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Japanese Candlestick charting is an exercise in picture recognition.  Unlike bar charts, which are gray and dreary like a Russian Winter, the Candlesticks are like the flower gardens of Paris in Spring - fresh, revealing, abounding in color.  They are a photograph of the mass psychology of the moment, in a form which tells a story immediately without the necessity of time-stealing translation.  There are only a few basic patterns to be committed to memory.  Rather than being shown as a straight vertical line with a blip on each side showing the open and close, the Candles fatten out the vertical line into a cylinder.  The space between the open and the close is the "real body."  Price travel above and below the real body is shown as "shadows." If the closing price is lower than the opening price, the real body is black.  If the closing price is higher than the opening price, the real body is white.  A "Hammer" occurs only at the end of a downtrend, and is represented by a small real body with a tall upper shadow.  A "Morning Star" is a three-bar pattern at the bottom of a downtrend, in which the first bar is black, the middle bar can be a Hammer just below the first bar, and the third bar is a white bar higher than the middle bar.  We had a picture-perfect example of a Morning Star three-bar reversal pattern on August 15, 16, and 17, 2007.  It propelled Dow Industrials prices from 12,518 at the low point of the Hammer to 14,124 in less than two months.  In the preparation of its free investment newsletter, CandleWave, LLC uses Japanese Candlestick charting analysis exclusively, because the Candles have a special propensity to reveal the psychology of the market and to zero in on major trend reversals in real time.