Every price chart, in every market, is made of exactly two kinds of movement, and mixing them up is where a lot of bad entries come from. An impulse move is initiative: someone is in a hurry, candles are large, closes sit near the extremes, and price covers ground fast with little hesitation. A correction is the opposite: overlapping candles, smaller ranges, closes that land in the middle of each bar, and price that seems to wander rather than travel. The Nasdaq rallying 220 points in eighteen minutes on an earnings reaction is an impulse. The next forty minutes of it drifting sideways in a 60 point band while the market digests that move is a correction.
Telling the two apart at a glance, without waiting for hindsight, is one of the more useful skills in reading price, because entries taken during genuine impulse behave completely differently than entries taken during what only looks like one.
The fingerprints of an impulse leg
Impulse candles are large relative to the last twenty bars, close near their high or low rather than the middle, and rarely overlap much with the candle before them, each one starting roughly where the last one finished. Volume, where you have it, tends to expand. On EURUSD, a genuine impulse might cover 25 to 35 pips in three or four candles on a five minute chart, with each candle's body doing most of the work and wicks staying short. That combination, size, close location, and low overlap, is the signature of one side being in control and not waiting for a better price.
The fingerprints of a correction
Corrections look tired even when they are moving. Candles overlap heavily, each one retracing into the range of two or three candles before it. Closes land near the middle of the bar instead of the extreme. The overall move often has more wick than body, and progress in the corrective direction is slow relative to how fast the preceding impulse traveled. A gold pullback from 2440 down to 2415 that takes five hours to cover $25, after an impulse that covered $40 in ninety minutes, wears every one of these fingerprints. The speed mismatch alone is often the fastest tell.
Why the distinction decides your entry
Entering during what you believe is a correction, expecting the larger trend to resume, only works if it actually is a correction and not the start of a new impulse in the other direction. This is where candle fingerprints earn their keep: a pullback that starts developing impulse characteristics of its own, large candles, closes at the extreme, low overlap, in the opposite direction, has stopped correcting and started reversing, and continuing to treat it as a buyable dip is how a normal pullback trade turns into fighting a new trend.
A simple two-stroke checklist
Before entering on a pullback, run three checks. Is the pullback's candle size meaningfully smaller than the impulse that preceded it. Is the overlap high, each candle mostly inside the range of the last few. Is the speed slower, covering less distance per unit of time than the impulse did. Three yeses supports treating it as a genuine correction worth joining. Even one clear no, especially a pullback candle that suddenly matches or exceeds the original impulse in size, is a reason to wait and let the next candle clarify things instead of assuming the trend's engine is still running the same stroke it just finished.