Candlestick Charts for Absolute Beginners

Every stock chart on SelectStock is a candlestick chart — the format traders have used since 18th-century Japanese rice markets. Once you can read one candle, you can read them all.

One candle = one day's story

Each candle shows four prices for one trading session:

• Open — where trading started,
• Close — where it ended,
• High and Low — the extremes touched in between (the thin "wicks").

The thick body spans open-to-close. Green means the close was above the open (buyers won the day); red means it closed below the open (sellers won). On our charts, hover any candle and the exact numbers appear above the chart.

The shapes talk

• Long green body, tiny wicks — buyers dominated start to finish. Conviction.
• Long wick below, small body — sellers pushed price down but buyers dragged it all the way back. Often a sign of demand (a "hammer").
• Long wick above — rallied, then got sold hard into the close. Supply overhead.
• Tiny body, long wicks both sides — a coin-flip day; nobody in charge.

Volume: the polygraph

The bars along the bottom show how many shares traded. A big green candle on heavy volume means real money agreed with the move. The same candle on feeble volume is easy to distrust — few participants, easy to reverse.

Don't read single candles in isolation

One candle is a word; the chart is the sentence. A hammer *after a long decline* means something; the same shape mid-range means little. Zoom out (our 6M and 1Y views) before concluding anything.

Spend a week just hovering candles on stocks you know and narrating the day's battle to yourself — "gap up, sold off, recovered late." That narration habit is technical analysis. Everything else is refinement.