How to read a candlestick chart, with real Bitcoin candles
How to read a candlestick: open, high, low, close, body, wicks and colors, using real Bitcoin candles. Green and red were close to even: 50.61% green.
A candlestick shows four prices for one slice of time: the open, the high, the low and the close. The thick part is the body, from the open to the close. It is green when the close is above the open and red when it is below. The thin lines are wicks, which reach up to the high and down to the low. On Binance Bitcoin from September 2019 to October 2026, 50.61% of 1-hour candles were green, close to even, and the middle 1-hour candle had a body of 0.23% inside a full range of 0.64%.
So wicks are not rare extras. They are most of a typical candle, at all three candle sizes we measured and in every year from 2019 to 2026. These are past cases, not a forecast.
For why wicks are so long, see Why do crypto candles have long wicks?. For 1-hour vs 4-hour vs daily candles, see Best timeframe for crypto?.
What does one candlestick show?
A bar is the open, high, low and close price over a set time. A candlestick is a way of drawing one bar.
- Open: the price when the time slice began.
- Close: the price when it ended.
- High: the highest price during the slice.
- Low: the lowest price during the slice.
The body is the thick block between open and close. The wicks (also called shadows) are the thin lines above and below the body. The upper wick reaches the high. The lower wick reaches the low.
Color shows direction. Green usually means the close was above the open. Red means the close was below the open. Many charting apps let you change these colors, so check yours.
How do you read the body and the wicks?
The body tells you how far price moved from start to finish. A long body means a strong move that held until the close. A short body means price ended near where it began.
The wicks tell you where price went and then came back from. A long upper wick means price pushed up, then fell back before the close. A long lower wick means price pushed down, then recovered.
A wick does not mean the same thing every time. A touch of the high may have lasted one second. The candle cannot show you the order of events inside the slice either. Did price hit the high first or the low first? The candle does not say.
How big is a typical Bitcoin candle?
We measured Binance Bitcoin perp candles at three sizes. All sizes are percent of the candle's opening price. The median is the middle value after sorting all candles from smallest to largest.
| Candle size | Candles | Median body | Median range (high to low) | Median share of range that is wick | Candles with wicks longer than body |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 hour | 62,357 | 0.23% | 0.64% | 59.09% | 61.82% |
| 4 hours | 15,589 | 0.47% | 1.35% | 60.33% | 63.19% |
| 1 day | 2,599 | 1.37% | 3.74% | 59.67% | 61.75% |
Here is a worked example. Picture a 1-hour candle that opens at 100 and has the median size. Its body is about 0.23 points wide. From its low to its high it spans about 0.64 points. Most of that span is wick.
Going from 1-hour to 4-hour candles, the body size about doubled. Going from 4-hour to daily candles, it about tripled. A daily candle is not just a longer copy of an hourly one. It covers more time, so it holds a bigger move.
Wicks were about 60% of the range at every size. In roughly six of every ten candles, the two wicks added together were longer than the body.
Are green candles more common than red?
Only slightly. Here is the share of candles that closed above their open.
| Candle size | Green candles |
|---|---|
| 1 hour | 50.61% |
| 4 hours | 51.09% |
| 1 day | 50.60% |
That is close to even. A candle's color tells you what happened in that slice, not what the next one will do. We also checked whether one candle's direction is linked to the next candle's direction. The link was close to zero: −0.02 for 1-hour candles. (A correlation near 0 means no link, and 1 means they move together.)
Size is different. Big candles tend to follow big candles. The same link for absolute size, ignoring direction, was 0.30 for 1-hour candles and 0.23 for 4-hour candles. For daily candles, we also counted days whose move was in the biggest 10% of the year before. The next day was also that big in 15.84% of 202 cases, versus 9.05% of all days. Most of these came in wild stretches like 2020 and 2022. We cover size in our guide to crypto volatility.
Does candle size change over time?
Yes. Here are Binance Bitcoin 1-hour candles in three different years.
| Year | Candles | Median body | Median range | Median share that is wick |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 8,760 | 0.41% | 1.08% | 60.02% |
| 2023 | 8,760 | 0.16% | 0.45% | 60.05% |
| 2026 (to Oct 19) | 7,008 | 0.19% | 0.49% | 57.13% |
The median candle in 2021 was more than twice the size of the one in 2023. But the share that was wick stayed near 60%. In every year from 2019 to 2026, it was between 56.00% and 61.65% for 1-hour candles. Size changes a lot between years. The mix of body and wick barely does.
This is why one chart can look dramatic in one year and flat in another. Charts rescale to fit the screen, so a calm year and a wild year can look alike. The percent move behind the candles may be very different.
What can candles not tell you?
- They do not show the order of events inside the slice.
- They do not show volume unless you add a volume panel. Volume is how much was traded.
- Candle names like "hammer" or "doji" are labels people give to shapes. We did not test them, so we make no claim that they work.
- The colors do not mean "buy" or "sell". They only show where the close sat versus the open.
- A candle on one exchange can differ from the same candle on another exchange.
How we measured this
We used completed 1-hour and daily candles from Binance BTCUSDT perps, from September 8, 2019 to October 19, 2026. We built 4-hour candles from four complete hourly candles on the UTC grid of 00:00, 04:00, 08:00, 12:00, 16:00 and 20:00. If one hourly bar was missing, that 4-hour candle was dropped. UTC is the shared world clock.
Body is the absolute distance from open to close, as a percent of the open. Range is high minus low, as a percent of the open. Wick share is one minus the body divided by the range, worked out for each candle before taking the median. We skipped candles with zero range and dropped two placeholder bars from the start of the Bitcoin history. We report medians so rare giant candles do not drag the numbers up. Candles next to each other are not independent, so the counts are not independent tests.
Try this in Comparand
Connect Comparand to your AI app, then ask:
- "Get completed 1-hour bars for Binance BTCUSDT for yesterday. For each bar, show the body size, the upper and lower wick as a percent of the open, and whether it closed green." The bars tool (venue_bars) returns open, high, low, close and volume for one symbol, with 1 minute, 5 minute, 15 minute, 1 hour, 4 hour and 1 day sizes. It returns completed bars only. It is free on every key. Your agent does the wick maths.
- "Get Hyperliquid price bars for ETH over one day." The Hyperliquid bars tool (hl_bars) returns price bars for one coin over a window you choose. It costs $0.005 per call on pay as you go, and plans include it under fair-use limits.
Comparand's own chart search is built on candles. It turns the latest completed bars into a shape. Then it finds the closest past windows from the same coin on the same exchange. See what a chart analog is and how many candles to match. You can try 3 coins free, read the docs, or see pricing.
The short version
- A candle shows open, high, low and close. The body runs open to close, and the wicks reach the high and low.
- The middle Binance Bitcoin 1-hour candle had a 0.23% body and a 0.64% range, and 59.09% of the range was wick.
- Body size about doubled from 1-hour to 4-hour candles and about tripled from 4-hour to daily.
- Green candles were 50.61% of 1-hour candles, so color alone says little about the next one.
- These are past cases, not a forecast.
Questions people ask
How do you read a candlestick?
A candlestick shows four prices for one time period: open, high, low and close. The thick body runs from open to close. The thin lines, called wicks, reach to the high and the low. Green usually means the close was above the open, and red means below, though apps let you change colors.
How big is a typical Bitcoin candle?
On Binance Bitcoin perps from September 2019 to October 2026, the middle 1-hour candle had a body of 0.23% and a high-to-low range of 0.64%. The middle 4-hour candle had a body of 0.47% and a range of 1.35%. The middle daily candle had a body of 1.37% and a range of 3.74%.
What do long wicks mean on a candle?
A long wick means price travelled to that level and came back before the candle closed. In our Bitcoin data, wicks made up 59.09% of the range of the middle 1-hour candle, so some wick is normal, not a special sign.
Do green candles mean price will keep rising?
No. In our test, 50.61% of Binance Bitcoin 1-hour candles closed green, close to half. The direction of one candle told us very little about the next one. These are past cases, not a forecast.
Which timeframe should I use for candles?
It depends on what you want to see. A 1-hour candle shows detail. A daily candle shows the big picture, and its middle body was about six times larger than the 1-hour one in our Bitcoin data. Both views come from the same prices.