Candlestick Pattern Scanner

The three-candle reversal patterns are statistically the most reliable. Three White Soldiers (bullish, 78 reliability) and Three Black Crows (bearish, 77) are the strongest, both because three consecutive bars in the same direction is much harder to fake than a single candle and because the third candle gives the market two full sessions to fail the pattern. Morning Star (bullish, 75) and Evening Star (bearish, 74) come next, where the indecision middle bar adds a behavioural confirmation: the trend exhausted, paused, then reversed. The strongest two-candle pattern is Bullish Engulfing (72) and its bearish counterpart (71). Single-candle patterns top out around 65 reliability with the Hammer at support and the Shooting Star at resistance. Anything below 55 reliability (Doji at 50, Spinning Top at 45) is properly read as indecision, not as a directional trade. The scanner above sorts every detection by these scores so you can filter the noise out instantly. Pair high-reliability patterns with structural context, namely a known support or resistance level, a trend that has gone too far, and volume that is expanding on the reversal candle, and the empirical edge is meaningful across decades of equity and forex data.

The scanner accepts 20 to 200 candles. The minimum is 20 because the pattern algorithms need at least that many bars to compute reliable moving averages, Bollinger bands, and the trend-context flags that downgrade or upgrade each detection. The maximum is 200 because beyond that the chart becomes too dense to read individual bars, and the older patterns lose practical value (a Hammer that fired six months ago is not a trade today). The sweet spot for most use cases is 100 candles, which is the default. On the daily timeframe that is roughly five months of trading history, enough to see the prior major swings, identify the dominant trend, and let the scanner find the half-dozen reliable patterns inside that window. On 4-hour and 1-hour timeframes, 100 candles covers the recent few weeks, which is the right scope for active intraday trading. Pair the candle count with the analyze window control: pull 200 bars for context but tell the scanner to flag patterns only inside the last 30 or 60 candles, which keeps the chart visually rich while focusing the result grid on what is actually actionable.

Yes. The scanner works on five asset classes: stocks (any ticker on a major exchange), forex (major and minor pairs including JPY crosses), crypto (BTC, ETH and large-cap alts), ETFs (SPY, QQQ, sector and country ETFs), and indices (S and P 500, Dow, NASDAQ, FTSE, DAX, Nikkei). The pattern algorithms are price-only. They look at the open, high, low and close of every candle and compute the geometry of the body and the wicks, which means they work identically across every asset class. The reliability scores in the database are calibrated to equities (where the most empirical research exists) but the same patterns behave similarly across asset classes because the underlying behaviour, buyer exhaustion at resistance and seller exhaustion at support, is universal. Crypto traders should note that crypto candlesticks on the daily timeframe carry an extra signal because crypto trades 24/7, so every daily candle reflects a full day of order flow without the gaps that equity charts have over weekends. Forex traders should note that the 1-hour and 4-hour timeframes are the right place for candlestick patterns because forex sessions overlap and patterns at session opens (London, New York) carry extra weight.

The empirical reliability research is calibrated to the daily timeframe, which is the most studied across equities, futures and forex. A Hammer on the daily after a multi-week downtrend has decades of statistical evidence behind it. The same Hammer on a 5-minute chart inside the lunch lull is mostly noise. The general rule: higher timeframes produce more reliable patterns because each candle represents more order flow and more participant consensus. For position traders, the weekly timeframe captures the cleanest signals but produces too few setups to trade actively. For swing traders on a 3-day to 2-week holding period, the daily is the sweet spot. For day traders on a same-session holding period, the 4-hour and 1-hour timeframes are the right place to look because patterns there reflect at least one full trading session of activity. Avoid the 5-minute and 15-minute timeframes for candlestick analysis. The bars there are too small and noisy for the empirical reliability scores to hold. Use those lower timeframes only for entry timing, after the higher-timeframe pattern has already confirmed the direction.

The honest answer is: accurate enough to be tradeable when paired with context, and barely better than random when traded in isolation. Across decades of empirical backtests in equities and forex, the strongest patterns (Three White Soldiers, Morning Star, Bullish Engulfing) deliver follow-through in the expected direction roughly 60 to 70 percent of the time on the daily timeframe, when filtered for trend context and structural location. The weakest patterns (Doji, Spinning Top) deliver follow-through closer to 50 percent, which is a coin flip. The reliability scores in the scanner database are calibrated to these numbers, with 78 representing the strongest empirical edge and 45 representing essentially random. The mistake most retail traders make is reading the patterns as deterministic signals and entering with full conviction every time. The right approach is probabilistic: a 5-star pattern at a structural level with volume confirmation has roughly a 2 to 1 edge in your favour, which is enough to make a 1:1.5 R:R trade profitable. A 1-star pattern in the middle of nowhere has no edge, so do not trade it. The probability is real but it is not certainty.

Yes. Candlestick patterns are a probability boost on top of an existing trade thesis, not a complete trading system. The four overlays on the scanner exist exactly to provide that combined read. SMA(20) and SMA(50) together tell you the dominant trend, which decides whether the pattern is a reversal at the right place (Hammer below SMA after a downtrend, Shooting Star above SMA after an uptrend) or a counter-trend pattern fighting the bigger move. EMA(20) is the responsive cousin of SMA(20), useful on intraday timeframes where you want a moving average that turns faster on momentum shifts. Bollinger Bands provide the volatility context: a reversal candle at the band edge reads very differently from the same candle in the middle of the range. The most powerful combined read is a pattern at the lower Bollinger band with SMA(50) acting as overhead resistance: this is the textbook oversold reversal setup. Add volume separately (the scanner shows it on the chart): a pattern that fires on rising volume is much more reliable than the same pattern on declining volume. The pattern alone is a 50 to 60 percent edge. The pattern plus three context variables is a 65 to 75 percent edge.

Two reasons, one statistical and one behavioural. Statistically, a reversal pattern fires at the end of an existing trend, which means the market has already moved a long way and is showing signs of exhaustion. The mathematics of mean reversion kick in: a market that has rallied for three weeks is more likely to pull back in the next two sessions than to keep rallying at the same pace. A continuation pattern fires in the middle of an existing trend, where the market is already at a state of equilibrium with the current direction, so the pattern provides much less new information. Behaviourally, reversal patterns reflect a meaningful shift in supply and demand: a Hammer at support shows that sellers tried to push price lower and failed, with buyers stepping in aggressively at the wick low. That is a real change in order flow. A Bullish Marubozu in the middle of a healthy uptrend just confirms what was already obvious from the chart. The reliability database reflects this: reversal patterns (Engulfing, Star, Soldiers, Hammer) cluster between 65 and 78, while pure continuation patterns (Marubozu, Gap Up, Gap Down) cluster between 57 and 68. When you are scanning for a tradeable setup, prioritise reversal patterns at known structural levels and treat continuation patterns as trend confirmation, not as standalone entries.

Both are indecision candles. The difference is in the body. A Doji has a body that is so small the open and close are essentially equal (less than roughly 5 percent of the bar range), with shadows of any length on either side. It is the purest expression of equilibrium: by the close, neither side had taken meaningful ground. A Spinning Top has a small body too, but it is visibly larger than a Doji (roughly 5 to 30 percent of the bar range), with long upper and lower shadows extending well beyond the body. It is indecision with more active back-and-forth: both sides pushed hard, neither held the ground they took. The reliability database scores the Doji at 50 and the Spinning Top at 45, because the cleaner equilibrium of a Doji carries slightly more information than the noisier struggle of a Spinning Top. Both gain meaning entirely from context. A Doji at the top of an extended rally, especially the Gravestone Doji with a long upper wick, is a credible reversal warning that scores 62 in the database. A Doji in the middle of a sideways range is meaningless. Always confirm an indecision candle with the next bar before treating it as a directional signal: if the bar after the Doji closes strongly in one direction, the indecision resolved that way and the move is real. If the next bar is also small-bodied, the market is still undecided and any trade is premature.