What are Net Change Percentage Standard Deviation Projections?

A candlestick is the story of how price moved during a single period: it opens, explores a high and a low, and finally closes.

“By what percentage did price change from open to close?”

That single percentage value – called the net-change % – is the raw material for everything that follows.

Why net-change % matters

If you collect that percentage for thousands of finished candles (daily candles, 1-hour, 4-hour – whatever you close) you get a probability distribution: most candles move only a little, a few move a lot. When you plot those percentages you get the familiar bell-curve. From any bell-curve you can read two key statistics:

Mean – the “typical” net-change.
Standard Deviation (σ) – how far a candle normally wanders from that mean.

A well-known property of a bell-curve is that ≈68 % of all observations stay between –1 σ and +1 σ, and ≈95 % stay within ±2 σ.

For traders that translates into a probabilistic map of where an unfinished candle is likely to close.