is like hearing tone of voice, not predicting tomorrow. The Technical Analysis domain examines whether candle patterns carry statistical weight; here, they're simply the richest honest summary of a trading period ever designed.

In the data

A candle is one row of a daily price history: open, high, low, close. Here is Apple's row for Friday 28 August 2020, the last session before its four-for-one split:

The four prices are the candle. The row also carries an adjusted close, the close restated so that it lines up with today's share count after every later split and dividend — and only the close is restated. Mix the two and you draw a session that never happened: a body from the real open of 504.05 down to the adjusted close near 121, when the actual day opened at 504.05 and closed at 499.23. Build a candle from the four raw prices of one row, and nothing else.

Try it now

1. On a one-month candle chart — Apple's is below, and the Terminal takes any other symbol — find the longest green and longest red candle. Check the calendar (Course 2 skills): did either land on an earnings date? Apple's reporting dates are in the first table below the chart and its newest headlines in the second. A candle older than those headlines may have a cause this page cannot show you, and then "no date I can see" is the honest note.

Open AAPL.US in the EODHD Terminal

2. Now measure the fight in one day, from its row. Below is Apple on 25 June 2026, a day it fell hard: open, high, low and close. The body is the close minus the open, and its size is that difference without its sign; the range is the high minus the low. Divide the size of the body by the range: near 1 and one side held the day from bell to bell, near 0 and the day was a tug of war that ended where it started. The sign you dropped is the colour — negative is red — so one division gives you both halves of the candle.

3. Now a candle with a dramatic lower wick, the day buyers won a visible battle: Apple on 7 April 2026. Run the same division. It comes out small, because a long wick is range that the body never claimed.

4. Describe today's candle in one plain sentence ("buyers led all day", "indecision"). You're now literate in the market's oldest language, with a number to check yourself against.