OHLC Candlesticks: Read the Bar Without Inventing the Price Path

How to read a candlestick chart in five checks

Start with the instrument and price series, then read the interval, open, high, low and close. The body joins open to close; the wicks reach the interval's high and low. A candle describes recorded prices. It does not identify every participant, establish the order of every price move or tell you where your own order would fill.

1. Identify the series. Confirm the exact instrument, contract or symbol and whether the chart uses bid, ask, last trade or transformed values.
2. Read the interval. A five-minute candle summarizes one defined five-minute bucket. Check its timestamp convention, timezone and session settings.
3. Locate open and close. Read the numerical values instead of relying only on body color.
4. Locate high and low. The wick tips give extremes of the recorded series during that interval.
5. Check what is missing. An unfinished bar can change. A completed bar still omits intrabar ordering, liquidity and your order's event history.

The examples here are invented price sequences for ordinary time-based bars. They are not signals, recommended entries or observations of TradeCopier performance. The interactive explorer changes the sequence while preserving the four summary values; the diagrams and tables below give the same explanation without JavaScript.

Read the body, upper wick and lower wick

Open is the first recorded price in the interval and close is the last available price in that same series. High and low are its recorded extremes. A chart can label a bar by its opening time: MetaQuotes documents the MqlRates time field as the period start. Do not interpret that label as the time at which the high, low or final close occurred.

Geometry of the hypothetical candle, in quoted price units

Measure	Formula	Example
Full range	High − low	104 − 98 = 6
Body	Absolute value of close − open	|102 − 100| = 2
Upper wick	High − max(open, close)	104 − 102 = 2
Lower wick	min(open, close) − low	100 − 98 = 2

These distances are not automatically dollars, pips or account profit. Converting a price move to money also requires quantity, contract terms and any currency conversion. The body and two wicks should add up to the full range for a valid ordinary candle. High must be at least both open and close; low must be at most both. A violation suggests mixed fields, a bad export or a different chart transformation.

Rising, falling and doji candles

A rising candle closes above its open; a falling candle closes below it. Many chart themes use green and red, but colors are configurable. Read the price relationship and chart legend. A candle with exactly equal open and close has zero body in the arithmetic used here. Traders may also call a very small body a doji, but that requires a stated tolerance rather than pretending all definitions are identical.

Three fictional candles sharing high 104 and low 98

Candle	Open → close	Body	What follows
Rising	100 → 102	2	The last price exceeds the first
Falling	102 → 100	2	The last price is below the first
Equal open and close	100 → 100	0	The endpoints match despite a range of 6

None of these statements proves a reversal, trend continuation or profitable strategy. A zero-body candle does not mean no trading occurred: the recorded price could move to both extremes and return to its open. Similarly, a long wick describes a distance in one sample interval; it does not prove which traders caused it or what happens next.

Identical OHLC values can hide opposite price sequences

Both 100 → 104 → 98 → 102 and 100 → 98 → 104 → 102 open at 100, reach high 104 and low 98, and close at 102. The first visits the high before the low; the second reverses that order. The final candle looks identical.

Imagine an already-open long position with hypothetical stop level 99 and target level 103. On the first connected path, 103 is crossed before 99; on the second, 99 is crossed before 103. This shows an ordering ambiguity, not two verified trade outcomes. A real order has trigger-side, activation, liquidity, quantity and execution rules that a line drawing cannot establish.

A backtest using only the four OHLC fields cannot recover which intrabar path occurred. Choosing whichever sequence gives the better result introduces an unsupported assumption. Use a declared treatment of ambiguous bars or suitable finer-grained data. Even tick data must cover the relevant series and event timing; additional rows alone do not establish that the model could receive the illustrated fill.

Timeframes and session boundaries change the summary

Aggregation uses the first open, highest high, lowest low and last close of the included observations. It does not average all four fields. Suppose two adjacent five-minute bars contain the following fictional values:

Combining two five-minute buckets into one ten-minute bucket

Declared interval	Open	High	Low	Close
09:00 inclusive to 09:05 exclusive	100	104	99	103
09:05 inclusive to 09:10 exclusive	103	105	98	102
Combined 09:00–09:10	100	105	98	102

The half-open interval convention above assigns a boundary observation to the next bucket. It is an explicit example convention, not a universal platform rule. A different session start can place the same observation in a different daily or hourly bar. Include timezone and session boundaries when comparing screenshots; a timezone display change alone does not necessarily rebuild the underlying buckets.

TradingView's interval guide explains the relationship between chart intervals and trading sessions, including shorter final bars when an interval does not fit the remaining session. Check the actual platform's construction rather than assuming every bar spans a full interval of active trading. Keep regular-session and extended-session data distinct.

A gap is not a candle body

The body compares this candle's open with its close. A gap compares a new open with the previous close. Suppose the previous close was 100 and the next bar opens at 103, reaches 105 and 102, and closes at 104. Its body is 1, its range is 3 and its opening gap from the prior close is +3. These are different measurements.

A gap between observed prices does not establish executable liquidity at every intermediate value. Likewise, connecting sparse observations with a line adds a visual interpolation, not evidence of transactions at each crossed price. Missing periods, feed interruptions and scheduled market closures require different explanations; check the source record before labeling a blank area on a chart.

Check bid, ask and last before diagnosing a copied trade

MetaTrader 5's chart guide documents chart construction from bid or last prices depending on the instrument. Its trading principles separately explain bid and ask in trade execution. A screenshot of one price series cannot establish every price another order type uses.

For example, a hypothetical bid high of 103.00 does not reveal the simultaneous ask high without the ask series. Last-trade data also does not guarantee an immediately available execution price, as Investor.gov's order guide explains. Use the correct side and native trigger rules before deciding whether a missing fill is inconsistent with the records.

When source and follower charts differ, record the exact instrument, price series, timeframe, session, timezone, platform build and whether the bar is complete. Then inspect order and execution records to separate an observation, a submitted instruction, an accepted order and a fill. The bid–ask reference and volume-field comparison explain two other reasons visually similar charts can describe different data.

Keep the claim as narrow as the evidence: “these recorded bars differ” can be established from two exports. “The copier caused a worse fill” needs matched order and execution evidence beyond candle shapes. The examples on this page establish arithmetic and information limits, not product compatibility or measured execution performance.