Heikin Ashi vs Candlestick Charts: Reading Both on NSE Stocks

Pull up Infosys on a regular daily chart for the sessions of October 5 to 16, 2026 and you see a messy run: four red candles, a green one, a red one, then four greens. Switch the same chart to Heikin Ashi and the story changes. One green, three reds, then six greens in a row, the last four without a single lower wick. Same stock, same data, very different first impression. That is the whole Heikin Ashi vs candlestick debate in one picture. One chart shows you exactly what price did. The other shows you what the trend has been doing. Both are useful, and both can mislead you if you forget which one you’re looking at. Below we work through the formula, three real NSE examples, and the places where Heikin Ashi quietly hides things you need for placing orders.

Educational content only. Not investment advice. The stocks below are used to show how the charts read, not as recommendations.

Heikin Ashi vs candlestick: the core difference

A regular Japanese candlestick is a straight record of one session. Its body runs from that day’s open to that day’s close, and its wicks mark the day’s high and low. Green (or hollow) means the close was above the open. Red (or filled) means it closed below. Nothing from yesterday leaks into today’s candle. If you want a refresher on reading those, our candlestick patterns for beginners guide covers the basics.

A Heikin Ashi candle is a blend. StockCharts’ ChartSchool, which has one of the clearest write-ups of the method, describes it as a combination of the prior period’s open-close data and the current period’s open-high-low-close data. ChartSchool translates heikin as “average” and ashi as “pace”, so the name roughly means the average pace of prices. Because every candle carries a piece of the one before it, the chart is smoother. Colours tend to come in longer runs, and one odd session doesn’t flip the picture.

That smoothing is the selling point. It is also the catch, as we’ll see with real numbers.

The four formulas, in plain words

There are only four calculations. Here they are as ChartSchool lays them out, with “(0)” meaning the current session and “(-1)” meaning the previous one:

• HA Close = (Open(0) + High(0) + Low(0) + Close(0)) / 4. Just the average of today’s four prices.
• HA Open = (HA Open(-1) + HA Close(-1)) / 2. The midpoint of yesterday’s Heikin Ashi body, not today’s actual open.
• HA High = the highest of today’s high, today’s HA Open and today’s HA Close.
• HA Low = the lowest of today’s low, today’s HA Open and today’s HA Close.

There’s a chicken-and-egg problem on day one, because there’s no previous Heikin Ashi candle to borrow from. ChartSchool’s fix is to seed the first candle with the plain average of open, high, low and close for the HA Close, the average of open and close for the HA Open, and the actual high and low for the rest. It notes that this artificial start fades over roughly seven to ten periods. That’s why your broker’s Heikin Ashi values can differ by a few paise from ours: it depends on where the calculation started.

For the examples here, we took daily open, high, low and close prices for each stock from NSE’s security-wise bhavcopy files, which are listed on NSE’s reports page, for every session from September 22 to October 16, 2026. We seeded the Heikin Ashi series on September 22, so by the October sessions discussed below the start-up effect has had well over ten sessions to wash out.

Worked example: building one Infosys candle by hand

Let’s do October 13, 2026 for Infosys (NSE: INFY) step by step. NSE’s file shows that day’s open at ₹1,029.20, high ₹1,065.00, low ₹1,027.00 and close ₹1,062.10.

HA Close. Add the four prices: 1,029.20 + 1,065.00 + 1,027.00 + 1,062.10 = 4,183.30. Divide by 4 and you get ₹1,045.83 (rounded). Notice that it’s about ₹16 below the real close. The average drags it back towards the middle of the day’s range.

HA Open. Go back to the October 12 Heikin Ashi candle. Its HA Open was ₹1,011.08 and its HA Close was ₹1,023.44. The midpoint is (1,011.08 + 1,023.44) / 2 = ₹1,017.26. Compare that with the real open of ₹1,029.20 and you’re already ₹11.94 apart.

HA High. The highest of ₹1,065.00, ₹1,017.26 and ₹1,045.83 is ₹1,065.00, the real high.

HA Low. The lowest of ₹1,027.00, ₹1,017.26 and ₹1,045.83 is ₹1,017.26. So the HA Low equals the HA Open, which means this candle has no lower wick at all. In Heikin Ashi language, that’s a strong up candle.

Do this once on paper and the chart stops being a black box. Every candle is yesterday’s body midpoint stretched towards today’s average price.

Infosys side by side, October 8 to 16

Here’s how the two versions compare over the stretch where Infosys moved from a ₹997.00 close on October 8 to ₹1,161.20 on October 16, a rise of about 16.5% in the closing price over six sessions. Prices are in rupees, from NSE’s bhavcopy; the Heikin Ashi columns are our own calculation using the formulas above.

Look at October 12. On the regular chart Infosys opened at ₹1,029.30 and closed lower at ₹1,020.00, a red candle that could easily shake out someone who bought the previous day. On the Heikin Ashi chart the same session printed green, because the averaged close (₹1,023.44) still sat above the averaged open (₹1,011.08). The trend view didn’t blink.

Then count colour changes across the ten sessions from October 5 to 16. The regular candles switched colour three times. The Heikin Ashi candles switched twice. Not a dramatic gap for Infosys, which was trending cleanly anyway. The difference gets much bigger on a choppier stock.

A Heikin Ashi chart answers “which way has this stock been leaning?” A regular candlestick answers “what exactly happened today?” Most trading mistakes with HA come from asking it the second question.

HDFC Bank: where the smoothing really shows

HDFC Bank (NSE: HDFCBANK) over the same ten sessions, October 5 to 16, is a good test of noise. Its regular candles went red, green, red, red, green, red, green, red, green, green. That’s seven colour changes in ten sessions. If you were reading that chart day by day, you’d struggle to say whether the stock was going anywhere.

The Heikin Ashi version went green, red, red, red, red, then five greens. Two colour changes. And from October 13 to 16, all four HA candles had no lower wick. Over that stretch the actual close moved from ₹704.90 on October 12 to ₹728.85 on October 16, per NSE’s data, so the smoother chart was pointing in the right direction.

October 14 is the telling day. The real candle was red: open ₹712.30, close ₹710.70. A candlestick reader might have flagged a pause. The HA candle was green with no lower wick (HA Open ₹707.62, HA Close ₹712.38), because the averaging leaned on the strength of the previous sessions. One quiet red day didn’t register as a change of trend. That’s precisely what the method is built to do.

Reliance: the cost of waiting

Now the other side. Smoothing means lag, and Reliance Industries (NSE: RELIANCE) shows it clearly.

On October 13, 2026 the real candle was green: Reliance opened at ₹1,158.90 and closed at ₹1,166.70, after four straight red sessions. The Heikin Ashi candle for that day was still red, with an HA Open of ₹1,176.97 and an HA Close of ₹1,161.53. The HA chart only turned green on October 14. By then the stock had closed at ₹1,174.60. So the HA trader got the “up” message a session late, and roughly ₹8 higher on the close.

The same lag shows up in reverse a week earlier. Reliance printed green Heikin Ashi candles with no lower wick on October 6 and 7. Then on October 8 the real stock fell from an open of ₹1,207.70 to a close of ₹1,178.00. The strong-looking HA candles of the previous two days gave no advance warning of that drop. The October 8 HA candle did turn red, but only after the move had happened.

None of this makes Heikin Ashi bad. It just means a green HA candle with no lower wick describes the last two sessions, not tomorrow.

What Heikin Ashi hides: gaps and real prices

Here’s the part that bites traders who switch to HA and forget to switch back.

Gaps disappear. Because each HA Open is the midpoint of the previous HA body, a new candle always starts inside the old one’s range. Infosys opened above the previous close on four straight days, October 13 to 16. On October 14, for example, it opened at ₹1,073.70 against the previous close of ₹1,062.10, a gap of ₹11.60. On October 16 the gap was ₹17.50 (open ₹1,127.50, previous close ₹1,110.00). On the Heikin Ashi chart, none of those gaps exists. If gap analysis is part of how you trade, you can’t do it on HA candles.

The prices aren’t real. On October 16 the Infosys HA Open was ₹1,082.29. The stock actually opened at ₹1,127.50, more than ₹45 higher, and never traded below ₹1,122.00 that day. The HA Close of ₹1,144.64 is also ₹16.56 below the real close of ₹1,161.20. These are averages, not quotes. The HA Open in particular sits below anything Infosys actually touched that day.

That matters most for stop-losses. Say you put a stop just under the “low” of the October 16 Heikin Ashi candle, ₹1,082.29. The real low was ₹1,122.00. Your stop would be about ₹40 further away than the chart made it look, which changes your position size and your risk in rupees. Always place orders off the real candlestick chart, or at least check the real high, low and close before you do.

Never set a stop-loss off a Heikin Ashi low without checking the real low. On Infosys on October 16, the two were about ₹40 apart.

How to read the Heikin Ashi candles

Heikin Ashi has its own simpler vocabulary. ChartSchool points out you won’t find dozens of one- to three-candle reversal patterns on these charts; instead HA is used to spot trending periods, possible reversal points and classic chart patterns. The main reads it describes:

• Long green candle, no lower wick: strong buying pressure. The HA Open marked the low and everything else was higher. Infosys from October 13 to 16 is a textbook run.
• Long red candle, no upper wick: strong selling. The HA Open marked the high. Reliance on October 9 fits this.
• Small body with wicks on both sides: indecision, often when the two underlying sessions were of opposite colours.
• Doji or spinning top: a possible reversal area, but not a signal by itself. ChartSchool’s advice is to treat a doji in a downtrend as indecision and wait for confirmation, such as a break above a resistance level you’ve marked.

Trendlines, support and resistance, and chart patterns like triangles and wedges all work on HA charts too, according to ChartSchool. The longer colour runs can actually make those shapes easier to see.

A practical way to use both on NSE charts

We don’t think it’s a choice between the two. If your charting platform offers both chart types, flip between them and use each for what it does well.

1. Start on Heikin Ashi for direction. Is the stock printing a run of green candles without lower wicks, a run of red without upper wicks, or a mess of small bodies? That’s your trend read.
2. Switch to regular candles for levels. Mark real support, resistance, gaps and the actual high and low of recent sessions. These are prices that traded.
3. Size and place orders off the real chart. Entry, stop-loss and target should all be real prices, as the Infosys stop example shows.
4. Use HA to stay in, not to get in early. Its strength is keeping you from bailing out on one red day, as with HDFC Bank on October 14. Its weakness is late entries, as with Reliance on October 13.
5. Add a trend filter if you like. You can also pair HA with a trend indicator such as the Supertrend so you’re not relying on candle colour alone.

Intraday traders should be extra careful here. Tighter stops leave less room for the difference between HA prices and real prices. For swing traders looking at daily charts, HA is often a calmer way to sit through a trend.

If you’re building a broader toolkit, our technical analysis guide for Indian stocks shows where chart types like these fit next to indicators, volume and support levels.

Quick recap

• Regular candles record each session exactly. Heikin Ashi candles average the current session with the previous HA candle, so the chart is smoother.
• HA Close is the average of open, high, low and close. HA Open is the midpoint of the previous HA body.
• HDFC Bank’s regular candles changed colour seven times between October 5 and 16, 2026. Its HA candles changed twice.
• The trade-off is lag: Reliance’s HA chart turned green a session after its regular chart did on October 13.
• HA hides gaps and shows averaged prices. Place stops and entries using real prices, as the ₹40 difference on Infosys’s October 16 low shows.

Disclaimer: This article is for information and education only and is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Prices and chart readings change every session, and past patterns don’t predict future moves. Consult a SEBI-registered investment adviser before making investment decisions.