Gravestone Doji: what the shape means and how to read it
The mirror image of the dragonfly doji — a long upper wick with almost no body — and what it does and does not say about a top.
Gravestone Doji is free on Basis — the button opens a live crypto chart with it already applied. No account, no trial and no limit on how many indicators you add.
Open the chartWhat it measures
A gravestone doji has its open, close and low essentially at the same price, with a long upper wick above — price pushed up hard during the bar and gave the entire move back by the close.
It measures rejection at the high of the bar, the opposite case from the dragonfly doji.
How it is calculated
These are the steps Basis performs, verified against the published definition.
- 1
Confirm the bar is a doji by body-to-range ratio.
- 2
Require the lower wick to be minimal to absent.
- 3
Require the upper wick to be a large multiple of the body.
How to read it
- After an advance, a gravestone doji says buyers pushed to a new extreme and could not hold any of it — a candidate top, contingent on what follows.
- The pattern is most informative at a level that already mattered — a prior high, a round number, a supply zone — rather than in open space.
- As with any single-bar pattern, absence of follow-through the next bar usually means it was noise.
Where it misleads
The same shape appears constantly in normal price action with no reversal attached. What separates a meaningful gravestone doji from a random one is location and what the next bar does, not the shape by itself.
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Updated 2026-08-27 · Educational reference, not financial advice.