Start with the mechanics, because the shape makes no sense without them. Every candle covers a fixed period, a day, an hour, a week, whatever timeframe the chart is set to. The open is the first traded price in that period. The close is the last. The high and low are the extremes reached in between. The "body" of the candle, the thick block, runs from the open to the close. The thin lines above and below, called wicks or shadows, mark the high and low.
Say a stock opens a trading day at ₦50.00. During the session it climbs as high as ₦53.20, falls back to a low of ₦48.80, and finishes the day at ₦52.00. The candle for that day has a body running from ₦50.00 to ₦52.00 (coloured to show the close was above the open, usually green or white), an upper wick reaching to ₦53.20, and a lower wick reaching to ₦48.80. That single candle is a complete, accurate record of the day's price range and where it settled. Nothing in that record tells you what happens tomorrow.
This is where a lot of chart reading goes wrong. Traders name candle shapes: a doji, where the open and close sit close together and the wicks are long; a hammer, with a small body near the top of the range and a long lower wick; an engulfing candle, where one candle's body swallows the previous one entirely. These names describe geometry. They do not describe cause. A hammer shape means sellers pushed the price down during the session and buyers pushed it back up before the close. It does not tell you whether those buyers were a handful of small retail orders or a large institutional position being built. The shape is identical either way.
Volume is the missing half of the picture. Volume is simply the number of shares that changed hands in that period. Two candles can look exactly the same, same open, same high, same low, same close, and mean completely different things depending on how much stock traded to produce them. A hammer formed on light volume, say a few thousand shares in a stock that normally trades hundreds of thousands, is noise. The same hammer formed on volume well above the stock's recent average suggests real buying interest showed up at the lows and was strong enough to move the close back up. Without the volume figure, you cannot tell one from the other. A candle on a bare price chart carries no volume data of its own. You have to look for the volume bar underneath.
Context is the other missing piece. A doji appearing after a long, steady rise carries a different weight than a doji appearing in the middle of a flat, directionless stretch. In the first case, it can mark hesitation at the top of a move, sellers and buyers reaching a rough balance after a run-up. In the second, it is simply what a doji looks like when nothing much is happening, because the stock wasn't trending anywhere to begin with. The candle itself is unchanged. What changes is everything around it, the trend leading into it and the volume that built it.
None of this means the OHLC framework is useless. It is a compact, honest record of price action, and once you can read one candle correctly you can read a sequence of them, which is where patterns start to carry more weight because they show behaviour over several sessions rather than a single snapshot. The point stands even there: a three-candle reversal pattern on collapsing volume is a weaker signal than the same pattern on rising volume, because rising volume tells you participation is increasing at the moment the price is turning.
What a plain OHLC candle cannot give you, on its own, is the "why". It has no field for order flow, no field for news, no field for who was trading. If you want to know whether a move has weight behind it, you need the volume bar next to the candle and you need to know where that candle sits in the broader trend. A single candle in isolation is a fact about one session. It is not a forecast, and no amount of naming its shape turns it into one.
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