Doji candlestick
A doji is a candle whose open and close are nearly equal, so the body is almost a flat line. Every push by buyers during the session was matched by sellers, which is read as indecision rather than direction.
The body is so small it is nearly a line: the session closed where it opened, whatever happened in between. Wicks can stretch a long way on either side, because price may have travelled a wide range before coming back. By the last print neither side had gained ground. That is the whole of what a doji records, a full day of argument that ended exactly where it started. It says nothing about who wins the next one.
Location and volume decide whether the standoff matters. A doji in a drifting chart is another quiet day. One that interrupts a clear trend puts a question mark against the trend, because the side that had been winning suddenly could not. The doji-indecision scan filters for that case: pattern is doji, close above the 50-day average, relative volume above 1.2, so the standoff happened inside a trend and with a crowd present.
Dojis print constantly. Near-equal open and close is one of the commonest shapes on any exchange and most of those sessions resolve into nothing at all, which leaves the candle useful as a marker of where a trend's conviction wobbled, with the next bar or two delivering the verdict. The replay on the scan page turns that into a number you can look at: the last 250 sessions, close to close, with no brokerage or slippage in the arithmetic.
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:
where pattern is doji and rel_volume > 1.21
of the 500 most-traded NSE stocks match today, as of 25 Sept 2026
Scans that use it
Prebuilt scans in the library whose query reads this pattern — each with a hit-rate replay over the last 250 sessions.
Common questions
Is a doji bullish or bearish?
Neither by itself. The session closed where it opened, so the meaning comes entirely from what the candle interrupts. After a sustained advance it questions the buyers; after a decline it questions the sellers; in a sideways chart it is a quiet day. The bars that follow carry the verdict.
Does a doji signal a reversal?
Sometimes, and far from reliably. Most dojis resolve in the direction of the prior trend or into more drift, and the candle marks the pause where a reversal could begin without saying that one has. Volume helps. A doji on heavy volume means many participants disagreed and neither side won, which is a firmer pause than the same shape on a thin tape.