What is a candlestick chart?

Every candle covers one fixed slice of time. The thick body runs from the open to the close. The thin lines above and below it, the wicks, reach the high and the low. A close above the open is usually drawn green, a close below it red.

The method goes back to rice traders in 18th-century Japan and stayed mostly unknown in the West until Steve Nison published Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques in 1991. It caught on because it fits four prices into the space a line chart spends on one. A long upper wick, for instance, tells you buyers pushed price up during the period and could not keep it there.

The timeframe changes the story. A month of hourly candles is 720 candles, and intraday noise dominates. The same month as 30 daily candles looks calm. So check a second timeframe before reading much into any pattern.

Take an invented daily ETH candle. It opens at $3,000, trades up to $3,150 and down to $2,920, then closes at $3,100. That draws a green body from $3,000 to $3,100, with an upper wick to $3,150 and a lower one to $2,920.

Also called: candles, OHLC chart, Japanese candlesticks.

The Price chart widget draws CoinGecko candles over 1D, 7D or 30D, and a dozen majors such as BTC, ETH and SOL fall back to Binance candles when CoinGecko does not answer. None of the ranges uses daily candles; even the 30D view is built from 4-hour ones. Point at a candle and the chart reads out its open, high, low and close. You can put several charts on one board next to the Prices and Watchlist widgets.

• Price chart
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