Anatomy of a candle

Anatomy of a Candle

Every candlestick on a price chart tells a small story about a fight between buyers and sellers over a fixed period of time. Once you can read that story, patterns and trends stop looking random and start looking like information.

What OHLC Means

Each candle is built from four prices:

• Open — the first price traded in that time period
• High — the highest price traded
• Low — the lowest price traded
• Close — the last price traded before the period ended

Together these are called OHLC. A single candle on a 1-hour chart summarizes an hour of trading in these four numbers.

The Body

The thick part of the candle is the body. It shows the distance between the open and the close.

• If the close is higher than the open, the body is usually colored green (or white) — buyers pushed the price up over that period.
• If the close is lower than the open, the body is usually colored red (or black) — sellers won that period.

A long body means strong, decisive movement in one direction. A short body means the open and close were close together — a period of indecision or balance.

The Wicks

The thin lines above and below the body are called wicks (or shadows). They show the high and low — the extremes the price reached before pulling back.

• A long upper wick means buyers pushed the price up, but sellers stepped in and forced it back down before the period closed.
• A long lower wick means sellers pushed the price down, but buyers stepped in and forced it back up.

Wicks are often more useful than the body itself, because they show rejection — a price level the market tried and then abandoned.

A Solana Example

Imagine SOL is trading around $140 on a 1-hour chart. One candle opens at $140, spikes up to $146 during the hour as buyers chase momentum, but then sellers take over and the price closes back down at $141.

• Open: $140
• High: $146
• Low: $139.50
• Close: $141

This candle would have a small green-ish body (close only slightly above open) and a long upper wick reaching to $146. Read together, this tells you: buyers tried to push SOL higher, failed to hold the gains, and sellers pulled the price back near where it started. That long upper wick is a signal that $146 met resistance — worth marking on the chart to watch if price approaches it again.

What Wicks Tell You About Market Structure

• Long wicks at the top of an uptrend can signal exhaustion — buyers are losing steam.
• Long wicks at the bottom of a downtrend can signal exhaustion — sellers are losing steam.
• Small bodies with wicks on both sides (sometimes called "spinning tops") show a tug-of-war with no clear winner.
• Candles with almost no wicks and a long body show strong, one-directional conviction with little pushback.

None of these signals guarantee what happens next — they describe what already happened, and traders use that description to estimate probabilities, not certainties.

A Common Mistake

New traders often read a single candle in isolation and treat it as a prediction. One long green candle does not mean "the trend is now up forever" — it means buyers won that one period. Candles need context: what happened in the candles before it, and what timeframe you're looking at. A big green 1-minute candle can sit inside a larger downtrend on the 1-hour chart and mean almost nothing on its own.

On MAPLUStrade

Open any market on MAPLUStrade and switch between the 1m, 15m, 1h and 1d timeframes. Watch how the same price action looks completely different depending on the zoom level — a huge wick on the 1m chart might be invisible on the 1d chart. Try marking the highs and lows of a few candles as levels, then check the Level 2 depth panel: the same price levels you marked from wicks are often where visible buy and sell orders cluster. This connects the "story" of a candle to the real order flow behind it.

Recap

A candle's body shows who won between open and close, while its wicks show where the price got rejected. Read candles in context of the timeframe and the candles around them, not in isolation.

*This lesson is educational only and not financial advice. Trading crypto assets like SOL carries risk of loss.*