The doji candle, read honestly.

A doji forms when the close lands (almost) exactly on the open. The body collapses to a line; the wicks show how far both sides traveled and failed to hold. The auction ran, sentiment swung, and the balance sheet closed flat — that is the entire information content. It is not bullish, it is not bearish; it is a photograph of equilibrium.

Why traders care: equilibrium is rare after a strong directional push. If price has been running and a doji prints, one side has stopped answering — which is why the doji earned its reputation as an exhaustion candle. The reputation is conditional, and the condition is location.

Classic doji: wicks both sides, open and close together — pure indecision. Long-legged doji: big wicks, still flat close — a violent fight with no winner, usually higher volatility ahead. Dragonfly doji: the long wick points down; sellers pushed, buyers took it all back by the close — watched at supports and lows. Gravestone doji: the wick points up; buyers pushed, sellers erased it — watched at resistances and highs. (A fourth, the four-price doji where OHLC are all equal, is a data artifact or a dead-illiquid tape, not a signal.)

The dragonfly and gravestone are the tradeable pair, and they map straight onto the level logic of the support and resistance guide: a dragonfly at a support is buyers defending a price; the same candle mid-range is just a pause.

One question decides everything: where did it print? A doji after an extended run, at a level that already matters (a daily support, a round number, a prior high where the stops rest) is a legitimate exhaustion candidate. A doji in the middle of a choppy range is statistical noise — random balance candles appear constantly, and most of them mean nothing. Two honest additions: wait for the next candle to confirm (a close beyond the doji’s extremes in your direction; the doji alone is not permission), and treat the doji as a location marker for a retest — the liquidity picture often explains the wick: someone just took the stops on one side.

Test the claim before trading it: the TradingView backtester can measure “doji at level, confirmed by next close” on your symbols and timeframe in minutes. Most traders who do this once stop trading naked dojis forever; some keep only the level-filtered version. Either outcome is progress.

A doji is trivially detectable in Pine — body smaller than a fraction of the total range, optionally within a distance of one of your plotted levels (the mechanics of the script are in the Pine Script tutorial). Fire the alert only when the filter passes, attach the webhook, and the JSON carries the trade:

{
  "symbol": "{{ticker}}",
  "action": "buy",
  "lot": 0.1,
  "sl": 15,
  "tp": 45
}

SignalForge routes the alert to MetaTrader 5 in milliseconds and the EA manages the position — same path as the bridge guide, fields from the JSON examples, stop sized off the candle with the lot size calculator. Rehearse on demo before the live switch (the paper trading pattern), and on funded accounts Prop Firm Shield keeps the daily loss limit across every pattern fire.