Candlestick formation · Neutral
What is it, in one line
Open and close within a hair of each other. Indecision by definition.
Neutral · 1 candle · verdict: rule and thresholds below
Open and close within a hair of each other. Indecision by definition. The engine checks the formation as an executable condition over open, high, low and close, with a trend filter applied before the count is kept.
Method
A candle whose open and close are close enough together that the real body is negligible relative to the range. The session covered ground in both directions and finished roughly where it started.
The traditional claim
Traditionally read as indecision rather than direction, and usually said to take its meaning from the candles around it rather than on its own.
How this detection is wrong
A body of exactly zero is not required and never should be — on real data an exact-equality doji is an artifact of tick size, not of indecision. maxBodyPct is the definition. The minRangeAtr floor exists to exclude halted, illiquid and synthetic-fill bars, which otherwise dominate any naive doji count.
Published so the count can be reproduced. Every figure below is a parameter of the rule, not a preference: change one and the occurrence count changes with it.
| Parameter | Meaning | Default |
|---|---|---|
| maxBodyPct | body, at most, as a share of the range | 0.05 |
| minRangeAtr | bar range, at least, in ATR | 0.1 |
| atrPeriod | bars of ATR used to size everything below | 14 |
These share enough geometry that a detector can return more than one of them on the same bar. The engine reports every match rather than picking a winner.
Every pair on the site that can be mistaken for another, and what separates each: the look-alikes index.
A candle whose open and close are close enough together that the real body is negligible relative to the range. The session covered ground in both directions and finished roughly where it started.
It is read as neutral. Traditionally read as indecision rather than direction, and usually said to take its meaning from the candles around it rather than on its own.
A body of exactly zero is not required and never should be — on real data an exact-equality doji is an artifact of tick size, not of indecision. maxBodyPct is the definition. The minRangeAtr floor exists to exclude halted, illiquid and synthetic-fill bars, which otherwise dominate any naive doji count.
As an executable rule over open, high, low and close, with 3 named parameters — including body, at most, as a share of the range 0.05, bar range, at least, in ATR 0.1, bars of ATR used to size everything below 14 — all published on this page so the count can be reproduced. Strict and loose variants are defined as well, so the sensitivity of the count to those thresholds is visible rather than assumed.
Measurement pending re-run
No hit rate is published here yet. The run that would supply one was computed on engine ca6d9e36c81c; the engine is now cfb08765de7c. Its candlestick rows included the still-forming bar, and it predates the chart formations entirely, so those figures have been withdrawn rather than published with a caveat. The definition above is unaffected: it is what the detector tests, and no re-run changes it.