Single-candle: doji, hammer, hanging man, shooting star, marubozu, spinning top

A stock drops sharply for a week. On Friday, it forms a candle with a tiny body and a massive lower wick. You check your chart-reading textbook and it says this is a "Hammer," a powerful bullish reversal signal.

Six months later, the exact same stock rallies sharply for a week. It forms the identical candle—a tiny body and a massive lower wick. You check the textbook again, and this time it says the shape is a "Hanging Man," a powerful bearish reversal signal.

How can the exact same visual shape mean two completely opposite things?

A single candle is not a signal; it is a record of one session's tug-of-war between buyers and sellers. Before you learn any names, learn to read that tug-of-war straight from the four numbers — and you can, with three questions:

1. Which way did it close? A close above the open (green) means buyers finished ahead on net; below (red) means sellers did. That is the body.
2. Which wick is long? A long wick is a rejected move — the side that pushed price out there got pushed back. A long lower wick means sellers drove it down and failed; a long upper wick means buyers drove it up and failed.
3. Where did the close land in the day's range? This is the honest tell of who had the last word. A close in the top third of the high-to-low range means buyers ended in control, whatever happened in between; a close in the bottom third means sellers did; a close in the middle means neither finished decisively ahead.

Every named shape below is just a memorable label for a particular set of answers to those three questions:

1. Doji — open and close are level, leaving a cross. Reading: both sides fought over a range but finished exactly even. A stalemate — pure indecision.
2. Hammer / hanging man — a small body up top, a long lower wick. Reading: sellers pushed the price down hard during the session, and buyers reclaimed nearly all of it by the close, so buyers had the last word. The identical shape is a "hammer" at a low and a "hanging man" at a high — the same reading, pointing different ways by context (the next section shows why).
3. Shooting star — a small body down low, a long upper wick. Reading: buyers pushed the price up, and sellers rejected it back down by the close, so sellers had the last word.
4. Marubozu — a full body, no wicks. Reading: one side controlled the session end to end, open to close, with no rejection either way — the cleanest sign of one-sided pressure.
5. Spinning top — a small body centred between two roughly equal wicks. Reading: both sides pushed hard (a wide range) but neither finished ahead — an even, contested session.

The names are shorthand; the reading — who went heavy, who got rejected, who closed in control — is what you actually take from the candle.

Every price in this module is an illustrative example, not a real quote. [illustrative]

Build a candle and watch the reading update — not just its name, but who ended in control. The pressure bar shows where the close landed in the day's range, the honest tell of who had the last word. Slide the close from the low to the high and watch the verdict move from "sellers" to "buyers."

A shape cannot tell you what it means in isolation. A single candle only gains a meaning when you place it into the context of the larger trend and structure.

A "hammer" at the bottom of a steep downtrend means the sellers finally pushed too far and the buyers are fighting back. That same physical shape at the top of a massive uptrend is called a "hanging man" because it shows the buyers struggled to hold the price up during the session, exposing a hidden vulnerability. You must define what would change your mind—usually, if the next day's candle closes below the wick of the hammer, the pattern has failed, and the prior trend is reasserting itself.

Fin-influencers sell cheat sheets with these shapes lined up on a grid, implying that if you memorize the shapes, you can print money. They deliberately strip away context because context is hard to teach in a 30-second video.

This traps beginners into pattern hunting. They see a "shooting star" right in the middle of a choppy, sideways range and confidently declare a massive reversal is imminent. But inside a range, a shooting star is just random noise. A reversal pattern requires an actual trend to reverse.

Single candles give you the most micro-level read on the market's heartbeat. They tell you who won today. But reading one session in isolation is like trying to understand a movie by looking at a single frame.

To get a clearer picture of the momentum, you must look at how multiple sessions interact with each other. In the next module, we combine these single frames into two-candle relationships.