Journal ·

What a long upper wick is actually rejecting

The upper wick is a record of prices that traded and did not hold into the close. That is a narrower claim than “sellers are in control.”

Arthit Srisuk

Handwritten notes and sketches in an open notebook

A long upper wick means the session traded higher and then gave those highs back by the close. Buyers were present. They were not present at the close. Those two sentences already contain more care than the poster version, which simply stamps “bearish” on every shooting star.

Shooting star still needs a rise behind it

The shooting-star name, like the hanging man, is reserved for a candle after an advance. A long upper wick after a fall is a different story — sometimes a stalled bounce, sometimes noise in a range. We do not steal the shooting-star label for every ugly upper shadow.

Where the wick stopped matters

If the wick high kisses a weekly level you have been using, the rejection has a location. If the wick high sits in empty space, you have a session that failed its own highs and nothing more. Students in the Saturday clinic often circle every long shadow on a gold chart and end the morning with a page that looks busy and says little. We make them erase any wick that does not touch a level they can defend in one spoken sentence.

Spoken sentence, not a paragraph. “This wick failed at the March high of the SET bank.” That is enough. If they cannot say it, the circle comes off.

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