How to draw a candlestick chart by hand

There are two quite different reasons to draw a candlestick chart by hand, and they want different things from the drawing.

One is to show a chart that exists: a session you traded, a move you are writing up. Here accuracy to the real prices is the whole point, and the fastest route is to import the data rather than reproduce it.

The other is to show a chart that does not exist: the textbook example, the setup still forming, the version where it failed. Nothing can be imported, because none of it happened. This is the case screenshots cannot serve at all, and it is the one drawing is for.

Four routes, and they all arrive at the same editable candles, so the choice is about where you are starting from rather than what you end up with.

Draw them. Place each candle directly. Complete control, and the right choice for a short illustrative sequence where every candle is making a point.

Generate them. Produce a plausible starting chart from market statistics, then shape it. Faster than drawing thirty candles to get to the five that matter, and the generated shape is calibrated per timeframe rather than random.

Import them. A CSV with Open, High, Low and Close columns. Most trading terminals export one, and free historical archives publish them for a long list of instruments. This is the accurate route when the chart is of something that really happened.

Sketch and convert. Draw the shape of the move as a zig-zag and convert it into a real candle sequence. Useful when you know the shape of the story before you know the candles.

This is the step that separates a drawing of a chart from a chart. A candle whose four numbers are not deliberate reads as approximately right, and a reader who knows candles will notice.

Work on the body first: it sets the open and the close, which is the part of the candle a reader takes in first. Then the wicks, which set the high and the low. In CandleDraw each of the four is a handle on the candle itself, so you set them by dragging on the chart rather than typing numbers into a panel beside it.

Keep the wicks honest relative to the bodies. The most common tell of an invented chart is wicks that are too long and too uniform, because real bars at most timeframes have a good proportion with no wick on one side at all.

A chart in a journal, a lesson or a post is making an argument, and an unannotated one leaves the reader to find it. Mark the level that mattered, shade the zone, label the candle you are talking about.

The restraint worth keeping: annotate the thing you are explaining and nothing else. Every additional line costs the reader attention, and a chart covered in them is harder to read than the bare candles were.

The last step is the one that decides whether the work was worth doing. A chart exported as a clean image sits in a document, a slide or a post without the window chrome, timestamps and grid noise a screenshot brings with it.

Export at the size it will be seen at. A chart shrunk into a column loses its wicks first, so a sequence meant for a narrow space usually wants fewer candles drawn larger rather than the same chart made smaller.