Japanese Candlesticks

If someone told you they had uncovered a 300 year old secret that had the potential to bring great wealth, would you listen? If this, then, could explain the mysteries behind the secret so that you could profit as well, would you be interested?

For those of you who are involved in the stock market, technical analysis can be somewhat of a mystery. You research and study, yet your trades just don’t end up being very successful. All you need to know is how to recognize the easily-seen signals the Japanese Candlesticks create.

A candlestick chart is a style of bar-chart used primarily to describe price movements of an equity over time. It is a combination of a line-chart and a bar-chart, in that each bar represents the range of price movement over a given time interval. It is most often used in technical analysis of equity and currency price patterns. They appear superficially similar to error bars, but are unrelated.

Candlestick charts are said to have been developed in the 18th century by legendary Japanese rice trader Homma Munehisa. The charts gave Homma and others an overview of open, high, low, and close market prices over a certain period. This style of charting is very popular due to the level of ease in reading and understanding the graphs. Since the 17th century, there has been a lot of effort to relate chart patterns to the likely future behavior of a market. This method of charting prices proved to be particularly interesting, due to the ability to display five data points instead of one. The Japanese rice traders also found that the resulting charts would provide a fairly reliable tool to predict future demand.

The method was picked up by Charles Dow around 1900 and remains in common use by today's traders of financial instruments. Compared to traditional bar charts, many traders consider candlestick charts more visually appealing and easier to interpret. Each candlestick provides an easy-to-decipher picture of price action.

Immediately a trader can see compare the relationship between the open and close as well as the high and low. The relationship between the open and close is considered vital information and forms the essence of candlesticks. Hollow candlesticks, where the close is greater than the open, indicate buying pressure. Filled candlesticks, where the close is less than the open, indicate selling pressure.

In order to create a candlestick chart, you must have a data set that contains open, high, low and close values for each time period you want to display. The hollow or filled portion of the candlestick is called "the body" (also referred to as "the real body").

The long thin lines above and below the body represent the high/low range and are called "shadows" (also referred to as "wicks" and "tails"). The high is marked by the top of the upper shadow and the low by the bottom of the lower shadow. If the stock closes higher than its opening price, a hollow candlestick is drawn with the bottom of the body representing the opening price and the top of the body representing the closing price. If the stock closes lower than its opening price, a filled candlestick is drawn with the top of the body representing the opening price and the bottom of the body representing the closing price.

Okay, I think the explanation is quite enough. So check this out if you still wanna more

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