Lesson 2: Single-Candle Signals

🕯️ Candlestick Patterns in 5 Minutes · Lesson 2 of 10

In Lesson 1 you learned that every candle is built from four prices and that the body and wicks tell a small story about buyers versus sellers. Now we put that to work on three specific shapes you'll see constantly.

These are single-candle signals. One bar, one message. They don't predict the future on their own, but they tell you who had the upper hand, and sometimes that nobody did.

The doji: a stalemate

A doji is a candle where the open and close land at almost the same price. The body shrinks to a thin line, with wicks above and below. Picture a stock that opens at $80, runs up to $83, drops to $77, then closes back at $80. Buyers and sellers fought all session and ended in a draw.

That's the message of a doji. Indecision. The trend that was running into it just hit a wall of uncertainty. After a long green run, a doji says the buyers ran out of gas. After a long red slide, it says the sellers eased off.

A doji alone is not a signal to act. It's a flag that says pay attention, the balance just shifted. We cover the variations in detail in our doji candlestick guide.

The marubozu: total control

The marubozu is the opposite of a doji. It's all body, no wicks. The candle opens at one end and closes at the other, with no shadows poking out.

A green marubozu opens at the low and closes at the high. Buyers grabbed the wheel at the open and never let go. A red marubozu opens at the high and closes at the low. Sellers dominated start to finish. There was no pushback, no point where the other side clawed any of it back.

This is the strongest single-candle statement of conviction you can get. When you see a big marubozu, one side just steamrolled the other for the entire period.

The spinning top: a quiet shrug

The spinning top sits in the middle. Small body, long wicks on both the top and bottom. Price stretched up and stretched down during the period, but closed near where it opened.

It looks a lot like a doji, and the meaning is similar. The difference is the body is small but visible, not a thin line. Both sides took a swing, both got rejected, and the candle ends roughly flat.

A spinning top says momentum is fading. The trend coming in is losing its grip. Like the doji, it's a caution sign rather than a green light. If a stock has been climbing hard and then prints a couple of spinning tops, the easy part of the move may be over.

How to read them in one glance

Here's the quick mental sort for these three.

Notice the pattern. Big body means conviction. Small body means doubt. That single rule carries you through most of candlestick reading, and it's exactly what the multi-candle patterns later in this course lean on. For the wider map of shapes, the candlestick patterns overview is your reference.

Next up

So far the candles have been symmetrical. Lesson 3 gets into the hammer family, where one long wick on one side flips the whole meaning. Hammer, hanging man, inverted hammer, shooting star, same shapes, but the trend they show up in changes everything.