A doji is a candle where the stock closes almost exactly where it opened. The body is just a thin line, sometimes with long wicks above and below. It’s usually described as indecision: buyers and sellers fought all day and ended up back where they started.
It’s also the most common named pattern there is. Our scanner found 57,502 of them across 559 US stocks and ETFs in three years, about one in every seven trading days. That makes it a good test of whether “indecision” tells you anything.
The main types
- Standard doji: open and close are about equal, with wicks of any length.
- Long-legged doji: long wicks on both sides. A big range that went nowhere.
- Dragonfly doji: open, close and high together, with a long lower wick. A “T” shape. Read as bullish. There’s a separate write-up on the dragonfly doji.
- Gravestone doji: open, close and low together, with a long upper wick. An upside-down “T”. Read as bearish.
One quirk: TA-Lib, the library behind the scanner, doesn’t give a plain doji a direction, so the scanner lists it as “Bullish Doji”. Treat it as neutral.
What happened afterwards
| After a… | Cases | Higher 5 days later | Higher 20 days later |
|---|---|---|---|
| Doji | 57,502 | 53.6% | 55.5% |
| Long-legged doji | 57,225 | 53.7% | 55.5% |
| Dragonfly doji | 5,586 | 55.0% | 56.9% |
| Gravestone doji | 5,100 | 53.7% | 55.3% |
| Any day | 413,576 | 53.8% | 55.6% |
Look at how close the first two rows are to the last one. A doji, with 57,000 cases, lands within two-tenths of a point of a random day at both horizons. That’s about as clean a “no signal” as you’ll ever see in market data.
The gravestone, supposedly the bearish one, was followed by a gain just as often as any other day. The dragonfly is the only variant that stands out, by about a point, and even that is small.
Does context rescue it?
I checked the two things people usually add: the trend going in, and whether the next day confirmed a direction.
- After a 10-day drop of more than 5%: 53.4% higher five days later, against 54.0% for any day after a drop.
- After a 10-day rally of more than 5%: 53.8%, against 53.7%.
- When the next day closed higher: 52.7% over the following five days, exactly the same as any up day.
Every way I cut it, a doji tells you about as much as flipping to a random date on the calendar.
Why it’s still worth knowing
A doji is honest about one thing: on that day, nobody won. That’s useful as context. A doji right at a support level you were already watching, or the day after a huge move, tells you the move has paused. What it doesn’t tell you is which way it goes next.
For option sellers, that pause can be an opportunity. If a stock has stalled and implied volatility is still high from the move before it, it can be a reasonable moment to sell premium with defined risk, like an iron condor. Just don’t treat the doji itself as the reason.
Recent dojis
The scanner flagged 1,265 dojis in October 2026. On October 23 alone they included AMAT, ADM and ALGN. Today’s list is on the candlestick scanner, and the full comparison across every pattern is in Do Candlestick Patterns Work?
Data: daily prices for 559 US stocks and ETFs, October 2023 to October 2026, patterns detected by TA-Lib. Educational only, not financial advice.