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Price Action

What a Candle Wick Tells You

A wick is a price the period reached and did not stay at: a move that was made and undone before the close. This paper shows you what a wick is, the four shapes a candle's wicks can take, a real day with a 147-pip upper wick, that same wick opened into the twenty-four hourly candles that made it, and the buttons on your chart that switch between the two views.

Difficulty
Beginner
Reading time
5 min
Pages
8
Reviewed by
Saman Rahbar

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The trip

A candle's body is where the period ended. Its wicks are where the period went and did not stay. A long upper wick means buyers took the price up to that height and sellers took it back before the close; a long lower wick is the same story the other way up. The wick is the trip, and the body is where it ended. That is the whole of what a wick tells you: a price was reached inside the period, and rejected inside the period.

Four shapes

There are four shapes and four sentences. A long upper wick with a short lower one: the high was rejected. The reverse: the low was rejected. Long wicks both ways with a small body between them: both were reached and neither held, and the period ended near where it began. Almost no wick at all: the period went one way and stayed there. The sentences describe what happened inside the period, and a candle can only ever say that much.

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