Spinning Top Candlestick Pattern

A spinning top is a single candlestick with a small real body near the middle of its range and upper and lower wicks of roughly equal length. It shows indecision: buyers and sellers both pushed price during the session, and neither held their ground. On its own it predicts nothing. After a long trend, and confirmed by the next candle, it can warn that momentum is fading.

Signal

Indecision

Candles

1

Look for it

After a strong move

In Alphacent

Pro library

Small body, centered, matching wicks

Wait for the candle to close, then check all three:

• Small real body. The gap between open and close is small next to the full high-to-low range. One rough guide is under a third of the range.
• Body near the middle. The body sits roughly halfway up the candle, not pinned to the top or bottom.
• Wicks of similar length. The upper and lower wicks do not need to match to the cent. If one is several times longer than the other, the candle is drifting toward a hammer or shooting star shape.

In the diagram, the two wicks are exactly the same length and the body is about a tenth of the full range. That is as balanced as the shape gets.

Color barely matters. The body is too small for green or red to carry much information. Judge the shape first, then where it appeared.

Spinning top or doji: the body decides

A doji opens and closes at the same price, or so close that the body shrinks to a thin line. A spinning top has a small but visible body. Both describe a session that ended roughly where it began, so think of the doji as the extreme version of the same message.

The boundary is blurry. The candle in the diagram, with a body around a tenth of its range, sits close to it, and two traders could label it differently. Both candles need the same things before they mean anything: a trend behind them and a confirming candle after them.

The more useful distinction is with candles that have one dominant wick:

• A hammer or hanging man has a small body near the top and a long lower wick, with little or no upper wick.
• A shooting star or inverted hammer is the mirror image: long upper wick, body near the bottom.

Those shapes say one side was rejected hard. A spinning top says both were rejected about equally, so it has no direction of its own.

A spinning top can also be an inside bar if its whole range fits inside the previous candle. Spinning top describes shape; inside bar describes position relative to the prior candle. One candle can be both.

What buyers and sellers did inside that candle

The wicks record two failed pushes. At some point in the session buyers drove price higher but could not hold the gains, and the upper wick is what is left of that attempt. At another point sellers drove it lower and buyers bought the dip, which left the lower wick. By the close, price was back near the open.

A single candle does not tell you which push came first. It only tells you both happened and neither side won.

It gets interesting when you ask who had been winning before this candle. In a strong rally, most sessions had been closing well above their open. A spinning top means that for one session, buyers could not manage it. The side in control did not stay in control this time. That says nothing yet about whether the other side is about to take over.

In a range it is noise, after a trend it is a heads-up

Inside a sideways range, where price bounces between support and resistance, most candles are already indecisive. A spinning top there tells you nothing new.

After a sustained trend it earns a closer look, especially when:

• It follows several long-bodied candles in the same direction, so the contrast is sharp.
• It prints at a level that has mattered before, such as a prior high in an uptrend.
• It clusters with other indecision candles, like two spinning tops and a doji in a row.

Even then, treat it as a warning and wait for something to act on. Strong trends print spinning tops as rest stops all the time and then carry on. The candle that follows decides it: a close beyond the spinning top's high or low, against the direction of the trend, is the confirmation many traders wait for.

Timeframe matters too. On a 1-minute chart spinning tops appear constantly and mean little. A daily or weekly candle holds far more trading, so its indecision carries more weight.

A hypothetical trade after a five-day slide

An index ETF has fallen for five straight days on the daily chart, from $58 to about $50. Day six prints a spinning top: open $50.40, close $50.10, high $51.30, low $49.20. The body is $0.30 on a $2.10 range, and each wick is $0.90. It qualifies.

You do nothing on day six. On day seven, price closes at $51.60, above the spinning top's high. That is your confirmation.

1. Entry: long at $51.60.
2. Stop: $49.00, just below the spinning top's low of $49.20. If price trades back under that low, the indecision resolved downward and the idea is wrong.
3. Risk per share: $51.60 minus $49.00 is $2.60.
4. Account risk: 1% of $2,000 is $20.
5. Position size: $20 divided by $2.60 is 7.7, rounded down to 7 shares. Actual risk: 7 times $2.60, or $18.20.
6. Position value: 7 times $51.60 is $361.20, about 18% of the account.

A target of twice the risk would be $56.80, still below the $58 where the slide began. The stop sits outside the whole candle on purpose. That candle already showed price can swing more than $2 in a session, so a stop inside its range is likely to get hit by the same back-and-forth. The position sizing guide covers the method in more depth.

Mistakes that make spinning tops expensive

• Calling every one a reversal. Many spinning tops are followed by more of the same trend.
• Entering on the spinning top itself. The candle only shows hesitation. Wait for the next close to show which side won.
• Labeling it before it closes. Halfway through the session a candle can look like a perfect spinning top and then close as a long green candle.
• Ignoring the range. In the middle of a choppy range it deserves the same weight as any other candle there: close to zero.

To get a feel for the doji boundary, shape a candle in Alphacent's free Build a Candle tool and shrink the body until the tool reads it as a doji, one of the free patterns it recognizes. Then open a daily chart in the simulator, note every spinning top you find after a clear trend, and write down what the next three candles did.

Worked examples on this page use a hypothetical paper account and are for learning only, not advice. In Alphacent, free trades use a fixed $1,000 size; choosing your size, stop-loss and take-profit orders, and leverage are Pro features.

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