Doji Candlestick on a Live Gold Chart

What it shows

Each doji gets a grey label marked D under the candle’s low. A doji is neutral: Pravex does not call it bullish or bearish.

How Pravex works it out

1. The doji is one candle whose body is at most 5% of its range (high minus low), on a candle whose range is above zero.
2. Both shadows have to be there: the upper shadow (high minus the top of the body) and the lower shadow (bottom of the body minus the low) must each be more than 5% of the range.
3. A doji with almost no upper shadow is a dragonfly doji in Pravex, and one with almost no lower shadow is a gravestone doji. Those two have their own patterns and are left out here.
4. Example numbers, not a live price: high 2,012, low 2,000, open 2,006.0, close 2,006.5. The range is 12 and the body 0.5, about 4% of the range. Both shadows are near 6, far more than 5% of the range, so it is a doji.
5. There is no trend test and no average body for this one, so a doji can be marked anywhere on the chart.

Settings

Setting	Default	What changing it does
Label colour	Grey (#787B86)	Change it to tell the doji apart from other patterns on the same chart. It fills the D label under the low of the last candle; the text stays white.

How traders read it

A doji is a pause. What it means depends on what came before it. After a long run of rising candles, a doji says the buyers did not push further this time, which is a reason to tighten a stop. Inside a quiet range it says almost nothing, because every candle there is undecided.

Traders use the doji’s high and low as the trigger. A close above the high puts the earlier side back in control; a close under the low says the other side has taken over. Until one of those happens, the doji is only a question.

Size matters. A doji with long shadows on both sides shows a real fight with no winner. A doji with a tiny range next to its neighbours is a candle where nothing happened.

When it misleads

Dojis are common, and most of them are noise. Our rule has no trend test, so the label appears in ranges and trends alike, and the meaning has to come from where it sits. A 5% body is a strict line: a candle with a 6% body looks the same to the eye and gets no label. Wait for the close before trusting a doji label on the latest candle, which is checked on each update and can lose its label.

Questions and answers

Is a doji bullish or bearish?

Neither. It shows a candle that ended where it began. After a rise it can warn that buying is fading, after a fall that selling is fading, but the next candle decides.

How small does the body of a doji have to be?

In Pravex the body must be 5% of the candle’s range or less, and both shadows must be longer than 5% of the range.

What is the difference between a doji and a spinning top?

A spinning top has a small body that is still a real body (more than 5% of the range) with shadows longer than the body. A doji’s body is almost flat.

Are there different kinds of doji?

Yes. Pravex has separate patterns for the dragonfly doji (no upper shadow) and the gravestone doji (no lower shadow), and several patterns built from a doji, such as the doji star and the harami cross.

Related: Dragonfly Doji - Bullish, Gravestone Doji - Bearish, Spinning Top White, Spinning Top Black, every indicator.