# Doji candlestick

> A doji is a candle whose open and close are nearly equal, leaving almost no body — a session where every push by buyers was matched by sellers, read as indecision rather than direction.

Canonical: https://patternsradar.com/learn/doji

The geometry is a body so small it is nearly a line: the session closed where it opened, whatever happened in between. The wicks can stretch far in either direction — price may have travelled a wide range — but by the last print neither side had gained ground. That is the record the doji keeps: a full day of argument that ended exactly where it started. It says nothing about who wins next; it says the previous consensus has stopped.

Location and volume decide whether that standoff matters. A doji in a drifting, directionless chart is just another quiet day. One that interrupts a clear trend is a question mark placed against it — the side that had been winning suddenly could not. The site's doji-indecision scan filters for exactly this: pattern is doji with close above the 50-day average and relative volume above 1.2, so the standoff happened inside a trend and with a crowd present, not on a sleepy tape.

Dojis print constantly — near-equal open and close is one of the most common shapes on any exchange — and most of them resolve as nothing. Treat the doji as a marker, not a signal: it flags where a trend's conviction wobbled, and the next bar or two deliver the verdict. The hit-rate replay on the scan page makes this checkable — run the doji scan against a year of sessions and see how often the wobble became a turn.

## In Sift

Written as `pattern is doji — or within 2 bars for recent prints`. A working scan — stocks printing a doji on above-average volume:

```sift
where pattern is doji and rel_volume > 1.2
```

1 of the 500 most-traded NSE stocks match today, as of 2026-08-21.

## Scans that use it

- [Doji on heavy volume](https://patternsradar.com/screener/doji-indecision.md): An indecision candle on above-average volume while the trend still holds.

## Common questions

### Is a doji bullish or bearish?

Neither, by itself. A doji records a standoff — the session closed where it opened — so its meaning comes entirely from what it interrupts. After a sustained advance it questions the buyers; after a decline it questions the sellers; in a sideways chart it is simply a quiet day. The bars that follow it carry the verdict.

### Does a doji signal a reversal?

Sometimes, and far from reliably. A doji marks the pause where a reversal could begin, not the reversal itself — most dojis resolve in the direction of the prior trend or into more drift. Volume helps: a doji on heavy volume means many participants disagreed and neither side won, which is a stronger pause than one on a thin tape.