Candle (OHLCV)

A candle (or candlestick) is a chart element that summarises price movement over a fixed time window. Each candle shows four price points (open, high, low, close) and one volume figure, together abbreviated as OHLCV. Candles are the standard way to visualise price action across any timeframe, from one-minute scalping charts to one-day swing trading views.

How to read a candle

A candle has two parts: the body (the rectangle between the open and close prices) and the wicks (the lines above and below the body showing the high and low). A green or hollow candle means the close was higher than the open (the period was bullish). A red or filled candle means the close was lower than the open (the period was bearish). The size of the body shows the magnitude of the move; the wicks show how far price reached in each direction before settling.

Candle intervals on Hex37

Hex37 supports six candle intervals: 1m, 5m, 15m, 1h, 4h, and 1d. Each interval is aggregated separately and cached in Redis for fast retrieval. Shorter intervals (1m, 5m) suit scalping and intra-day reading; longer intervals (4h, 1d) suit swing trading and trend identification. Most traders watch two or three intervals simultaneously: a higher timeframe for trend context, a middle timeframe for setups, and a lower timeframe for entry timing. Trying to trade from a single timeframe usually leads to either missing context (low TF only) or missing entries (high TF only).

Candle patterns and what they actually tell you

Many chart-reading books teach specific candle patterns (doji, hammer, engulfing, and others) as predictive signals. The honest answer is that candle patterns are descriptive rather than predictive: a hammer at a swing low tells you the period saw a sharp reversal, but it does not reliably predict the next period. The patterns are useful as part of broader context (price location, volume, regime) but treating any single candle as a tradeable signal in isolation is unreliable. Backtesting any candle pattern across a few hundred occurrences usually shows the edge is much smaller than pattern-trading books suggest.

Common candle-reading mistakes

• Trading single candles without context. A pattern that 'works' in textbook examples is usually surrounded by additional context (a clean trend, a key level, confirming volume) that the example glosses over.
• Using too short an interval. Scalping 1m candles is psychologically expensive: every candle feels meaningful while most are just noise.
• Ignoring volume. A candle's body and wicks tell you what price did; volume tells you the conviction behind it. A breakout candle on low volume is much less reliable than one on heavy volume.
• Cherry-picking the timeframe to confirm a bias. If your thesis works on 4h but not 1d, the 1d view is the more reliable signal. The shorter timeframe is the noisier one.