Japanese candlesticks are great method of preparing price charts. Candlestick chart has a huge advantage over linear chart or OHCL (Open, High, Low, and Close) chart. It shows more information: trend, strength of movement, relation between bears and bulls. It can also generate signals to open or close much faster. Sometimes only one candlestick is enough. 90% of stock charts I analyze are candlestick charts.

In Japan, candlesticks are most popular method of technical analysis. It has XVII century tradition coming from rice market.

To prepare a candlestick chart, there are used four values for each data point: opening price, closing price, highest price and lowest price. How they are shown?

In general, we distinct hollow and filled candlesticks.

When closing price is higher than opening price, we get a hollow candlestick, which has white body - rectangle. Upper border responds to closing price, bottom responds to opening price. If the highest price was higher than the closing price, we see upper shadow in form of thin line above the candlestick body. Analogously with the lowest price, if it was lower than closing price, we get the lower shadow.

Filled candlesticks are similar, except for one difference. Closing price is lower than opening price. In such case, the body is black and upper border respond to opening price, while bottom to the closing price. Upper and lower shadows are exactly like in hollow candlesticks.

If you are new to the candlesticks, I strongly advise to dedicate some time to browse such charts. Try comparing them with linear and OHCL charts. This way you will get used to it and pretty soon you will be able to easily read shown data.

In my next post concerning this subject, I will show and discuss types and meaning of different candlesticks.

S&P500

Gyutae from Winning The Web writes that roundup posts aren’t so useless. As I read a lot of different blogs on regular basis, I think it is good idea to share with you the most interesting content I find. Of course, most interesting for me, but I hope you will like it.

If you wrote a post on your blog or you read somewhere else, and you think that it fits to my roundups, contact me and let me know. If I find it interesting, I will surely add it to next edition of Sunday Roundup.

photo credit: Carlton Browne

Ok, here we go with my first roundup:

Which comes first, the success or the happiness?Answer for this question is at DumbLittleMan.

FrugalDad tells us why we go to work. I knew the answer before reading whole post, what about you?

An interesting guest post at GetRichSlowly concerns finding good stocks.

This one I really like. Trent writes about breaking dreams into steps. Highly recommended reading.

For those of you, who don’t have enough to read about personal finances, there is recently updated ranking of blogs about it.

Lifehacker tells you what software you should avoid under Windows and shows better replacements.

That is all for this week. Have a great time.

It’s time for a summary of the last month. I should post it yesterday, but the post about my Entrecard contest took a place.

April was really fast and, unfortunately, very expensive for me. I spent much more money than in March. After quick comparison of bills and expenditures from both months, I see that it is not easy task to keep spending on the similar level each month. Why? Because of irregular expenditures, that occurs for example once per three or four months. I had a lot of such spends in April like paying for medical services or buying some stuff in bulk. At least I know I will save more in May.

Last month was really severe for me at the stock market. I decided to invest more aggressively and I took a harsh lesson. Only one out of my seven picks sky-rocketed, while rest was slowly going down and down. I definitely kept the positions for too long, having a hope these stocks would go up. That didn’t happen. In the end I took about -3% loss.

After that experience I will definitely invest more cautiously. When there is no promising pick, I will simply keep my money on a saving account.

photo credit: masochismtango

Small, good news for the end of summary is that my blog income is higher than in March. It is slightly above 6$ combined from Google Adsense and Kontera. Great.

I like participating in different contests, especially those on-line. Even if the contest is small and the prizes are only symbolic, I find a lot of fun in this. It is always exciting to wait for the results and it is really amazing feeling when you win. Such a small taste of success.

Today, I decided to run my own, tiny contest. As a most traffic I get on my blog is coming from Entrecard, this content is dedicated for users of this network.

The rules are simple. On 1st June, I will check statistics on Entrecard and a top dropper would be a winner.

What are the prizes?

• 1000 EC,
• review of your blog,
• 1 month banner spot 125 x 125 on my blog.

If there would be more than one Entrecard dropper with the highest result, I will select the winner at random.

Keep dropping and good luck.