What a candle is saying
Open, high, low, close — and why touching a price is not closing beyond it.
Read any single bar as a record: where the period opened, how far it stretched in each direction, and where it finally settled. Separate the body from the wicks and range from progress, size a bar against its ATR instead of against an impression, and hold the distinction that matters most on any chart — a price that was touched is not a price that was closed beyond. Every level, trend and session description built later rests on that habit.
4 chapters · 5 quiz questions · 15 terms · free on a free account
Otus, on this module
A candle is four numbers drawn as one shape. That is all it is. Most traders learn to recognise the shapes in a week and then spend a year arguing with charts, because nobody told them the body and the wick record different events. Get the four numbers straight and every chart after this one reads differently.
The chapters
Each module ends with you doing what it taught — a written answer Otus reads, and a quiz.
- 01 · Read
Four numbers, one bar
Open, high, low, close — the body, the wicks, and why range is not progress.
- 02 · Read
Closing above is not going above
A touch is provisional. A close is final. The difference decides what "broke" means.
- 03 · Study
Find it in this week's study
Open "Day by day" and read one day as a single candle.
- 04 · Write
In your own words
Three or four sentences. Otus reads them.
- 05 · Quiz
Five questions
A wrong answer still pays. It costs the combo, not the XP.
15 terms this module defines
The same definitions Otus uses in the lessons. All of them are in the trading glossary.
- Candle
- One fixed slice of time drawn as four numbers: the first price, the highest, the lowest and the last. Also called a bar. Change the slice and the bar changes; the market does not.
- OHLC
- Open, high, low, close — the four prices every candle records. Every other feature of a bar, from its colour to its wicks, is calculated from these four.
- Timeframe
- The length of time one candle covers — five minutes, one hour, one day. Any statement about closes, levels or trends is incomplete until it names the timeframe.
- Body
- The filled block between the open and the close. It measures net progress: where price started against where it actually finished.
- Wick
- The thin line out to the high or the low. Prices that were genuinely traded inside the period and then left behind before it ended. Also called a shadow or tail.
- Range
- The high minus the low of a bar: the total distance travelled, wicks included. Range is the journey; the body is the destination.
- Body as a share of range
- How much of the distance a bar covered it actually kept. A high share means it moved and held the move; a low share means it moved and gave it back.
- ATR
- Average True Range: the average size of the last n bars, commonly fourteen, including any gap from the previous close. The yardstick that turns "a big bar" into a checkable number.
- Rejection
- Shorthand for a long wick: the market traded at those prices during the period and did not stay there by the close. It records what happened, not who did it or why.
- Liquidity
- How many orders are resting near the current price, ready to trade. Thin liquidity means a modest order can move price a long way — which is how long wicks get printed.
- Spread
- The gap between the bid (the price to sell at) and the ask (the price to buy at). It widens in thin conditions, and a wide spread can print extremes few people traded at.
- Stop order
- An instruction to buy or sell automatically once a set price trades. Clusters of them tend to sit just beyond obvious prices, and triggering them can print a sharp wick.
- Close
- The last traded price of the period. The one number that has to survive the whole period to exist, and the only one that cannot be taken back once the bar ends.
- Close versus touch
- Trading above a price and finishing above it are two different events. Everything in the product that says "broke" or "held" means the second one, on a named timeframe.
- Unfinished bar
- A candle whose period has not ended. Its apparent body runs from the open to the last traded price, which is still moving — so it has no close yet.
Finishing it pays 150 XP and 3 keys on the game board, on top of what each chapter earns. XP measures what you learned — never what you earned. How levels work.
Education only. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell anything; the school teaches reading charts, never predictions.
Start with lesson one.
The first modules, Otus as your tutor and the game board are free. No card needed.