Market Language

Price is the one thing every participant agrees to look at. Learn to read it and you are reading the crowd.

The four numbers inside every candle

A single candlestick encodes four prices from its time period — and those four numbers, read together, tell you the whole story of that period.

Open — the first traded price of the period. The starting position of the battle.
High — the highest price reached. How far buyers managed to push.
Low — the lowest price reached. How far sellers managed to press.
Close — the final price. The most important of the four, because it is where the battle actually ended.

Of these, the close carries the most weight. Anyone can push price around intraday; what matters is where it settled when the period ended, because that is the price the market was willing to defend to the finish. A great deal of candle reading comes down to a single question: relative to where it opened, where did it close?

In short

Every candle is Open, High, Low, Close. The close matters most, and the timeframe decides how much the whole candle matters.