Patterns · wicks

Once you can read a single candle, this section is the next stop: joining the shape of a few candles to the wicks above and below them, and reading them together. Hammer, engulfing, doji, long upper wick, long lower wick, pin bar — the names sound cryptic, but each one is just describing the same thing: how buyers and sellers wrestled over these few bars. This section is for people who already know open, high, low, close and want to take one step further. If you can't yet tell a body from a wick, go back to the candlestick basics first — otherwise patterns turn into a pile of names you can't keep straight.

For a reading order, start with the candlestick pattern guide. It picks out the few a beginner actually uses so you get the lay of the land in one pass; if you like to compare as you go, keep the pattern-guide tool open and match shapes one by one. Once you have the overview, dig into wicks: what long upper and lower wicks are telling you teaches you to read selling pressure above or buying support below off that one thin line, and the wick & pin-bar decoder makes it visual. The last two are the heavy hitters — what a pin bar is covers the long wick where price gets spiked to an extreme and snaps back, and hammer, engulfing, doji walks through the most-cited patterns in full.

Before you go further, let's take some of the mystique out of the word "pattern." Search online and you'll find dozens, even hundreds, each with a flashier name than the last — as if learning them all would let you predict price. In truth the ones a beginner genuinely uses number in the handful, and every one of them is describing the same plain thing: how buyers and sellers changed hands over these few candles. A hammer is a push down that got bought back; an engulfing candle is one side swallowing the previous bar in a single move; a doji is both sides locked in a standoff with neither giving way. Rather than memorising dozens of names, get the underlying logic — that bodies and wicks describe a balance of force — and you'll be able to read a pattern you've never seen before and get it roughly right. Why wicks talk louder than bodies comes down to the same idea: a wick records "how far price reached, and how much it got pulled back" — that unheld distance often reveals who was really pushing better than where price closed.