Read the wick, not only the close
Closes matter, and so do the excursions that failed. A long wick is a record of a price that could not hold, not a decoration on the real body.
Students who have been told to 'watch the close' sometimes treat the wicks as noise. That is a misunderstanding of the instruction. Waiting for the close means you do not narrate a bar while it is still printing. Once it has closed, the wick is part of the record. It shows a price that was traded and then given up inside that same fifteen minutes.
A long upper wick into a session high is not automatically a reversal. On a London morning that has been climbing bar after bar, the first long upper wick may only show that someone hit a round number and the next bar is still owed a description. We mark the wick, we write the time, and we wait for the following close before we say the high is likely in.
Relative length is the part most pattern lists skip. A wick that looks dramatic on a quiet lunch bar may be ordinary beside the 08:15 candle. In foundations we measure wick against the median body of that session, not against a textbook drawing. If you only compare candles to clip art, every lunch wick becomes a shooting star.
Lower wicks get the same treatment. A hammer after a sharp drop through the European morning is a different object from a hammer in the middle of a three-hour range. The first is a failed continuation of the drop, at least for that bar. The second may only be a probe of a well-known floor. Both have a lower wick. Only one of them arrived after the session had already spent its energy in one direction.
A practical mark on the canvas: when a wick makes a new session high or low, we tick the wick and leave the session extreme in pencil until two later closes have had a chance to take it out or leave it. Redrawing the extreme in ink the moment the wick prints is how people end up with a sheet that no longer matches the morning they actually sat.