Spinning Top Candlestick on a Live Gold Chart

What it shows

Pravex has two spinning tops. This page is the white one (close above open), marked STW with a grey label under the candle’s low. The black one, a falling body, has its own pattern. Both are neutral.

How Pravex works it out

1. What counts as long or small for the white spinning top moves with the market, since the yardstick is a 14-candle exponential average of body sizes, where a body is the distance from open to close, so a quiet stretch lowers it and a busy one raises it.
2. The candle must be rising (close above open) with a small body, below the 14-candle average.
3. It must not be a doji: the body has to be more than 5% of the range.
4. Both shadows must be longer than the body. The upper shadow is the high minus the close, the lower shadow is the open minus the low.
5. Example numbers, not a live price: open 2,004, close 2,006, high 2,010, low 2,000. The body is 2, 20% of the range, with shadows of 4 above and 4 below. It passes if 2 is under the average body.
6. No trend is tested.

Settings

Setting	Default	What changing it does
Label colour	Grey (#787B86)	The fill of the STW label under the low of each candle where the white spinning top pattern is complete; its white text needs a colour it reads well on.

How traders read it

A spinning top says the market moved both ways and settled near the open. After a strong run it is the first sign the run has lost pace. In a quiet range it is just another candle, and the label carries no weight there.

Treat its high and low as the trigger. A close beyond one of them after the spinning top shows which side came back first. A rising body is a small detail: the close was a little above the open, which matters less than where the candle sits.

When it misleads

Small bodies with two shadows are everywhere, so this label appears often. It has no trend test, and the meaning comes only from context. Since small is measured against the 14-candle average, a candle after a busy stretch can count as small even when it moved a fair amount. Wait for the close before trusting a white spinning top label on the latest candle, which is checked on each update and can lose its label.

Questions and answers

Is a spinning top bullish or bearish?

Neither. Pravex marks it as neutral. After a rise or a fall it suggests the move is slowing, and the next candle shows which way it resolves.

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

A doji’s body is 5% of the range or less. A spinning top has a real but small body, more than 5% of the range and below the average body, with both shadows longer than it.

Does the colour of a spinning top matter?

Pravex has a white and a black version so you can choose. The colour only says whether the close was a little above or a little below the open.

Related: Spinning Top Black, Doji, Harami - Bullish, All Candlestick Patterns, every indicator.