2.4 candlesticks

The candlesticks style can be used for 2D data plotting of financial data or for generating box-and-whisker plots of statistical data. The symbol is a rectangular box, centered horizontally at the x coordinate and limited vertically by the opening and closing prices. A vertical line segment at the x coordinate extends up from the top of the rectangle to the high price and another down to the low. The vertical line will be unchanged if the low and high prices are interchanged.

Five columns of basic data are required:

      financial data:   date  open  low  high  close
      whisker plot:     x  box_min  whisker_min  whisker_high  box_high

The width of the rectangle can be controlled by the boxwidth command. For backwards compatibility with earlier gnuplot versions, when the boxwidth parameter has not been set then the width of the candlestick rectangle is controlled by ‘set bars <width>‘.

By default the vertical line segments have no crossbars at the top and bottom. If you want crossbars, which are typically used for box-and-whisker plots, then add the keyword ‘whiskerbars‘ to the plot command. By default these whiskerbars extend the full horizontal width of the candlestick, but you can modify this by specifying a fraction of the full width.

The usual convention for financial data is that the rectangle is empty if (open < close) and solid fill if (close < open). This is the behavior you will get if the current fillstyle is set to "empty". See ‘fillstyle‘. If you set the fillstyle to solid or pattern, then this will be used for all boxes independent of open and close values. See also bars and financebars. See also the candlestick and finance demos.

Note: To place additional symbols, such as the median value, on a box-and-whisker plot requires additional plot commands as in this example:

  # Data columns:X Min 1stQuartile Median 3rdQuartile Max
  set bars 4.0
  set style fill empty
  plot 'stat.dat' using 1:3:2:6:5 with candlesticks title 'Quartiles', \
       ''         using 1:4:4:4:4 with candlesticks lt -1 notitle

  # Plot with crossbars on the whiskers, crossbars are 50% of full width
  plot 'stat.dat' using 1:3:2:6:5 with candlesticks whiskerbars 0.5

See boxwidth, bars and ‘set style fill‘.