One candle is a bucket of smaller candles
A 15-minute candle is not a different kind of thing from a 5-minute candle. It is the same four numbers measured over a longer window: its open is the first 5-minute candle's open, its close is the last one's close, its high is the highest of the three highs, and its low is the lowest of the three lows.
Why this changes everything about patterns
Look at what happened to the story. On the 5-minute chart there is a long lower wick at candle 6, a doji-ish candle at 12, a lot of texture. On the 15-minute chart you get two opposing candles and then a strong green one. Both are true, and neither is more true than the other.
This is why "I saw a hammer" is not a usable statement. A hammer on a 1-minute chart is a few seconds of order flow. The identical shape on a daily chart represents a full session of buying and selling. They are not the same signal and they do not deserve the same position size.
Practical rules that follow
- Name the timeframe whenever you name a pattern. "A hammer on the 4-hour" is a statement. "A hammer" is not.
- Patterns on higher timeframes are more meaningful and much rarer. A daily engulfing pattern might appear a handful of times a year on one instrument. That scarcity is most of its value.
- Do not mix timeframes in one decision by accident. Deciding your bias from the daily and your entry from the 15-minute is fine and normal. Noticing a hammer on the 1-minute and calling it a daily signal is not.
The closing price is not stable until it closes
One more consequence worth internalising. A candle is only final once its period ends. On a 1-hour chart, a candle that looks like a perfect hammer at 20 minutes past the hour can be a long red candle by the close. Beginners trade the forming candle and then wonder why the pattern "failed". If you want to trade a pattern, wait for the close — the pattern does not exist until then.
How to check this yourself
Pick one specific hour on a recent chart. Look at it on the 5-minute, then the 15-minute, then the 1-hour. Write one sentence describing what happened on each. You will get three genuinely different descriptions of the same sixty minutes, and you will stop treating a single timeframe as "what the market did".