Bullish Candlestick Patterns: The Six Our Engine Trades
Bullish candlestick patterns mark the sessions where sellers lose their grip: a rejected low, a swallowed body, three closes marching upward. Most articles pad the list to twenty shapes. Vike's engine leads with six, and every rule on this page is quoted from the detector that scans live charts — the same rows, drawn from the same data file, that build our full cheat sheet.
Six is not a limitation. It is what survives when you demand that each pattern have a precise rule, a working detector, and a published page showing where it failed.
What makes a candlestick pattern bullish
Start one level below the patterns. A single bullish candlestick is just a bar that closed above where it opened, which the crate settles with a helper called is_white — one comparison, and the body gets drawn green. That is the raw material, and not one of the six rules below is satisfied by it alone.
Inside vike-indicators, direction is a sign. Every pattern detector emits +100 for the bullish reading of a shape and −100 for the bearish one, on the same scale, from the same arithmetic. batch_engulfing is the purest case — one function, one loop, and the sign alone decides whether you are looking at a bullish or a bearish engulfing.
That convention encodes something traders forget: bullishness is rarely a property of the shape alone. A small body over a long lower shadow is a hammer after a downtrend and a hanging man after a rally — byte-identical geometry, opposite signs. A pattern earns the bullish label from what it interrupts. Print the same candle mid-range and the engine still flags the shape, but there is nothing for it to reverse, so the label carries no weight.
The six bullish candlestick patterns
| Pattern | The rule Vike checks | |
|---|---|---|
| HammerBullish, after a downtrend | body ≤ 30% of range · lower shadow ≥ 2× body · upper ≤ bodybatch_hammer | |
| Inverted HammerBullish, after a downtrend | body ≤ 30% of range · upper shadow ≥ 2× body · lower ≤ bodybatch_inverted_hammer | |
| Dragonfly DojiBullish, after a decline | doji body · lower shadow ≥ 50% of range · upper ≤ 10% of rangebatch_dragonfly_doji | |
| Bullish EngulfingBullish, after a decline | red bar, then a green one closing ≥ its open and opening ≤ its closebatch_engulfing | |
| 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 | |
| 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 | |
| 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 |
Here is the bullish side of the ledger, straight from the engine's own cheat-sheet data. Three are single-candle rejections, three are multi-candle handovers, and each links to a full page with real detections and real failures.
Read the signal column with care. Two of the six demand a preceding downtrend, two demand a decline, and one — the soldiers — is a continuation claim rather than a reversal at all. The table is a menu of hypotheses, not a list of buy buttons.
The single-candle rejections
All three single-bar patterns say the same structural thing: price went somewhere low, and the market refused to stay there.
The BTC chart above is the canonical case — a real hammer that batch_hammer flagged, confirmed the next session, and resolved 6.1% higher within five days. The inverted hammer flips the rejection to the upper shadow while keeping the bullish read, which surprises people; its geometry is identical to the bearish shooting star, and only the downtrend before it changes the sign. The dragonfly doji is the extreme version — body collapsed to a line at the very top of a long lower shadow.
The multi-candle handovers
Two or three sessions telling one story: supply was in charge, and then it was not.
A bullish engulfing is a red body covered end to end by the next green one — four price comparisons, no shadows read at all. The morning star needs a gap that 24/7 markets almost never leave, which is why batch_morning_star found just 6 instances across 479,749 daily crypto bars and our page for it runs on 4-hour candles. Three white soldiers — 37 hits in that same scan — demands three long green bodies, each opening strictly inside the previous body, with almost no upper shadows; batch_three_white_soldiers polices every clause.
Scarcity cuts both ways. Rare patterns carry more information per appearance and give you almost no appearances to trade.
Trading a bullish signal without donating
The DOGE and ICP charts above are what a full sequence looks like: pattern, confirmation, resolution — +6.2% and +19.9%. Both went right. Plenty do not, so the routine matters more than the examples.
Demand a downtrend first. Every reversal needs something to reverse; the signal column above states each pattern's requirement.
Wait for the close beyond the high. The bar after the pattern closing above it is your evidence that buyers stayed. I skip anything that never confirms, and it removes most of the junk.
Anchor the stop at the pattern low. The rejected extreme is the invalidation line — price closing back through it means the story was wrong.
Stack momentum on top. A bullish pattern with RSI leaving oversold is two independent measurements agreeing. One measurement is a coin flip with better marketing.
Where the bullish label fails
Real detections lose, and the leaf pages show them deliberately: an ETH hammer that kept falling, an inverted hammer that dropped 12.5% instead of bouncing. Those were not bad reads of the rule — the rule passed, confirmation printed, and the trade still lost. That is what a probabilistic edge looks like from inside.
Frequency is the other tax. Engulfing shapes print on roughly one bar in twelve of crypto tape, so treating each one as a signal grinds an account down in fees and stops. And the trend requirement never stops applying: the mistake I made early was taking bullish shapes inside strong downtrends, where every rejected low got run over within a session or two. The label describes the pattern's best context. Outside that context, what you own is one random candle in a market full of them.
Frequently asked questions
What is a bullish candlestick?
Any bar whose close finished higher than its open, nothing more. is_white settles it in the crate with a single comparison, which is why colour alone tells you so little: one green session inside a falling market changes nothing about the market.
What is the most reliable bullish candlestick pattern? None alone are reliable enough to trade blind. Three white soldiers has the strictest rule and the lowest false-positive rate in our scans, but it appears 37 times in 479,749 daily bars — reliability and availability trade off directly.
Can a bullish pattern appear in an uptrend? The geometry can, and the engine will still flag shapes like the soldiers, which are continuation signals anyway. Reversal patterns printing mid-uptrend have nothing to reverse, so their bullish label carries little weight there.
Do bullish patterns need volume confirmation? The detectors read price only — no volume term appears in any of the six rules. Volume can strengthen a discretionary read, yet it is worth knowing the engine's evidence for these pages never used it.
How many bullish patterns exist in total? Our engine detects 63 candlestick patterns overall, and more than a dozen carry a bullish reading in the right context. These six are the ones with published pages, real examples, and documented failures.
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.