Candlesticks pack four numbers — open, high, low, and close — into a single shape. Once you can read that shape at a glance, price charts stop looking like noise and start telling a story about who is in control: buyers or sellers.
The body shows the distance between the open and the close. A long green body means buyers pushed price up and held it; a long red body means sellers dominated. The thin wicks above and below show how far price travelled before being rejected.
Patterns matter most at the edges. A hammer after a long decline, or a shooting star after a sharp rally, hints that momentum is fading. Context beats memorised names — always read a candle relative to the trend around it.
Start by watching a single asset for a week. Note where long wicks appear and what happens next. That habit builds real intuition faster than any list of pattern names.