Candlestick chart

Jana opens a bitcoin chart and sees a row of colored candles instead of a continuous line. Each covers the selected time interval. TradingView calls the first price Open, the last Close, the highest High and the lowest Low. The body connects Open and Close; the wicks show how far the price reached. A long wick can therefore accompany a small body: the price moved a long way but finished near where it began. [1]

With the usual settings, a green body means the close was above its own open, and a red body means it was below. Colors are not a fixed market rule, though. TradingView can compare Close with the previous candle’s close instead of its own Open, and you can change the colors themselves. If Jana sends a screenshot to a friend, “it’s green” alone does not explain what happened. The values and chart settings matter. [1]

TradingView’s Hollow candles separate two comparisons. The fill shows whether Close ended above or below its own Open; the color compares Close with the previous candle’s close. A green filled candle can therefore close below its own opening price while remaining above the previous close. Nothing is wrong: the display is answering two different questions that are easy to confuse when reading ordinary candles. [2]

Jana watches the body on the right edge change size. Until the interval ends, High can rise, Low can fall and Close tracks the latest price so far. TradingView describes this changing data in its explanation of live-chart recalculation. A shape that looks convincing midway through an interval may disappear by the close. If a rule depends on a completed candle, you need to wait for it to finish. [3]

Switching to Heikin-Ashi can make a chart look smoother. But TradingView uses calculated values derived from current and previous prices for this chart type, rather than ordinary OHLC — open, high, low and close. The picture may help you find your bearings, but its values cannot automatically be treated as prices at which you could actually have bought. Check the chart type before interpreting its candles. [4]

Several different price paths can produce the same OHLC. A candle alone does not reveal whether the high or the low came first. This matters when testing trading rules on past data. TradingView simulates order execution with a broker emulator; if only candle data is available, it must infer the path inside each candle according to its rules. That test result is not a record of your actual trades. [5]

“Bitcoin” does not identify a single chart. The exchange, trading pair, interval length and interval boundaries all matter. Kraken’s OHLC channel, for example, sends summaries for a chosen pair and interval and updates them when trades occur. Before comparing two screens, Jana matches these settings and checks whether both candles have closed. Different pictures alone do not prove the data is wrong. [6]

Reading a candle means understanding a price summary. Its shape alone does not tell you when to place an order, how much risk to take or how to account for costs. Testing a candlestick pattern requires explicit rules and an understanding of the simulation’s assumptions; TradingView documents these for its broker emulator. For a beginner, learning what happened during an interval is more useful than treating every candle as a promise about the next move. [5]