The blank candle

[Fairman]

The blank candle

Sometimes a candle appears with zero range: open, high, low, and close all equal. A few ticks, or none at all.

It happens in quiet markets, particularly on exotic pairs and in the hours after the New York close. It also happens when the feed stalls.

Distinguishing a genuine pause from a feed problem matters. A blank candle during an active session suggests a connectivity problem or a freeze. Trading on stale prices at that moment is dangerous.

Some systems treat a lack of ticks for more than a few seconds as a warning and block new orders until normal flow resumes. A simple timer does the job.

On the chart, blank candles in the middle of an active session are worth investigating. A comparison with another feed shows whether the market was really quiet.

On a VPS, blank candles sometimes come from the platform's connection to the broker being half-dead: the terminal says connected, but no data flows. Restarting the terminal fixes it, and a watchdog script that restarts after thirty seconds of silence in active hours makes the fix automatic. Quiet markets and dead feeds look identical until the clock is checked against another source.

How long can the platform go without a tick before a trader would notice?