A gravestone doji is a candlestick with almost no body, a long upper wick and little or no lower wick, where the open, low and close all sit at or near the bottom of the range. Price rallied hard during the session and gave every point of it back before the close. The candle looks like an upside-down T, and it records a failed attempt to move higher.
It belongs to the doji family, which means the open and close are effectively equal โ the session ended exactly where it started despite covering ground in between. What separates the gravestone from other doji is where that ground was covered: entirely above the open, and entirely rejected.
This page covers what has to be true for a candle to qualify, how the gravestone relates to the shooting star it is often confused with, what confirmation looks like, and the situations in which the pattern means nothing at all.
What the candle records
A long upper wick with a close at the low says something specific about the session's auction: buyers were willing to pay progressively higher prices for a while, and then either stopped, or ran into supply large enough to absorb them completely.
By the close, everyone who bought during that rally is holding a position at a loss or at break-even. That is the mechanical reason traders treat it as a bearish signal โ a pool of recent buyers now sits above the current price, and some of them will sell into any bounce simply to get out flat.
What the candle does not tell you is whether the sellers who won the session have anything left. A single rejected rally inside a strong uptrend is a pause. The same candle after an extended advance, at a level that has already produced turns, is a different proposition.
The conditions that qualify a gravestone doji
Measure these rather than judging by eye. A candle that misses on the body test is a shooting star, not a gravestone, and the distinction matters for how much weight the pattern carries.
| Criterion | Threshold | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Body size | Effectively zero, under about 5% of the range | This is what makes it a doji rather than a star |
| Upper wick | The great majority of the range, 70% or more | The rejected rally is the entire signal |
| Lower wick | Absent or negligible | Price never traded meaningfully below the open |
| Close position | At or very near the session low | Sellers held control into the close |
| Prior move | A visible advance | With no rally behind it, there is nothing being rejected |
The strictest reading requires open, low and close to be identical. In practice, on most instruments and timeframes, exact equality almost never occurs and traders allow a small tolerance. Decide on your tolerance in advance and apply it consistently, because a loose definition turns half the chart into gravestone doji.
Gravestone, shooting star and dragonfly
Three candles are routinely mixed up. The differences are small on the chart and meaningful in what they imply.
| Candle | Body | Long wick | Appears after | Implies |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gravestone doji | None | Upper | An advance | Rally fully rejected, close at the low |
| Shooting star | Small, at the bottom | Upper | An advance | Rally mostly rejected, some body remains |
| Dragonfly doji | None | Lower | A decline | Selling fully rejected, close at the high |
| Inverted hammer | Small, at the bottom | Upper | A decline | Failed rally in a downtrend, weak bullish signal |
A gravestone doji and an inverted hammer have nearly identical shapes. The trend they appear in is what separates them, exactly as with the hammer and the hanging man. If the trend context is genuinely unclear, that is a reason to pass on the trade rather than a puzzle to solve.
A gravestone is generally read as stronger than a shooting star, because the close at the low means not one point of the advance survived the session.
Where it has to appear
Location does more work than the candle. A gravestone doji carries weight when it forms somewhere that already mattered:
- At or just above a prior swing high
- Into a supply zone drawn from the origin of an earlier impulsive decline
- At the upper boundary of a range that has capped price more than once
- After an extended advance that has run without a meaningful pullback
Mark the level before the candle prints. A gravestone in the middle of a trending move, with nothing structural above it, is one session where buyers pushed and stopped โ which happens constantly and resolves upward as often as not.
Timeframe changes the meaning too. On a daily chart the candle summarises a full session of two-sided trading across the whole participant base. On a five-minute chart it can summarise a thin patch of liquidity and nothing more.
Confirmation, entry and stop
The candle is a hypothesis, and the following session tests it. Most approaches require a close below the gravestone's low before treating the pattern as active. Without that, you are trading a rejection that has not yet produced any follow-through.
The stop belongs above the gravestone's high, plus a buffer for spread and noise. That high is the price at which the pattern's premise fails โ if the market trades above the level the rally was rejected at, the rejection did not hold.
This is where the pattern creates a practical problem. The defining feature of a gravestone doji is a long upper wick, and a long wick means a wide stop. A candle with a 40-point wick on an index gives you a stop 45 points away once the buffer is added. If you enter with the position size you usually trade rather than the size that stop implies, the trade risks far more than you intended โ the very feature that made the pattern interesting is what makes the position dangerous.
Work the other way round: fix the stop from the candle, then let the size follow. The lot size calculator handles it for any instrument; for indices, where these wicks are largest, the NASDAQ 100 and S&P 500 pages use the point values those contracts actually trade in.
How gravestone doji fail
The rally resumes. Most commonly, the next session simply trades above the wick and continues higher. The rejection was real for one session and irrelevant to the trend. Requiring a close below the low before entering filters most of these out at the cost of a worse price.
The stop is taken before the move. Price pushes above the high, triggers stops sitting at the obvious level, then reverses down. The buffer above the high exists for this, and it is a reason to avoid placing stops exactly at the wick's tip where everyone else's sit.
It forms in a strong uptrend. In a persistent advance, rejected rallies print regularly and resolve upward. A gravestone with no structural resistance above it is a poor short in a market that is still going up.
Definition creep. The candle had a visible body and was really a shooting star, or the "advance" behind it was three sideways candles. Both are failures of classification rather than of the pattern.
No honest source can tell you how often the pattern works. It depends on the instrument, the timeframe, the trend filter and the confirmation rule you apply โ which is why it has to be measured on your own trades rather than accepted from a description.
Turning it into something you can measure
Log every gravestone doji trade with the timeframe, the level it formed against, whether you waited for a confirming close, and the result in R rather than in currency. After a few dozen you can answer the questions that matter for your trading specifically: whether confirmation improves your results enough to justify the worse entry, whether the ones at prior swing highs carry the whole edge, whether the pattern is worth trading at all on the instruments you actually trade.
Fips's trading journal records trades in R and groups them by setup, and account analysis shows the distribution rather than the average โ with a pattern this dependent on context, the average tells you very little. If you would rather find out before risking money, backtesting the rule on historical data gives you the sequence of outcomes and, more usefully, the worst losing streak the rule has produced.
Frequently asked questions
Is a gravestone doji always bearish?
It is read as bearish, but only in context. After an extended advance or into resistance, it records a rejected rally. In the middle of a range, or in a strong uptrend with nothing above it, the same candle carries little information. The location does more of the work than the shape.
How is a gravestone doji different from a shooting star?
A gravestone has effectively no body โ open, low and close are all at the bottom of the range. A shooting star has a small but visible body. The gravestone is generally treated as the stronger signal because none of the session's advance survived to the close.
Do the open, low and close have to be exactly equal?
Strictly, yes, but exact equality is rare on most instruments. Traders allow a small tolerance, commonly a body under 5% of the total range. Set your tolerance in advance rather than deciding candle by candle, or the definition stretches to fit whatever you want to see.
Should I short as soon as the gravestone closes?
Entering on the close gives a tighter stop and takes every rejection, including the many that go nowhere. Waiting for a close below the low filters those out and costs you part of the move. Both are workable; the important thing is choosing one, applying it consistently, and measuring which performs better on your instruments.
Does it work on lower timeframes?
The shape appears on every timeframe. A daily gravestone records a full session of trading; a five-minute one may record a brief thin patch. If you trade intraday, anchor the candle to a level from a higher timeframe rather than treating each occurrence as a signal in itself.