Upper Wick
Upper shadow · Top wick · Wick · 윗꼬리 · 위꼬리
The thin line sticking up from a candle on a chart: the price rose that far during the period but came back down by its end.
Simple explanation
Each candle on a chart holds four prices: where the period opened, where it closed, the highest and the lowest. The body is drawn between the open and the close; thin lines (wicks) reach out to the high and the low. The line above the body is the upper wick, the one below the lower wick.
A long upper wick means the price once rose a lot, but at that level more people wanted to sell than to buy, and it was pushed back down. It is read as a sign of heavy selling at high prices, so a long upper wick after a big rise is often taken to mean the rally is losing strength.
It shows up often in coins suspected of manipulation. When the price is driven vertically within minutes or hours and the coins are sold at the top where buyers crowded in, the price falls fast and leaves a long upper wick. Be especially careful when such candles repeat at similar times of day. Wicks also form for ordinary reasons, for example when big news is followed by disappointed selling.
How long a wick looks depends on the time frame: a long wick on the 1-minute chart can vanish inside the body of the daily candle. In a coin with very little trading one or two fills can draw a long wick, so look at the trading value too.
The "spike fade" signal on CoinGaja's unusual coin signals page puts this in numbers: it turns on when a coin rose 30% or more from its 24-hour low and is now 15% or more under its 24-hour high, from prices taken every 5 minutes; markets with under 100 million won (about $71,000) of 24-hour value are left out. This entry is general information, not investment advice.
Example
1-hour candle: open ₩1,000 · high ₩1,500 · low ₩980 · close ₩1,050
The body is short (₩1,000-1,050); the upper wick runs from ₩1,050 to ₩1,500, ₩450 → it was up +50% at one point and gave most of it back
A buyer at the ₩1,500 high is down −30% at the close → what CoinGaja's "spike fade" signal looks for
※ Example numbers, for illustration only
See it on CoinGaja
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