Candle and volume examplesSample data · not a real stock
What to look forRed candles (up) close above their open; blue candles (down) close below. The bars underneath are volume — notice how volume tends to rise on days with big price moves. (Korean charts use red for up and blue for down.)
CautionOne candle’s shape cannot tell you the next day. Look at several days and volume together.
1260 bars · 2018-10-15 – 2023-08-11
On price
Lower panes
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Sample (synthetic) data: not a real stock or real prices, but prices generated to explain the idea. Drag the chart to move through time and use the wheel or two fingers to zoom.
Concept
A candle shows four prices for a day in one shape: the open (first trade), high, low and close (last trade). Korean charts usually draw up days in red and down days in blue (US charts typically use green and red).
An up candle closes higher than it opened; a down candle closes lower than it opened.
Body: between the open and the close. A longer body means a bigger difference between the start and end of the day.
Wicks: prices reached during the day and then left. A long upper wick means the price rose during the day and was pushed back down.
Volume: the number of shares traded that day, shown as bars at the bottom of the chart. It shows how many people took part in the price move.
In the second example above (“Volume spike”), find the day when quiet volume suddenly jumps.
How to read candles
Look at the color first: red (up) means the price rose that day, blue (down) means it fell.
The body length shows how big the day’s move was; the wick length shows how much it swung during the day.
Read several candles together to see whether highs and lows are rising or falling. That is the trend you will learn next.
Look at volume as well. The same rise is often read differently with heavy volume and with light volume.
Weekly and monthly candles work the same way; the period just changes from a day to a week or a month.
Cautions when reading it
Many candle shapes have names (“hammer”, “long white candle”), but a single candle cannot tell you the next move.
Heavy volume means strong interest, not proof that the direction is right.
Color conventions differ by country. US and many other charts draw up days in green and down days in red.
Chart shapes and indicators summarize past prices. The same shape is sometimes right and sometimes wrong depending on the market, and this page does not tell you when to buy or sell any stock. To practice yourself, try the chart lab or mock trading.