Set Up the Best Candlestick Colors for Trading on Any Chart

The best candlestick colors for trading are the ones that let you tell rising candles from falling ones instantly, without straining your eyes over a long session. For most people that means green for bullish, red for bearish and a high-contrast background, but the right answer shifts with your screen, your eyesight and the platform you use.

This guide covers the main color schemes, what each candle color actually tells you, options for dark mode and color-blind traders, and practical settings for TradingView and both MetaTrader versions. It closes with a worked Bitcoin H1 example in which “color” describes candle direction rather than a visual preference.

What Are the Best Candlestick Colors for Trading?

There is no universally best palette, only schemes that are easier or harder to read. A reliable default looks like this:

• Bullish candles: green, or another hue you associate with rising prices
• Bearish candles: red, or a clearly contrasting alternative
• Background: near-black, charcoal or white, picked so both candle hues stand out sharply
• Shadows and outlines: neutral or matched to the body, so they do not compete for attention

Choosing a palette alters nothing about the underlying prices. What it affects is how quickly you read them, so prioritise contrast, consistency across every screen you use, and comfort over hours of analysis. If red and green are hard for you to separate, switch to blue and orange or add a fill distinction, both covered below.

Best Candlestick Color Combinations

Most traders settle on one of five broad schemes. Each is a convention, not a performance setting, and green/red is simply the most familiar rather than inherently superior.

Chart style	Bullish candle	Bearish candle	Background	Suits
Classic	Green	Red	Black or white	Most traders and most platforms
Minimal	White (hollow)	Black (filled)	Neutral light	Price-action reading
Accessible	Blue	Orange	White or charcoal	Red-green color blindness
Dark mode	Light green/cyan	Soft red or coral	Dark gray	Long evening sessions
Monochrome	Hollow or light	Solid or dark	White	Printing and reduced clutter

Whichever you pick, keep it identical across every symbol and timeframe you watch. Swapping palettes between windows forces your brain to relearn the code each time, which slows pattern recognition exactly when you need it most.

What Makes a Chart Color Scheme Readable?

Readability comes from four properties, and hue matters less than most people assume:

1. Luminance contrast. Candles should differ clearly in brightness from the background, not just in hue, because brightness is what the eye separates first.
2. Distinct directions. Rising and falling candles need to differ in more than one way where possible, such as hue plus fill.
3. Few competing colors. Every extra indicator, zone or drawing color dilutes attention from price itself.
4. Consistency. The same meaning should map to the same appearance on every chart, platform and device.

A quick self-test works well: shrink the chart to thumbnail size or glance at it from across the room. If you can still tell which way the last dozen candles moved, the scheme is doing its job.

What Do Bullish and Bearish Candle Colors Mean?

A candle’s color shows whether price closed above or below where it opened during that period. TradingView’s documentation describes a green candle as one whose open sits at the lower edge of the body and close at the upper edge, with a red candle the reverse (TradingView Help Center, retrieved September 2026).

Two details catch traders out:

• Previous-close coloring. TradingView offers a setting that colors each candle by comparing its final price with the prior candle’s close instead of its own open. With it enabled, a candle can finish below its open and still appear green.
• Regional conventions. In mainland China’s stock market, red marks a rise and green a fall, the opposite of Hong Kong and most Western markets (Fortune, 2015). If you follow Chinese-language data sources, check which convention they use.

Candlesticks themselves date back to 18th-century Japanese rice trading, according to TradingView, so today’s green/red standard is a much later platform habit rather than part of the method’s original design.

Green and Red vs Black and White Candles

Both approaches work; they trade intuition against minimalism.

Green/red

• Instantly familiar across almost every retail platform and data feed.
• Carries built-in “up” and “down” associations for Western traders.
• Less distinct for many color-blind viewers.

Black/white

• Cleaner and closer to the original Japanese style, often drawn as hollow up candles over solid down candles.
• Suits price-action traders who want candle shape, not hue, to dominate.
• Relies on fill and outline differences, so it stays readable on monochrome screens and printouts.

Conventions can also be flipped. In the strategy video later in this article, Petko Aleksandrov uses a black-background template in which black bodies mark rising candles and white bodies falling ones. Any mapping works, provided you apply it consistently and never have to stop and think which is which.

Chart Colors That Stay Readable on a Dark Background

This style works best with slightly softened colors rather than full-saturation ones. A practical starting point:

• Background: charcoal rather than pure black
• Bullish candles: mint green or cyan
• Bearish candles: muted red, coral or amber
• Grid: faint gray, or switched off
• Indicators: two or three distinct colors at most

Prefer a light background instead? The same logic applies in reverse: use deeper, more saturated candle colors on white so bodies do not wash out, and keep the grid pale enough to disappear unless you look for it.

Heavily saturated reds and greens on black can appear to shimmer at the edges and become tiring. Muted tones keep contrast high enough to read at a glance while reducing that glare, and keeping drawing tools in hues that clash with neither candle direction keeps signals legible.

Color-Blind-Friendly Candle Colors

Blue for bullish and orange for bearish is the most widely recommended alternative, ideally combined with a fill difference so direction never depends on hue alone. That matters for a sizeable share of traders: Colour Blind Awareness estimates that color vision deficiency affects roughly 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women (charity estimate, accessed September 2026), and the US National Eye Institute notes that the most common type makes those two traffic-light hues hard to tell apart (NEI).

Accessibility guidance points the same way. The W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines state that color should not be the only visual means of conveying information (W3C, Understanding WCAG Success Criterion 1.4.1). On a chart, that translates into two dependable options:

1. Contrasting hues: blue #0072B2 for bullish bars and orange #E69F00 for bearish ones, both from the Okabe-Ito palette designed to remain distinguishable across common forms of color vision deficiency (Okabe and Ito, Color Universal Design, 2008; later popularised in Wong, Nature Methods, 2011).
2. Fill-based distinction: empty bodies for up candles and solid bodies for down candles, which works regardless of hue.

Combining both gives the most resilient chart. Test your choice with a color-blindness simulator or by viewing the chart in grayscale; if direction is still obvious, you are set.

Do Candlestick Colors Affect Trading Performance?

No. Changing colors does not alter price data, indicator calculations, order execution or backtest results; an EA reads open and close prices, not pixels. What colors can influence is how you perceive the chart.

That perceptual effect is real enough to take seriously. A study published as “Up or Down? How Culture and Color Affect Judgments” found that participants from mainland China, where red signals a rise, predicted stronger economic growth when material appeared in red, while Hong Kong participants showed the opposite association (Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, via ResearchGate). Colors carry meanings the brain applies automatically.

The practical takeaway is modest. Choose a scheme you can read effortlessly, keep it consistent, and judge setups on price and risk rather than on how alarming or reassuring a candle looks.

How to Change Candlestick Colors in TradingView

TradingView keeps candle styling in the chart’s Symbol settings, per its Help Center:

1. Open a chart and select Candles from the chart-type menu on the top toolbar.
2. Click the gear icon to open chart settings, then choose the Symbol tab.
3. In the Candles section, set Body, Borders and Wick, each with separate values for up and down candles.
4. Decide whether to enable Color bars based on previous close.
5. Save the layout so every new chart opens with the same scheme.

TradingView also offers a hollow candle chart type, a quick way to get fill-based direction without editing anything manually.

Setting Candle Colors in MT4 and MT5

In both MetaTrader platforms, candle styling lives in the Properties window. MetaQuotes’ documentation lists four predefined schemes for MT5, “Yellow on Black”, “Green on Black”, “Black on White” and “Color on White”, and notes that custom schemes are saved through templates (MetaTrader 5 Help, Chart Settings, checked September 2026).

1. Right-click any chart and pick Properties, or press F8.
2. Open the Colors tab.
3. Set Bull candle and Bear candle for body fills, then Bar up and Bar down, which control wicks and outlines (MetaTrader 5 mobile help).
4. Adjust background, grid and foreground to match.
5. Confirm with OK, then use the context menu’s Template > Save Template so the scheme can be applied elsewhere.

MT4 follows the same Properties route with a smaller set of built-in schemes. If you have not installed it yet, our guide to downloading and setting up MetaTrader 4 safely covers the process, and our overview of candlestick chart types and timeframes explains how bar, line and candle formats compare.

Example: The Candle Color Strategy for Bitcoin on H1

Candle direction can also drive a trading rule, and that is what the original version of this article taught. In the video below, Petko Aleksandrov, founder of Algo Trading Space, calls it one of his favourite strategies because the entry needs no indicator, only a run of same-direction candles.

[YouTube video: Candle Color Strategy, embed https://www.youtube.com/embed/xhJCkNWm4FQ]

What “Candle Color” Means Here

In this strategy, color refers to whether a candle closed above its open (bullish) or below it (bearish). The palette you choose in MetaTrader has no effect on the rules; a black-bodied rising candle and a green one carry identical information.

Entry Rules

• Long: four consecutive bullish candles on BTCUSD H1, then buy at the open of the fifth.
• Short: four consecutive bearish candles, then sell at the open of the fifth.
• Body filter: every candle in the sequence needs a body of at least 50 pips, measured as close minus open on up candles and the reverse on down candles.

On the two-decimal Bitcoin quote from Pepperstone shown in the video, 50 pips equals 50 cents of price movement. A candle opening at 10,361.51 and settling at 10,367.01 therefore clears the filter comfortably.

Exit Rules: Moving Average Cross

This rule relies on two averages, one of 15 periods and one of 45. A long closes at the open of the bar after the faster average crosses below the slower one; by symmetry, a short would close after an upward cross. Our explainer on how MetaTrader 4 indicators work shows how to add and configure them.

Stop Loss and Take Profit

Every trade also carries a take profit of $240 and a stop loss of $215 in Bitcoin price terms, and whichever level or exit signal comes first ends the trade. In the video’s long example, entry near 10,505 put the target at about 10,745, which was reached before the averages crossed.

With $240 of potential gain against $215 at risk, reward and risk are nearly equal. If every trade finished at one of those two levels, the system would need to win a little over 47% of the time just to break even before costs (215 divided by 455); the crossover exit changes that arithmetic, so the real figure has to come from testing.

Why Four Candles in a Row?

The entry is a momentum idea: a run of candles pointing the same way suggests buyers or sellers are in control, and the trade bets that the push continues. The catch is timing. By the fifth candle a good part of the move may already have happened, so the approach depends on trends extending far enough to cover both the late entry and trading costs, something only a test across different market phases can show.

A Worked Sell Example

The video’s short trade opens at about 10,688 after four falling candles. Subtracting the $240 target gives 10,448, the level at which profit would be taken if price reached it before the stop or a crossover. The spoken figure in the video is slightly different, so rely on the arithmetic rather than the narration when reproducing it.

Limits of This Strategy

The video demonstrates the rules on hand-picked examples; it does not provide backtest statistics, so treat it as a template to test rather than a proven system. Three points deserve attention before you use it:

1. The body filter barely filters. At the roughly $10,000 Bitcoin prices on screen, 50 cents is about 0.005% of price, so almost every H1 candle qualifies, and the proportion shrinks further as Bitcoin rises. Scaling the minimum body to recent volatility would make the rule meaningful.
2. Fixed dollar targets age badly. A $240 objective means something else entirely at other price levels.
3. Regulation limits access. Retail CFD leverage on cryptocurrencies is capped at 2:1 in the EU (CNMV summary of ESMA measures, June 2018), and the FCA bans crypto derivatives for UK retail consumers (FCA, October 2020).

Before trading it, run the rules through a proper test; our guide to backtesting an Expert Advisor in MetaTrader explains the process, and our Bitcoin Expert Advisor guide covers running automated BTCUSD systems.

FAQs

What colors should candle wicks and borders be?

Match them to the body or use a neutral gray. Both TradingView and MT5 let you style each element separately, and matched colors keep a candle reading as one shape. A contrasting border helps mainly with hollow candles, where it defines an otherwise empty body. Avoid bright wick colors that differ from the body, because they pull attention toward the extremes and can make ordinary candles look more dramatic than they really are. Thin, subtle shadows usually read best.

Do Heikin-Ashi candles use colors the same way?

Not quite. Heikin-Ashi bars are calculated from averaged open, high, low and close values, so their color reflects a smoothed trend rather than whether price actually finished higher than it started. A green Heikin-Ashi bar can therefore appear during a period when the standard candle finished lower. The same palette advice applies, but never read those colors as literal price direction, and switch to regular candles whenever exact entry or exit prices matter, such as when placing stops.

Can candle colors be based on volume instead of direction?

Yes, on platforms that support it. TradingView lists volume candles among its candlestick variations, which adjust appearance according to traded volume so heavy-activity periods stand out. That can help traders who read participation alongside price, but it adds a second meaning to each candle, so keep direction obvious through shape or fill. In MetaTrader, volume usually appears as a separate histogram beneath the chart rather than inside the candles themselves, which keeps the two signals visually independent.

What colors should indicators and trend lines use?

Indicator and drawing colors should contrast with both candle directions and with each other. A useful habit is giving each indicator a fixed color on every chart, for example keeping a fast moving average one hue and a slow one another, so you recognise them without reading labels. On a green/red chart, blues, purples and neutral grays tend to stay legible. Limit the total palette, since every extra hue competes with price for attention and makes crowded charts harder to scan.

Should each market get its own color scheme?

Only if it serves a clear, practical purpose that you can explain in one sentence. Some traders running several monitors give each asset class its own background tint, so a glance reveals which screen carries forex and which crypto. The direction colors, however, should stay identical everywhere. Changing those between charts invites misreads at the worst moments, while a background change carries no directional meaning and is far less likely to cause errors when you are acting quickly under pressure.

Can I back up or share my chart color settings?

Yes. In MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5, saving a template stores colors, indicators and chart settings in a template file you can copy to another terminal or share with colleagues. TradingView keeps styling within saved chart layouts tied to your account, so the scheme follows you across devices when you sign in. Keeping a master template also protects your setup if a platform update or reinstall resets the defaults, saving you from rebuilding it by hand.

Get Help With Your Trading Chart Setup From Algo Trading Space

If you want a chart setup that stays readable across TradingView and MetaTrader, or you plan to automate a candle-direction rule like the one above, get in touch with the Algo Trading Space team. We can help you configure templates and test candle-based strategies on your broker’s data before any capital is involved.

Risk warning: Trading forex, crypto and CFDs carries a high risk of loss, and leverage can magnify losses beyond your initial deposit. This article is for educational purposes only and is not financial advice. Examples shown are illustrative and do not guarantee future performance.