A candlestick chart (also called Japanese candlestick chart) is a style of financial chart used to describe price movements of a security, derivative, or currency.

Each “candlestick” typically shows one day, thus a one-month chart may show the 20 trading days as 20 candlesticks. Candlestick charts can also be built using intervals shorter or longer than one day.

It is similar to a bar chart in that each candlestick represents all four important pieces of information for that day: open and close in the thick body; high and low in the “candle wick”.

Being densely packed with information, it tends to represent trading patterns over short periods of time, often a few days or a few trading sessions.

Candlestick chart of EUR/USD currency pair on daily timeframe in MetaTrader 5 trading platform.
Candlestick charts are most often used in technical analysis of equity and currency price patterns.

They are visually similar to box plots, though box plots show different information.