What is Gap (Price Gap)?

A jump between one candle's close and the next candle's open with no trading between — price simply skipped the levels.

A gap is a jump between the closing price of one period and the opening price of the next, with no trades occurring at the prices in between. On charts it appears as empty space between candles. Forex gaps mostly appear at the weekly open, when news over the weekend moves sentiment while the market is closed; stocks gap daily around earnings and overnight news; crypto, trading around the clock, rarely gaps at all except on individual exchanges with outages.

Gaps matter to traders for two reasons. First, they are a risk: a position held over a weekend can open far beyond its stop loss, filling with heavy slippage — no stop order can execute at prices that never traded. Second, they leave levels of interest: markets show a well-documented tendency to eventually return to fill gaps, and an unfilled gap acts as a magnet and reference zone, similar in spirit to a fair value gap on lower timeframes. Respect gaps in risk planning before exploiting them in analysis.