Recently, someone asked me how to start reading charts seriously, and the answer is always the same: forget about lines—you need to master Japanese candlesticks. It’s not an exaggeration; it’s literally the first thing anyone who wants to do real technical analysis should understand.

Candlesticks have an interesting history. They were originally used in Japan centuries ago in rice trading, then they came to the West, and now they’re the standard for analyzing any financial market. Basically, each candlestick shows you four pieces of data at the same time: open, close, high, and low—which traders call OHLC. The body of the candlestick is where it opened and closed, and the wicks are the extremes the price reached. The color depends on the platform, but generally green is bullish and red is bearish.

What’s interesting is that with a line chart you only see the close, and you lose all the information about what happened in the middle. With Japanese candlesticks, you see the full battle between buyers and sellers. A long upper wick with a close below tells you that buyers pushed the price up, but sellers regained ground. That’s information you can’t ignore.

Now, there are specific patterns that traders constantly look for. The Doji is a candlestick with an almost nonexistent body and long wicks—it means pure indecision; nobody has control. The Hammer is similar, but it indicates a probable trend reversal. The Marubozu is the opposite: a huge body with no wicks, showing a strengthened trend—no doubt. There are many more, but these are the ones you see all the time.

What most people don’t understand is that a candlestick doesn’t give you a definitive signal. You need confluences—multiple signals that line up. A Japanese candlestick pattern + a Fibonacci level + a moving average—that’s what gives you confidence to enter. I’ve seen traders enter with just one candlestick, but those are traders with years of experience—their eyes are already trained.

One detail many overlook is the importance of timeframes. A Hammer on a 1-day chart is far more reliable than one on a 15-minute chart. And here’s what becomes useful when you understand wicks: a 1-hour candlestick is made up of four 15-minute candlesticks. If you see a long wick on the 1-hour candlestick, when you break it down into smaller timeframes you can see exactly where the action happened—where buyers lost control, and where sellers gained strength.

To identify support and resistance, Japanese candlesticks are infinitely superior to lines. The wicks reach levels that lines don’t even register. I’ve seen support levels that only become clearly visible when you use candlesticks—using lines, you completely miss them.

My advice if you’re just starting: for now, forget about trading. Open a demo account, look at charts every day, and train your eye to recognize patterns in the historical data. Look for Japanese candlesticks across different assets and different timeframes. When you recognize patterns without thinking—when you see a setup and you know what it means—that’s when you should consider opening real trades. Professionals spend hours analyzing to make decisions in minutes. It’s like a soccer player training for 3 hours to play 90 minutes—you need that prior training.

Most serious traders combine technical analysis with fundamentals, but if you want to build a solid foundation, mastering Japanese candlesticks is the first mandatory step. Once you truly understand them, you’ve already completed more than 50% of the journey. After that, you can add indicators, Fibonacci levels, moving averages—but without understanding what each candlestick is telling you, everything else is just noise.