Long Wick Candles and Rejection Candles: Definition, Rule and Tested Follow-Through

A candlestick has a body, between the open and the close, and two wicks, also called shadows, that reach the high and the low of the bar. When one wick is long and the body is small, the price traveled far in one direction during the bar and came back before the close. Traders call such a bar a rejection candle: the market tried a price level and refused it. The StockCharts candlestick dictionary reads a long upper shadow as buyers dominating the first part of the session, and a long lower shadow as sellers dominating it, before the other side took over.

Long upper wick and long lower wick

A long upper wick forms when the price rallies after the open and falls back to close near the bottom of the bar: higher prices were tried and rejected. A long lower wick forms when the price drops after the open and recovers to close near the top: lower prices were tried and rejected. Several named candlestick patterns are long wick candles placed in a given trend:

The hammer and the hanging man have the same shape; StockCharts names the candle a hammer when it forms during a decline and a hanging man when it forms during an advance. A candle with long wicks on both sides and a small body is a spinning top, which StockCharts reads as indecision; our page on the high wave candle covers the variant with very long wicks.

A rule for a long wick

"Long" needs a measure, or every chart reader will mark different candles. The chart above uses three conditions, all on the bar itself:

• the wick is at least twice the length of the body;
• the wick is more than half of the bar's range, from high to low;
• the range is at least one average true range of the 14 previous bars, so that tiny bars on a quiet day do not count.

The last condition matters most. A wick of a few dollars on a bar much smaller than usual tells nothing about rejection. Raise it, and only the most violent rejections remain: at one and a half average true ranges, the chart above keeps only two of its ten candles, the upper wick of September 11 and the lower wick of July 20, 2026. A bar whose whole range is several average true ranges is a price spike, whatever the size of its wick.

Ten long wick candles on Bitcoin, July to October 2026

The rule marks four long upper wicks and six long lower wicks on daily Bitcoin between July 1 and October 28, 2026. A rejection holds if the price stays on the right side of the wick: the low of a lower wick is not broken, the high of an upper wick is not exceeded. The chart gives the close five days after each candle and whether the wick held for ten days.

Four of the six lower wicks held for ten days, but three of the four upper wicks did not, in a market that was rising from July to early October. The lower wick of July 20 failed on July 28, with a low of 62,742.47, and the upper wick of September 11 was exceeded on September 18, when the price reached 81,400. The one upper wick that held, on October 2, came after the September 21 high of 87,395.67, and the price peaked again at 86,999.11 on October 5 before closing at 81,343.50 on October 28, the last bar of the chart. The low of the October 15 wick, 79,800, was broken on October 24 with a low of 79,220.74.

Does a long wick signal a reversal?

A common claim is that a long lower wick at a low marks a bottom, and a long upper wick at a high marks a top. We tested it with the rule above on every daily bar of the S&P 500 ETF from January 1993 to October 2026 and of Bitcoin from August 2017 to October 2026, measuring the close five bars later. For a fair comparison, each long wick at a 20-day low or high is set against the other 20-day lows or highs, without a long wick. A bar is at a 20-day low when its low is the lowest of the last 20 bars, itself included.

The mean change five bars later, in the order of the chart, was +0.23%, +0.41%, +0.62%, +0.39% and +0.11% on the ETF, and +0.74%, +0.04%, −0.07%, +2.34% and +1.77% on Bitcoin.

A long lower wick at a 20-day low did no better than a 20-day low without one, on either market. A long upper wick at a 20-day high was not followed by a higher close in 46.7% of cases on the ETF, against 43.1% for other 20-day highs, a gap well within what chance produces on 45 cases; on Bitcoin, prices rose more after it, the opposite of a top. These figures exclude costs and cover small samples. Our bench measures the named long wick patterns differently, on full histories: either by the move after 10 bars or by a 2:1 target trade, as described in the bench methodology; these named patterns are stricter setups than a long wick on its own, yet none of the six below earns a proven edge there:

How traders use long wick candles

• Wait for confirmation. Acting only once the next bar has closed in the direction of the rejection gives the market one more bar to prove the wick right.
• Place the stop beyond the wick. If the wick's extreme is broken, the rejection has failed, as on July 20 and October 15, 2026.
• Weigh the trend. In the Bitcoin window above, three of the four upper wicks failed in a rising market. Ten candles are far too few to make a rule of it, but they show how often a rejection against the trend gives way.
• Look at the wick on a lower timeframe. A daily wick is a move within the day; an hourly chart shows whether it was a single drop or a slow grind. Our guide on trading candlestick wicks goes further.

More chart reading guides are in technical analysis.