Marubozu candlestick
A marubozu is a candle with almost no wicks. The session opened at one extreme of the range and closed at the other, meaning one side controlled the tape from the first print to the last.
All body: open at or near one end of the range, close at or near the other, essentially no shadow on either side. There was no tug-of-war to record. A green marubozu is buyers in control for every trade of the day and a red one is the same session run by sellers, and no other single candle makes as flat a claim about who owned the tape.
What the claim is worth depends on where it lands and who was present. A marubozu on thin volume is a quiet market drifting one way. The same bar on heavy volume is conviction with a crowd behind it, and at a level the market watches it often marks the day something changed. The marubozu-conviction scan applies that discipline: pattern is marubozu within 2 bars, relative volume above 1.
The caveat is exhaustion. Total control of one session says nothing about the next, and a marubozu printed late in an extended move is as likely to be the crescendo as the beginning, because the strongest-looking bars cluster at both ends of a trend.
In Sift
Written as pattern is marubozu. A working scan — stocks printing a full-body candle on above-average volume:
where pattern is marubozu and rel_volume > 1.20
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
What does a marubozu candle indicate?
Total one-sided control of a single session. Open and close sit at opposite extremes of the range, with no wick to show the other side ever pushed back, so a green marubozu means buyers ran the whole day and a red one means sellers did. It measures conviction inside the session and says nothing about what follows it.
Is a bullish marubozu a buy signal?
Not by itself. It says buyers dominated one session, and whether that starts a move or ends one depends on where it printed: early in a base or through a watched level it often carries follow-through, while deep into an extended run it can be the exhaustion bar. Volume and location decide, and the replay on the scan pages measures both readings over 250 close-to-close sessions with no costs in them.