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What one 5-minute SENSEX candle actually records (and what it throws away)

22 September 2026 · AlgoRishi

Open any SENSEX chart and you will see a wall of red and green rectangles with thin lines sticking out of them. Most people learn to call them "candles" and then immediately jump to pattern names — hammer, doji, engulfing. That is skipping the only part that actually matters.

Before any pattern means anything, you need to know precisely what a single candle is recording. Let us take one 5-minute SENSEX candle apart.

4numbers inside every candle
5 mintime each candle covers
755-min candles in one SENSEX session
20SENSEX options lot size

A candle is a summary, not a picture

Between 10:35 and 10:40, SENSEX traded thousands of times. Every one of those trades had a price. A 5-minute candle throws away all of that detail and keeps exactly four numbers:

That is it. Four numbers. The body of the rectangle is drawn between Open and Close. The thin lines above and below — the wicks, or shadows — stretch to the High and the Low. The colour just tells you whether Close ended above Open (usually green) or below it (usually red).

One 5-minute SENSEX candle, 10:35–10:40 High — 74,946 (touched 10:37) Close — 74,920 (last trade) Open — 74,860 (first trade) Low — 74,838 (touched 10:36) the actual path is thrown away five minutes
The candle keeps four numbers. The squiggle inside — the order in which prices actually happened — is not stored anywhere on the chart.
Two candles can look identical and describe completely different five minutes. One may have fallen first and then recovered; the other may have risen first and then given it back. The chart cannot tell them apart.

The wick is where the argument happened

Think of an auto-rickshaw negotiation. You ask ₹80. He says ₹150. You walk away a step. He says ₹110. You settle at ₹100. The Open is ₹80, the High is ₹150, the Low is ₹80, the Close is ₹100.

The ₹150 was real — it was genuinely asked — but it did not hold. That is what a long upper wick is telling you: price got there and could not stay. A candle with a long upper wick and a small body means buyers pushed up and sellers pushed it straight back inside the five minutes.

Why the timeframe changes the story

The same market produces different candles depending on the window you choose. A 1-minute chart gives you 375 candles in a SENSEX session and shows every wobble. A 5-minute chart gives you 75 and smooths most of them away. A 15-minute chart gives you 25.

None of these is more "correct". A sharp drop that looks like a dramatic red candle on the 1-minute chart may be nothing more than a lower wick on the 15-minute one. Switching timeframes to find the version you like is one of the easier ways to fool yourself.

A practical habit: before reacting to a candle, check whether it has actually finished. A candle still in progress changes shape until its window closes — the 10:35 candle is not a fact until 10:40.

What this means on SENSEX weekly options

SENSEX weekly options expire on Thursday, trade in lots of 20, and have strikes spaced 100 points apart. That combination matters here for a specific reason: the candle you are reading is the index, but the thing you would be holding is an option premium, and the two do not move one-for-one.

A 60-point index candle near Thursday expiry can move a near-the-money premium far more violently than the same 60-point candle on a Monday, because time value is draining faster. The index chart shows you the underlying's five minutes. It does not show you what happened to the premium of the 74800 put in those same five minutes — that is a separate chart with a separate shape.

Candlestick reading is a description of what already printed. It is not a forecast, and no candle or pattern indicates what price will do next. Options can expire worthless, and F&O trading carries a high risk of loss.

The summary

A candle is four numbers — open, high, low, close — over a fixed slice of time. The body is the net result, the wicks are the rejected extremes, and everything that happened in between is gone. Learn to read that honestly and the pattern names become much less mysterious, because every one of them is just a particular arrangement of those same four numbers.

Disclosure: AlgoRishi publishes signal tracking on real market prices using virtual capital, for information and education only. Nothing here is investment advice or a recommendation to trade. Futures & options trading involves substantial risk of loss. Past performance is not indicative of future results. AlgoRishi is not a SEBI-registered investment adviser or research analyst.