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Candlesticks 101
Start with a single candle. Get the open/high/low/close, the bullish/bearish body, the red-and-green colours and the wick straight first — then work out how long one candle actually covers. Read this track in order and a wall of red and green stops looking like noise.
This track is the first step in the whole site, and it is only about a single candle: which four prices it records, what the body and the wick each stand for, how colour marks a bullish or bearish candle, and how much time one candle covers. These are the alphabet of chart reading — skip them and everything later about support, resistance and patterns will read like a fog. So if you have just opened Binance for the first time and the wall of red and green put you off, this is where you belong. If you can already read a single candle and only want to sort out the colours or the timeframe, jump straight to the article you need.
We suggest reading in order rather than hopping around. Start with the cornerstone, how to read a candlestick chart — it strings the open/high/low/close, the body, the wick and the timeframe together in one piece and is the foundation for this track. Keep the single-candle decoder open while you read: type in a few sets of prices, watch it draw the candle and label each part, and it sticks far better than memorising definitions. Once the ground is solid, read bullish vs bearish candles to work out which side had the upper hand, then green up or red up? — do not skip that one, because colours run the opposite way in some markets and it is easy to read a rise as a fall. Finish with which timeframe to use, and you will see how the same stretch of price can look completely different once you change the candle's duration.
Why insist on starting from one candle instead of the whole chart? Because a single candle is the smallest and the only fully objective unit on the chart: it squeezes four prices — the open, the close, the high and the low over a slice of time — into one shape, and the height of the body, the colour and the length of the wick are all just those four numbers drawn out, with nothing subjective added. Once those four prices and the shapes they make feel familiar, a screen full of candles stops being a red-and-green blur and turns into a tug-of-war you can actually read. The people who get more and more lost tend to be the ones who skipped this step and jumped straight to chasing patterns and indicators — building the walls before the foundation. This track is deliberately slow so that you pack that foundation down; four articles take a week or two to click, and there is no rush. One candle at a time.
Do not read a single candle as a signal on its own. Seeing one big bullish candle and thinking "is this about to run?" is the most common beginner misread — one candle is only a record of what already happened over that slice of time, and it does not guarantee the move continues. The same candle with a long lower wick can mean opposite things depending on whether it shows up at a low after a long fall or at a high after a long climb. So although this track teaches you from a single candle up, the habit we really want you to build is this: whenever you look at any candle, first ask where it sits on the whole chart. A sense of position is worth far more than memorising what each candle looks like.
WickRead is an independent chart-reading site, not affiliated with Binance. This track is educational; it isn't investment advice and gives no buy or sell signals. Crypto is volatile and trading carries risk, so use your own judgement and check that the service is available where you are.