The busiest day looks like nothing.

The number the four numbers do not contain

04.01.01 listed what a candle throws away: the order of events, how long a price lasted, and how much changed hands. The first two are gone for good. The third is usually recorded separately, and in the mandi it is the simplest count there is — how many sacks left the yard.

In a share market the same figure is called volume: the quantity traded in the period. It is published alongside the prices and drawn under the candle, not inside it.

It is a genuinely separate measurement. Price says how far the day moved. Volume says how much arrived. Neither can be worked out from the other, and their disagreement is the whole of this lesson.

Effort against result

The useful framing is a pair of words: effort is how much arrived, and result is how far the price moved. Ordinarily they track each other — a lot of buying moves the price, a quiet day does not.

Thursday is the case where they disagree. Four hundred sacks arrived and the price finished five paise from where it started, having travelled eighty-five paise all day. A great deal of effort produced almost no result.

The plain reading is that somebody met everything that arrived. For every sack pressed onto the market there was a buyer at close to the going price, and for every buyer a seller. That is what absorption names: demand and supply meeting in quantity without the price having to move to find them.

Volume and range are separate measurements. Their agreement is ordinary; their disagreement is the thing worth noticing.

Two warnings that come with the name

Shape cannot distinguish it. Thursday's board is a small-bodied candle and so are the other five — 04.02.03's shape exactly. If you are reading shapes alone, absorption is invisible. No amount of studying the candle recovers a number that is not in it.

Big compared with what? The same comparison problem as range, and the same answer: volume is judged against its own recent average on its own board. Four hundred sacks is enormous in a week of sixty and unremarkable in a festival week of six hundred. There is no absolute figure.

And the same refusal as everywhere else in this Part: absorption records that a great deal was met at a stable price. It does not say by whom, or why, or what the next day does. Part 08 is volume in full; 04.05.02 makes it one of four filters.

A candle that says less than the day did. The last name in this chapter is the opposite problem: a candle that says a great deal, and says exactly the same thing in two situations that could not be more different.