Candles and volume, without the cope

You finished the basics, so here's the grown-up version: a candle is not a mood, it's a receipt. It records four numbers for a time window — the first trade (open), the last trade (close), and the highest and lowest prices anyone actually paid in between. On a DEX there's no order book doing this; the price is just the ratio of the two tokens in the liquidity pool, and every swap nudges that ratio. A green candle means the window ended with the pool holding relatively more of the quote side than it started with. That's it. No candle "wants" anything.

Volume is where the cope creeps in. Price rising on shrinking volume means fewer people are paying up each leg — the move is getting thinner, not stronger. That's divergence, and it's one of the most reliable "this is running out of buyers" tells there is. Also know this: on-chain volume is real transactions, but real doesn't mean honest. A bot swapping a token back and forth with itself pays only fees and prints beautiful volume bars all day. Huge volume with a flat holder count and the same few wallets cycling is wash trading wearing a volume costume.

Wicks are rejected prices. A long upper wick says someone bought the top and the market immediately disagreed — those buyers are now underwater and every one of them is future sell pressure at breakeven. A long lower wick says sellers panicked into bids that held. Wicks tell you where trapped people live, and trapped people behave predictably: they sell relief and they panic lows. Read candles as a record of who got trapped where, and charts stop being astrology.