Candles, trends, and volume in plain English — plus the honest limit of what a chart can and can't tell you.
A stock chart looks intimidating, but 90% of it is three ideas: price over time, the trend, and volume. Get those and you can read almost any chart. This is education, not a signal to buy any stock.
Each candle shows one period: where price opened, the highest and lowest it went, and where it closed. Green usually means it closed up, red means down. A long candle means a big move; a tiny one means indecision. That's it — no magic.
Zoom out. Is price generally rising, falling, or drifting sideways? A common shorthand is the 200-day moving average: above it is broadly considered an uptrend, below it a downtrend. The trend is the context every other clue lives inside.
Volume is how many shares traded. A move on high relative volume means real interest; the same move on quiet volume is easier to fake or fade. Big price + big volume = the market means it.
Here's what most chart guides won't admit: a pattern that looks perfect is often a coin flip once you measure its real base rate. Charts show what happened, not what will. We test the popular ones on 8,000+ stocks — many are far less reliable than they feel.
Look up any stock's factor scorecard to see its trend and setups with measured base rates, or check which chart patterns actually hold up in the data.