Reading a candle — the language of the chart.
OHLC, body vs wick, and the volume bar that validates everything.
Before this: Markets, timeframes, F&O — the playground.
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9 min read · live widgetLook at a single NIFTY 5-minute candle. Open 24,500. Close 24,580. High 24,590. Low 24,495. The body is 80 points wide. The upper wick is just 10 points; the lower wick is 5. Volume on this bar is twice the recent 20-bar average. That one candle is telling a complete story — but most traders read only the colour. In this lesson: OHLC anatomy, body-to-wick ratio, and volume confirmation.
OHLC — the four numbers in every bar
- Open — the first traded price in the interval.
- High — the highest price reached.
- Low — the lowest price reached.
- Close — the last traded price.
The rectangle between Open and Close is the body. The thin lines extending above and below are the wicks (or shadows). The body represents the committed move — what buyers and sellers agreed on by the end. The wicks represent the rejected extremes — prices touched but not held.
A candle is bullish when close is above open, regardless of where high and low sit. Bearish when close is below open. Colour is just a visual encoding of that one comparison.
Body vs wick — the emotion in the bar
The ratio of body to wick is where the real information lives.
Strong conviction. One side dominated start to finish. Our anchor NIFTY candle — 80-point body, 10-point upper wick, 5-point lower wick — is exactly this pattern. Roughly 84% of the bar's range is body. A confident bull bar.
Indecision. Buyers pushed up, sellers pushed back, close ended near open. Nobody won. Common at turning points but also common in chop. A small-body bar alone tells you little; the context around it does the work.
Rejection. A long lower wick on a bullish candle means sellers tried to drive price down — and buyers smacked it back up before close. A long upper wick on a bearish candle is the mirror. The wick is the footprint of a failed attack.
Colour without context is decoration. A green candle with a tiny body and huge wicks is not bullish — it is a fight nobody won. A red candle with a massive body and almost no wicks is a confident bear move. Read body before colour.
Volume — the validator
A candle is a claim. Volume is the proof.
If our NIFTY candle had a giant 80-point body but volume below average, the move was driven by thin liquidity — a few traders, no institutional participation. Those moves reverse often, because the level was not actually defended by serious money.
The same 80-point body with twice average volume is a different story. Real money agreed on the direction. Institutions either drove the move or accepted it. Statistically, follow-through is much more likely.
Shorthand:
- Big body + big volume = real move, expect continuation.
- Big body + low volume = thin tape, often reverses.
- Small body + big volume = battle fought, no winner — watch the next bar carefully.
- Small body + low volume = noise, ignore.
How OptionLab handles the candles you see
Before any candle reaches your scanner, it passes through a data sanitiser that enforces basic geometry — high cannot be below low, close must sit inside the high-low range, volume cannot be negative, timestamps must be valid. Bars that fail are silently discarded.
You do not see the rejected bars. You do not inspect every candle for corruption. Signals you act on are computed only from bars the engine considers structurally sound. Small thing, but it compounds across millions of bars per session — and is one reason OptionLab's signals stay stable when a broker feed misbehaves for a few seconds.
See it live
Train your eye on real candles
- Open Strategy Lab. Load NIFTY50 on a 5m or 15m chart.
- Find a recent strong-bodied bullish candle. Note OHLC.
- Compute body / total range as a percentage. Above 70%? That is conviction.
- Check the volume bar. Above or below recent average?
- Look at the next 3 candles. Did the move continue, reverse, or stall?
Do this twenty times and your candle-reading will outpace any one indicator.
- OHLC = Open, High, Low, Close. The body sits between open and close; wicks extend to high and low.
- Bullish = close above open. Bearish = close below open. Colour is decoration, not definition.
- Big body with tiny wicks = strong conviction. Small body with long wicks = indecision or rejection.
- Volume validates the body. Big move with big volume is real; big move with low volume often reverses.
- OptionLab discards candles with broken geometry before they reach your scanner — data quality is upstream of signal quality.
Next up: you can now read one candle. But one candle is a sentence — the market is a paragraph. In the next lesson — Regimes — we'll see how OptionLab classifies the larger context that decides whether your candle's signal even matters.
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