Doji

A candlestick with almost no body. Whatever the period did in between, it closed at the level it opened, so the rectangle that would normally show the distance between open and close collapses to a line and only the wicks have length. The name is Japanese and the form is one of the oldest in the tradition.

The wicks are what distinguish the variants. A long legged doji has extended wicks on both sides, from a period that travelled a long way in both directions and settled in the middle. A dragonfly has a long lower wick and almost none above, a gravestone the reverse, and a four price doji, where open, high, low and close coincide, appears only where almost nothing traded at all.

The definition contains a tolerance that nobody agrees on. Open and close are rarely equal to the last decimal, so every chart package and every chartist applies a threshold for how small a body still counts, and one screen's doji is another screen's very small candle. The pattern is also entirely dependent on the period being drawn: a doji on an hourly chart is invisible on a daily one. What it describes is a balance between buying and selling over one interval, which is a description of that interval and not a statement about the next one.