First: what one candle covers
A candle always covers one period of time, and you choose the period. One minute, five minutes, an hour, a day, a week.
On a daily chart, one candle is one trading day. On an hourly chart, the same picture is one hour. Nothing about how you read it changes — only how much time it swallowed.
Lakshmi's auction runs one session a day, so one of her boards is one candle.
The four prices, and their names
Tuesday at the market. Bids start at ₹22 a kilo. By mid-morning someone pays ₹23.40; earlier, when a lorry arrived, bids had sagged to ₹21.60. The last bid before Lakshmi closes the auction is ₹23.10.
Four numbers survive on her board:
Open — the first price of the session, ₹22. High — the highest price reached, ₹23.40. Low — the lowest price reached, ₹21.60. Close — the last price of the session, ₹23.10.
You will meet them written as OHLC: open, high, low, close, in that order. Every candle on every chart you will ever look at is those four numbers and nothing else.
How the four numbers are drawn
A candle has a thick middle, called the body, and thin lines above and below it, called wicks or shadows. Both words are used; they mean the same thing.
The body runs between the open and the close. The upper wick reaches up to the high, the lower wick down to the low. That is the whole of the drawing: four prices, two of which become the ends of a box and two of which become the tips of lines.
What each part of it records is the next lesson. For now it is enough that you can put the four numbers on the page and get them back off it.
Tuesday, drawn
One session. The body spans the first and last bid; the wicks reach out to the highest and lowest.
The high and the low are the only two of the four that nobody had to be paying when the auction closed.
Why some candles are green and some are red
Tuesday closed at ₹23.10, above where it opened. A candle that closes above its open is drawn hollow, in green.
Now keep the same open, the same high and the same low, and let the last bid be ₹21.80 instead. The close is now below the open, and the candle is drawn filled, in red.
Colour says one thing only: whether the close was above or below the open. It does not mean the price rose all session, or fell all session. Granthara uses green for a rise and red for a fall everywhere, but other charts differ and plenty of people swap them — check which is which before you read somebody else's.
A candle is not a picture of the session. It is four prices, and everything between them was rubbed out.
What a period boundary decides
One consequence of "one candle, one period" is worth having early. The open and the close are not natural events — they are where the clock was cut.
Lakshmi opens at seven and closes when the last lot goes. Move either bell by an hour and two of her four numbers change, while the onions and the buyers do not. The high and the low would usually survive that; the open and the close often would not.
So a candle is a summary of a period somebody chose. On a daily chart that choice is the exchange's session; on a five-minute chart it is an arbitrary grid laid over the day. Neither is wrong, and neither is the market's own opinion about where a day begins.
Lakshmi's Tuesday board reads ₹22 · ₹23.40 · ₹21.60 · ₹23.10. Which statement uses only what is written on it?
Which of these does a single candle contain?
Four numbers, drawn. The next lesson asks what the two parts of that drawing actually record — because a price the session reached is not the same thing as a price it kept.