Candlestick Patterns: The Complete Cheat Sheet
Candlestick patterns are shapes a single bar — or a short run of bars — makes when buyers and sellers fight to a particular kind of standstill. Each one is a compressed story about a session: who pushed, who gave ground, and where price ended up when the bell rang.
Most cheat sheets copy each other. This one is different in a way that matters: every rule below is the actual condition a running trading engine checks, lifted from the detector that scans live charts, not paraphrased from another article. Where a pattern fails, we show you a real trade that failed.
What a candlestick actually shows
Three measurements carry all the information, and every pattern on this page is a claim about them.
The body spans the open to the close — the session's net result. Above it, the upper shadow marks how far buyers pushed before losing the ground back. Below, the lower shadow records how deep sellers drove price before it recovered. That is the entire vocabulary.
Proportion makes the pattern, not price. A body that is tiny relative to its range says the session went nowhere despite trying, while a lower shadow twice the body says sellers made a serious attempt and were beaten back. Read the ratios and you are reading the pattern — which is exactly what batch_hammer and its siblings do on every bar of every chart, thousands of times a second.
The candlestick patterns cheat sheet
| Pattern | The rule Vike checks | |
|---|---|---|
| HammerBullish, after a downtrend | body ≤ 30% of range · lower shadow ≥ 2× body · upper ≤ bodybatch_hammer | |
| Hanging ManBearish, after an uptrend | identical geometry to the hammer — the crate differs only in signbatch_hanging_man | |
| Inverted HammerBullish, after a downtrend | body ≤ 30% of range · upper shadow ≥ 2× body · lower ≤ bodybatch_inverted_hammer | |
| Shooting StarBearish, after an uptrend | identical geometry to the inverted hammer — only the sign differsbatch_shooting_star | |
| DojiIndecision — direction from context | body ≤ 10% of the 10-bar average body, with a real rangebatch_doji | |
| Dragonfly DojiBullish, after a decline | doji body · lower shadow ≥ 50% of range · upper ≤ 10% of rangebatch_dragonfly_doji | |
| Gravestone DojiBearish, after a rally | doji body · upper shadow ≥ 50% of range · lower ≤ 10% of rangebatch_gravestone_doji | |
| Spinning TopIndecision — direction from context | body ≤ 30% of range · both shadows strictly longer than the bodybatch_spinning_top | |
| Bullish EngulfingBullish, after a decline | red bar, then a green one closing ≥ its open and opening ≤ its closebatch_engulfing | |
| Bearish EngulfingBearish, after a rally | the same function, sign flipped — green bar, then a red one covering itbatch_engulfing | |
| Inside DayCompression — direction from the break | high below the prior high and low above the prior low. The crate has no range rule at all — its nearest test is body-inside-body with opposite colors, which agrees only 17.5% of the timebatch_harami | |
| Morning StarBullish — and all but extinct on daily crypto | long red bar · a star whose whole range sits below that close · long green bar closing past the first body’s midpointbatch_morning_star | |
| Evening StarBearish, after a rally | the mirror, rewritten rather than sign-flipped — it reads the low where the morning star reads the highbatch_evening_star | |
| Three White SoldiersBullish continuation | three green bodies ≥ 0.7× the 10-bar average, each opening inside the last, upper shadows ≤ 30% of bodybatch_three_white_soldiers | |
| Three Black CrowsBearish continuation | the same five clauses mirrored — and it polices the lower shadow, so the wick above is never readbatch_three_black_crows | |
| MarubozuMomentum, in the bar’s own colour | each shadow ≤ 5% of the range — and no size clause at all. One function, sign from the colour; closing/opening variants police one end onlybatch_marubozu | |
| Long-Legged DojiViolent indecision — direction from context | doji body (≤ 10% of the 10-bar average) · each shadow ≥ 30% of the range. The crate’s rickshaw-man clause is provably unreachable — same detectorbatch_longlegged_doji | |
| PiercingBullish, after a decline | red bar · green bar opening below its low · closing past the body midpoint, short of the open. The strict gap makes it near-extinct on daily cryptobatch_piercing | |
| Dark Cloud CoverBearish, after a rally | the mirror, rewritten rather than sign-flipped — it reads the high where the piercing reads the low: gap above the wick, close into the bodybatch_dark_cloud_cover |
Here is the whole set at a glance. Each row carries its exact detection rule and the function that enforces it — click through for real examples, confirmation rules, and the cases where it broke.
Prefer it on paper? The same rows ship as a one-page candlestick patterns PDF, and the bullish and bearish halves each get a category page of their own. Cut the same set a different way and you get the types of candlesticks, grouped by what each rule reads, or the twelve candlestick reversal patterns, which is the only grouping the code itself cannot make. New to the format entirely? Start with what a candlestick chart shows, learn how to read one bar at a time, or trace where the patterns came from. Charts that redraw the same tape a different way get their own pages too — renko bricks, heikin ashi smoothing, point and figure columns and the market profile histogram — and every one of them deletes something these shapes depend on.
Read those rules closely, because a few of them are genuinely surprising. Hammer and hanging man are the same shape — identical geometry, separated by the engine only through the sign it emits and the trend they print in. Inverted hammer and shooting star pair off the same way, while bullish and bearish engulfing go one step further: a single function, a single loop, and the sign alone deciding which name you are looking at. So six of the eleven rows here are really three shapes wearing different hats depending on where they land. Stranger still is the inside day, where no detector in the crate implements the shape at all — that row names its closest relative instead, and the page measures how often the two agree.
Single-candle reversals
Those four shapes — hammer, hanging man, inverted hammer, shooting star — all say the same structural thing: price stretched hard in one direction during the session and could not hold it.
A long shadow is rejection. It marks a price level the market visited and refused. When that rejection lands after a sustained run, it hints the run is tiring. When it lands mid-range, it is noise, and I skip those entirely.
Direction comes from two things, never one: which side the long shadow falls on, and what the trend was doing beforehand. Get the trend wrong and you will read a hammer where a hanging man is staring at you. The shapes are indistinguishable; only the context separates a bullish read from a bearish one.
The doji family
A doji is the extreme case: the body collapses to a line because the open and close finish level. Nobody won.
That measurement is relative, which is the detail most explanations skip. batch_doji compares the body against the recent average body, not against the candle's own range — so a doji has to be tiny next to its neighbours, not merely small. It is why a genuine doji jumps off the chart instead of blending into a quiet stretch of small bars.
Where the shadows fall splits the family. A dragonfly puts its long shadow below with the body at the high, and reads bullish after a decline. Flip it vertically for the gravestone — bearish at a top. Balanced shadows on both sides make a standard doji — pure hesitation, taking its direction entirely from whatever prints next.
How to trade a candlestick pattern
One workflow covers all ten shapes above, which is the useful thing about learning what the engine measures rather than memorizing names.
Demand a trend for it to interrupt. A reversal pattern needs something to reverse. In a directionless range these shapes print constantly and mean nothing.
Wait for the next candle. Let the bar after the pattern close beyond it — above the high for a bullish read, below the low for a bearish one. That follow-through is your evidence real money arrived rather than one jumpy session.
Anchor the stop to the pattern's own extreme. The far end of the long shadow is a clean, unarguable invalidation line. Price closes back through it and the idea is finished.
Stack a second reason on top. A pattern that prints while RSI sits at an extreme beats one floating in neutral territory every time. The mistake I made early was trading the candle alone and treating the shape as the whole signal.
Where candlestick patterns fail
Here is the part most cheat sheets leave out entirely.
These shapes fail constantly. They fail hardest inside strong trends, where every rejection wick gets run over by the next bar. Thin, low-volume tape manufactures convincing shapes out of almost nothing. And any pattern traded without confirmation is a coin flip wearing a Japanese name.
Look at the failure examples on the pages linked above — a real ETH hammer that kept falling, an inverted hammer that dropped 12.5% instead of bouncing, a shooting star that rose 6.7%, and a gravestone doji that rose 17.5%. Those are not cherry-picked disasters; they are what the detector flagged, shown honestly. A pattern marks a place worth your attention — it never promises an outcome.
Frequently asked questions
What are the most reliable candlestick patterns? None are reliable alone. The ones with the clearest structural story — hammer, shooting star, and the doji family — earn their keep only when the trend, the confirmation candle, and a momentum reading all agree.
How many candlestick patterns are there? Dozens are named, and the engine behind this site detects 63. Most are variations on a handful of ideas: a small body, a long shadow, or a gap. Learn the ratios and you can read patterns you have never seen named.
Do candlestick patterns work in crypto? Yes — every example on these pages is real Binance data. They behave the same way because they describe order flow, not any particular asset. Thin, low-liquidity pairs produce more false signals.
What is the difference between a candlestick pattern and a chart pattern? Scale. Candlestick patterns live in one to three bars; chart patterns like head and shoulders or triangles form across dozens. Both describe rejection and continuation, just over different horizons.
This is educational material, not financial advice. Candlestick patterns describe probabilities, not certainties, and every real trade carries real risk — size positions so a wrong read costs little.