Candlesticks

The candlesticks style can be used for 2-d data plotting of financial data or for generating box-and-whisker plots of statistical data. Five columns of data are required; in order, these should be the x coordinate (most likely a date) and the opening, low, high, and closing prices. 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.

The width of the rectangle can be controlled by the set 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 5#5width6#6.

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.

By default the rectangle is empty if (open 6#6 close), and filled with three vertical bars if (close 6#6 open). If filled-boxes support is present, then the rectangle is colored according to set style fill 5#5fillstyle6#6. See set bars (p. ) and financebars (p. ). See also

http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/demo/candlesticks.htmlfinance 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 `set boxwidth`, `set bars` and `set style fill`.