Candlestick

### Four numbers, one slice of time Every candle covers one slice of time set by your timeframe. On a 1H chart, one candle is one hour. It reports four numbers: where price opened, where it closed, and the highest and lowest it traded in between. The **body** is the thick rectangle between the open and the close. Green (or hollow) means the close came in above the open, so buyers won that period. Red (or filled) means the close came in below it, so sellers won. The size of the body is conviction. A long body is a strong, one-sided move. A small body is a quiet, balanced one. The **wicks** are the thin lines poking out above and below. They mark how far price stretched before it got pushed back to the close. Wicks are information, not noise. A long upper wick is the footprint of sellers defending a level that price tried to take, and the longer the wick, the harder that rejection. A tiny body with long wicks on both sides is a fight to a draw, which is indecision, the doji. ### A live candle is a liar The candle on the right edge is still forming. It can look like a strong green close one minute and then wick down hard and close red the next. Nothing it currently shows is a fact yet. A closed candle can never change again. It is locked-in history, and everything you analyse should be built on closed candles. Wait for the close, then judge what actually happened. That one distinction will keep you out of more unconfirmed trades than any indicator on the chart. ### Where the candle lands in the system This is why the break rule is a *close* rule. A true break of structure needs 50 percent of the candle body past the wick of the structure point. A wick through the level with a close back inside is a wick test, not a break, and the whole No Close family is built on exactly that difference: price reached beyond the level, then failed to close there. And the rejection candle is a trigger, not a permission slip. It only counts on an approved timeframe, and the RR floor and the divergence rule still gate it no matter how clean the candle looks. One candle read on its own is noise. Candles read in sequence are where the information lives. Taught in Module 3, Lesson 2: Candlesticks Explained.