Look at ten traders staring at the same candle and you'll get ten different reactions, and most of them are wrong for the same reason: they're reading the color instead of the fight. A daily candle on GBPUSD that opened at 1.2680 and closed at 1.2645 lost 35 pips, sure, but it might have rallied to 1.2710 first and then gotten sold all the way back down. The color tells you who won the war. It tells you nothing about how brutal the battle was, and the battle is where the useful information actually lives.
Every candle, on every timeframe, from a 1 minute chart to a monthly one, is built from exactly four numbers: the open, the high, the low and the close. Learn to read those four numbers properly before you learn a single named pattern, because pin bars, engulfing candles and every other shape in this series are just different arrangements of the same four ingredients.
The body and the wicks are different information
The body is the rectangle between the open and the close. Color tells direction: a candle that closes above its open is usually shown green or white, one that closes below its open is red or black. The wicks, sometimes called shadows, are the thin lines above and below the body, marking the high and low price actually touched before retreating. A big body means one side pushed price a long way and held most of it. A long wick attached to a small body means price got shoved hard in one direction and then rejected almost all the way back. Those are two completely different stories that can look similar at a glance.
Body size is conviction, measured in real numbers
Put numbers on it. Gold trading a $22 range for the day, say 2,401 to 2,423, that closes at 2,419 has a body covering $18 of that $22 range, about 80 percent. That's a strong, one-sided candle: buyers controlled most of the session. The same $22 range closing at 2,411, near the middle, has a body of maybe $8, roughly a third of the range. That's a tug of war, not a rout, even though both candles traveled the exact same distance. On the Nasdaq, a 200 point day that closes 180 points from the open is conviction. A 200 point day that closes 40 points from the open, after touching both extremes, is chop wearing a trend's clothing.
Where the close sits is the real vote
The single most useful thing about any candle is where the close landed inside its own range, because the close is the price the market agreed to leave the fight at. A candle that closes at or near its high, even after diving lower first, tells you buyers had the last word for that period. A close near the low tells you sellers did. A close parked in the middle, with wicks stretching both ways, tells you nobody won, and that's information too: it usually means the price level the candle is sitting at matters, because both sides are fighting hard over it.
One candle by itself proves almost nothing
Here's the honest part. A single candle, however dramatic its shape, is weak evidence on its own. A huge bullish body on EURUSD sitting in the middle of an empty range, nowhere near a prior swing high or a level anyone has defended before, is just a big candle. The same shape forming right at a support zone that has held twice before, after a downtrend that's already losing momentum, is a completely different proposition. Context turns a shape into a signal. Without a level, a trend, or prior structure to react against, you're reading a sentence with no idea what page it came from. Every pattern in this series inherits this rule, and none of them escape it.