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Wicks that get filled on the very next candle

A long wick usually gets read as rejection. Sometimes the very next candle trades right back through it and the rejection is gone within five minutes.

One is a wick made by a stop run. Price pokes through a level, takes out stops, snaps back. If the next candle fills the wick, the participants who caused the snap back may simply not have been there in size. The poke was thin liquidity, not a real decision.

The other is a wick made during a moment of wide spread or a single large order. The wick is real, but it doesn't represent many participants. The next candle filling it is just price returning to where it was trading before the burst.

In both cases the lesson is the same. A wick isn't a rejection until price shows it can stay away from it. If the candle after a long upper wick opens and trades straight back up into it, I'd treat the wick as noise and stop reading it as resistance.

On the other hand, a wick that holds for two or three candles, with each one closing away from it, has earned more weight.

Look at where the next candle opened relative to the wick. If it opened near the close of the wicked bar and drifted back up, that's a slow fill and often means the selling just dried up. If it opened and spiked straight through the wick in the first minute, that's more aggressive and often comes with a news headline or a correlated pair moving. The second kind tends to carry on further. The first kind often ends with price chopping around the wick high for a while before choosing a direction. Checking what the correlated pairs did in that same minute usually tells you which kind of fill it was. A move on all dollar pairs at once is rarely just thin liquidity.

Broker feeds matter a lot for this. One broker might show a long wick where another shows a short one, because a single off-market quote made it into one feed and not the other. If you see a wick that seems huge compared with the bars around it, check a second chart from a different source before you build a trade on it. If the wick only exists on your broker, the next candle filling it is just the market ignoring something that never really traded in size. It's a quick habit and saves building whole theories around something that might be a single bad quote.

On M1 this happens constantly and isn't very meaningful. On M15 or H1 a wick that gets filled by the next bar is a bigger deal, because a larger number of participants were involved in building and then removing it. If you trade off higher timeframe wicks, a quick fill on the same timeframe is a fairly strong sign that the level the wick formed at isn't going to defend. That's often a better clue than what M1 or M5 is showing at the time. The same goes for daily wicks, which carry a lot of weight with swing traders and are often the levels intraday traders lean on without realising why.

For stop placement, a filled wick is a trap. People like to put stops just beyond the wick, because that's the obvious invalidation. If wicks at that level have a habit of getting filled, the stop is sitting in exactly the zone that keeps getting revisited. Either the stop needs to go beyond where those fills tend to run, or the trade needs a different reference that isn't a wick at all, such as the close of the bar or a structure point further back. A close based stop has its own issue, which is that it can leave you sitting in a losing position for the rest of the bar, so the size has to reflect the worst intrabar move you'd accept.

The stop run wick being filled straight away is a useful tell. Session timing helps tell the two types apart. Around the London open, many wicks come from stop runs at the Asian high or low, and if the next candle fills them, the real participants may not have arrived yet. Later in the session, a wick filled immediately is more likely a failed move with genuine size behind the reversal. Taking the time of day into account makes the read more reliable than looking at the wick alone.