Learn the stock market › Read a stock chart › Lesson 2 of 6
Line, bar or candlestick chart?
Apple, 20 days as a line
The same 20 days as bars
The same 20 days as candlesticks
Four prices a day
Thousands of trades happen in a trading day. Four of their prices are enough to describe it: the open is the first price, the high and low are the day's extremes, and the close is the last price. Together they are called OHLC. The last five days of Apple:
| Date | Open | High | Low | Close |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 2 | 342.67 | 343.80 | 335.82 | 338.32 |
| Nov 3 | 325.58 | 334.50 | 325.33 | 331.90 |
| Nov 4 | 341.56 | 354.50 | 340.99 | 349.51 |
| Nov 5 | 353.89 | 355.38 | 342.06 | 344.17 |
| Nov 6 | 338.73 | 345.79 | 338.30 | 342.37 |
The prices are adjusted for dividends, just like the charts above.
The line
A line uses only the close. It is the easiest to read and works best for long periods, where single days cannot be seen anyway. Everything that happened during the day is gone.
The bar
A bar is a vertical stroke from the day's low to its high. A short tick on the left marks the open and one on the right the close. On Nov 6, 2026 Apple traded between $338.30 and $345.79, opened at $338.73 and closed at $342.37.
The candlestick
A candlestick shows the same four prices. The thick part, the body, runs between the open and the close. The thin lines, the wicks or shadows, reach the day's high and low.
On Nov 6, 2026 Apple closed above its open, so the last body is green.
A long body means the price moved a lot from open to close. Long wicks mean the price went far during the day but came back. The colour compares the day's close only with the day's open, not with yesterday. So a green day can still end lower than the day before, if the stock opened even lower.
Reading patterns in candlesticks is part of technical analysis, and the most common patterns have a lesson of their own. How well five well-known signals have predicted prices is in the technical analysis study.
Which one to use
They are the same trades, so none is truer than the others. A line suits months and years. Bars and candlesticks suit days and weeks, when you want to see how far the price moved within the day. Pick one week per bar instead of one day and each bar shows the week's first price, high, low and last price.
Test yourself
A candlestick is red. What do you know for sure?
More numbers are on the Apple page.