Candlestick (OHLC)
One bar summarizing a time slice: where price opened, the extremes it reached, and where it closed.
What it means
A candlestick compresses an interval into four numbers — open, high, low, close. The body (open→close) shows the net move; the wicks show the failed excursions. It is the universal chart language because it survives any zoom level.
The subtlety in live trading is the current bar: it is unfinished, and its close does not exist yet. Rules that read "the last bar's close" on a live chart are reading a value that keeps changing until the bar ends — a classic source of backtest-vs-live mismatch.
Why traders care
- Bars make patterns and indicators computable at any timeframe.
- Knowing the difference between a finished and an in-progress bar prevents look-ahead bugs.
In a TraderWe strategy
if Price > CandleOpen and Price > CandleOpenN(1):
Buy()Trading above both this minute's open and the previous minute's open.
Educational content, not investment advice. Engine details describe how TraderWe computes this value; other platforms may define it differently.