Why candles feel confusing at first

When you open a chart for the first time, you see rows of green and red boxes with lines sticking out the top and bottom. It looks random. But every single one of those boxes is just a record of a fight between buyers and sellers over a fixed slice of time. Once you know what to look for, the "randomness" turns into a repeatable process you can run on any market, any day.

OHLC: the scoreboard for one round of the fight

Every candle stores four numbers: Open, High, Low and Close (OHLC). The open is where the round started, the close is where it ended, and the high/low show how far price stretched in each direction before settling. If the close is above the open, the candle is usually shown green (buyers won that round); if it's below, it's red (sellers won).

Example: imagine a 1-hour candle on a SOL/USD chart opens at $140, spikes to $144, dips to $138, then closes at $142. The wick shows the $144-to-$138 fight happened, but the close at $142 tells you buyers ended up in control by the end of the hour.

Swing highs and swing lows: how trend is actually built

Beginners often say "the price is going up" just because they see a few green candles. But trend isn't about individual candles — it's about the pattern of swing highs and swing lows across many candles.

  • A swing high is a peak with lower prices on both sides of it.
  • A swing low is a dip with higher prices on both sides of it.

When each new swing high is higher than the last one, and each new swing low is also higher than the last one, that's an uptrend. Flip it around — lower highs and lower lows — and that's a downtrend. When the highs and lows stop making clear progress in either direction, the market is in consolidation, moving sideways.

This matters because it shifts your attention from "is this one candle red or green" to "is the overall structure of peaks and dips climbing, falling, or flat." A single red candle inside a strong uptrend is not the same signal as a red candle that just broke a prior swing low.

Same structure, different timeframe, different story

Here's where a lot of beginners get tripped up: the swing structure you see depends entirely on which timeframe you're looking at. A market can be forming higher highs and higher lows on the 1-hour chart while simultaneously forming lower highs and lower lows on the 1-day chart. Neither view is "wrong" — they're just answering different questions. The 1-minute chart tells you what's happening in the next few trades; the 1-day chart tells you what's happening over the next few weeks. Reading only one timeframe is like reading one paragraph of a book and assuming you know the ending.

The five-question habit

Instead of trying to memorize candlestick shapes, build a habit of asking the same short list of questions every time you open a chart:

  1. What is the OHLC of the last few candles telling me about who's in control right now?
  2. Am I looking at a swing high, a swing low, or somewhere in between?
  3. Is the sequence of swings climbing, falling, or flat on this timeframe?
  4. Does a higher timeframe agree with what I'm seeing here, or contradict it?
  5. Where would this "story" be proven wrong — meaning where would the next swing high or low break the pattern I think I see?

Running through these questions doesn't tell you what price will do next. It gives you a consistent way to describe what has already happened, so your decisions are based on structure instead of a gut feeling about one candle.

Reading a chart is not the same as having a plan

It's worth separating two skills that often get mixed together. Reading a chart means being able to describe the OHLC, the swings, and the trend across timeframes accurately. Having a trading plan means deciding in advance what you'd do about it — including how you'd manage risk if the structure breaks down. A setup can look textbook-perfect on the chart and still not work out, because chart reading describes the past and present, never guarantees the future.

Key takeaways

  • OHLC (open, high, low, close) is the raw data behind every candle, not a prediction.
  • Trend is defined by the pattern of swing highs and swing lows, not by the color of one candle.
  • The same market can show different swing structures on different timeframes at the same moment.
  • A short checklist of questions builds a repeatable process for reading charts consistently.
  • Reading a chart well is a separate skill from having a plan for managing risk.

Apply it on MAPLUStrade

Open any market on MAPLUStrade, switch between the 1m, 15m, 1h and 1d timeframes and mark the swing highs and swing lows you see on each one. Notice how the "trend" can look different depending on the timeframe. The same candle you're reading here is exactly what the Level 2 depth panel is pricing against in real time.

This article is educational only and not financial advice; markets can move against any structure you identify.