When I first started learning how to trade, one thing that I focused on were candlesticks. The reason why I started on candlesticks is because I've always thought of them to be the foundational building blocks of reading charts and trading.
To put it in an analogy, think of individual candlesticks as the "letters" of the chart. Once you have a good grasp of the letters, you can then read words when you put those "letters" together. In the case of trading, they're patterns.
After knowing how to read words, you can then start to read and make sense of sentences, paragraphs, and eventually a whole story.
As for the case with reading charts, this would be piecing candlestick patterns together along with indicators and tools such as MACD, RSI, Bollinger Bands, EMAs, pitchforks, Fibonacci along with market movement theories such as Elliott Wave Theory or Wyckoff Market Cycle Theory to read the full story. Once you use them in together, you can get a better idea of how to read the chart and infer with a greater degree of probability on what will happen next.
This is why I think it's imperative to understand candlesticks first before anything else which is why I put together this post.
Wow nice articles & beautiful pictures