Candlestick Charts on TradingView Explained

With the toolbar and navigation now familiar, it’s time to look at what’s actually drawn on the chart itself. This lesson covers the most common chart type on TradingView - and arguably in all of trading - the candlestick.

What Is a Candlestick, Really?

A candlestick is simply a compact way of showing four prices for one specific period of time: the open (the first traded price), the high (the highest price reached), the low (the lowest price reached), and the close (the last traded price). Instead of writing those four numbers out, TradingView draws them as a single shape - fast to scan, and easy to compare across many periods at once.

Anatomy of a Single Candle

Every candle has two main parts: a body and, usually, one or two wicks (sometimes called shadows).

        │
        │   ← upper wick (the high)
        │
     ┌──┴──┐
     │     │
     │     │  ← body (the open-to-close range)
     │     │
     └──┬──┘
        │
        │   ← lower wick (the low)
        │

The body shows the range between the open and the close for that period. The wicks extend above and below the body to mark the highest and lowest price actually reached, even if price didn’t stay there for long. A candle with a small body and long wicks tells a different story - lots of back-and-forth movement - than one with a large body and barely any wick at all, which shows price moving fairly directly from open to close.

Bullish vs Bearish Candles

Where the open and close sit within that body tells you the candle’s direction:

• Bullish candle (commonly shown in green or white): the close was higher than the open. The bottom of the body is the open; the top is the close.
• Bearish candle (commonly shown in red or black): the close was lower than the open. The top of the body is the open; the bottom is the close.

These colors are TradingView’s defaults and can be changed in chart settings, but green-for-up and red-for-down is the convention most traders expect, so most leave it as is.

Reading a Sequence of Candles at a Glance

A single candle is useful, but candles are almost always read as a sequence. Scanning several candles in a row - are most of them green or red? are the bodies getting larger or smaller? are the wicks getting longer? - gives a quick visual sense of whether a stock or index has been pushing steadily in one direction, chopping back and forth, or losing momentum, well before doing any deeper analysis.

How This Differs From the F&O Course’s Candle Lesson

BlinkCopied’s F&O beginner course also covers candlesticks, in its lesson How to Read TradingView Charts - but with a different focus. That lesson looks at candles specifically through the lens of making an F&O trading decision. This lesson stays one level below that: purely the platform mechanics of what a candle’s shape means and how TradingView draws it, which is worth being completely comfortable with before layering any trading-decision context on top.

Real-Life Example: Scanning a Month of Reliance Candles

Suppose a trader opens a daily Reliance Industries chart on TradingView and scrolls back one month. Without reading a single indicator, they notice the first two weeks show a run of mostly green candles with fairly large bodies and short wicks - a fairly direct upward push. The following week shows smaller, mixed red-and-green candles with longer wicks - more indecision, less directional conviction. None of this required any calculation; it came purely from scanning candle shapes and colors across the sequence, which is exactly the kind of quick visual read this lesson is building toward.

Analogy: A Day’s Weather Summary

Think of a single candle like a one-line daily weather summary: the day’s starting temperature (open), the day’s ending temperature (close), and the highest and lowest temperatures reached at any point (high and low). A day that started cool and ended warm, without much fluctuation in between, looks very different from a day that swung wildly hot and cold before settling somewhere in the middle - even if both days happened to end at the same final temperature. A candle captures that same kind of shape for price, in one glance.

Common Beginner Mistakes

• Only looking at candle color, and ignoring body size and wick length. A tiny green body says something quite different from a large green body with almost no wick.
• Treating a single candle as a standalone prediction. One candle only describes a period that has already finished - it doesn’t guarantee what the next one does.
• Not checking the exact OHLC numbers when precision matters. Hovering over a candle shows the real values - useful whenever eyeballing the shape isn’t quite enough.
• Jumping straight to named multi-candle patterns. Getting fully comfortable with one candle’s basic shape first makes any pattern-based learning later far easier to follow.

Practical Tips

• Practice on a chart you already know well - your own most-traded stock or the Nifty 50 - so you have some intuition for whether a move “looks normal” or not.
• Keep the default green/red coloring unless you have a specific reason to change it - it matches what virtually every other trader and broker platform uses.
• Get comfortable scanning a full sequence of candles, not just isolated ones - that’s where candles genuinely earn their usefulness over raw numbers.

Conclusion

A candlestick is nothing more than a compact, visual summary of open, high, low, and close for one period - and once that single shape makes sense, scanning an entire chart becomes far faster. The next lesson looks at two other ways TradingView can display that exact same underlying data - line charts and bar charts - and when a trader might genuinely prefer one over candles.