All 26 of the common patterns, drawn from their actual open, high, low and close values rather than from memory. Each one says what the shape is, and what the session behind it did.
Reading the drawings
The rectangle is the body — the distance between the open and the close. The lines above and below are the wicks, marking the highest and lowest prices traded in the period. A long wick and a short body means the period travelled a long way and came back.
Shapes that form when a fall runs out of sellers. They describe rejection of lower prices, not a floor.
A small body near the top of the range, a lower wick at least twice the height of the body, and little or no upper wick.
Sellers drove price well below the open and buyers took all of it back before the close. It marks a session whose lows were rejected — the identical shape after a rise is a hanging man, so the move it follows is what names it.
A small body near the low of the range with a long upper wick and almost no lower wick.
Buyers managed a rally well above the open and could not hold it, but the close still finished above the open. Found at the end of a fall, it shows demand appearing where there had been none; the same candle after a rise is a shooting star.
A down candle, then an up candle whose body opens below the previous close and closes above the previous open, covering it completely.
One session undid everything the previous one did and more. The larger the second body relative to the first, and the more volume behind it, the more it describes a genuine change of hands rather than a quiet drift back.
A long down candle, then an up candle that opens below its low and closes above the midpoint of its body — but not above its open.
A weaker relative of the engulfing pattern: the recovery started from a lower low and reclaimed more than half of the previous session, without erasing it. Closing below that midpoint makes it an ordinary bounce instead.
A long down candle, a small-bodied candle that gaps below it, then a long up candle closing well into the first body.
Three sessions telling a sequence: heavy selling, then a pause where neither side made progress, then buyers taking the range back. The middle candle is the point — it shows the selling stopped before the recovery began.
A long down candle followed by a small up candle whose entire body sits inside the previous body.
The second session traded in a narrower range than the first and never threatened its extremes. It describes selling losing momentum rather than being overpowered, which is why it is usually treated as weaker than an engulfing candle.
A bullish harami, followed by a third candle closing above the first candle's open.
The harami with its follow-through attached. The third session is what separates a pause from a turn, which is why the three-candle version is described as the confirmed form of the two-candle one.
Three long up candles in a row, each opening inside the previous body and closing near its own high.
Three consecutive sessions where buyers held control into the close. Small upper wicks are the detail that matters — long ones would say each rally was being sold, which is the same three candles telling the opposite story.
Two candles, usually of opposite colour, whose lows are at or very near the same price.
Two separate sessions stopped at the same level. That level is the information — it is one of the cleanest ways a chart shows where a price found buyers twice, which is the raw material of a support line.
Open and close at virtually the same price at the top of the range, with a long lower wick and no meaningful upper one.
Price fell hard and came all the way back to close where it opened. It is the most extreme version of the rejection a hammer describes, and it also means the session made no net progress at all.
The mirror images, formed when a rise stops finding buyers.
Identical to a hammer — small body at the top, long lower wick — but appearing after a rise rather than a fall.
A session that sold off sharply and recovered. In an uptrend that shows sellers were able to push price a long way for the first time in a while, even though buyers repaired it before the close. Shape alone cannot tell it from a hammer; only what came before does.
A small body near the low of the range with a long upper wick, at the end of a rise.
Buyers pushed well above the open and lost the entire advance by the close. It records a rally that was sold into, which is the same event an inverted hammer records at the other end of a move.
An up candle, then a down candle whose body opens above the previous close and closes below the previous open.
The second session reversed everything the first achieved. Like its bullish mirror, its weight comes from the size of the body and the volume behind it rather than from the shape alone.
A long up candle, then a down candle that opens above its high and closes below the midpoint of its body.
A session that started stronger than the last one finished and ended by giving back more than half of it. Closing above that midpoint leaves an ordinary pullback rather than this pattern.
A long up candle, a small-bodied candle gapping above it, then a long down candle closing well into the first body.
The morning star inverted: a strong advance, a session that could not extend it, and then one that took it back. The small middle body is the hinge — it shows the buying had already stalled before the selling arrived.
A long up candle followed by a small down candle contained entirely within the previous body.
A wide session followed by a narrow one that never tested either extreme. It describes an advance running out of participation rather than meeting active selling.
Three long down candles, each opening within the previous body and closing near its own low.
Three sessions that closed weak in a row, with small lower wicks showing each dip was not bought. By the third candle a good deal of the move has already happened, which is the standing criticism of the pattern.
Two adjacent candles whose highs stop at the same price.
Two sessions turned away at the same level. As with its bottom counterpart, the pattern is really a way of noticing a price that has now rejected an advance twice.
Open and close together at the bottom of the range, with a long upper wick and no lower one.
Everything gained during the session was gone by the close. It is the strongest single-candle form of a rally being rejected, and like every doji it also says the period ended exactly where it began.
Sessions that ended roughly where they started. They say the argument was unresolved, which is information about the pause rather than about the direction out of it.
Open and close at effectively the same price, leaving a body that is a line rather than a rectangle, with wicks either side.
The session moved in both directions and settled where it started. It is a statement about balance, not direction — a doji in a strong trend is often just a quiet day, and reading more into it than the trend supports is the usual mistake.
A small body near the middle of the range with visible wicks above and below it.
Both sides had a turn and neither finished ahead. A cluster of these is how a chart shows a range forming, and it is one of the more useful shapes precisely because it makes no claim at all.
A doji with unusually long wicks on both sides.
A wide, volatile session that resolved nothing. It usually marks an expansion of range rather than a turn, and it is common around news that was interpreted in both directions before the close.
Pauses inside a move, and the single candles that show one side controlling a whole session.
A long up candle with no wicks: the open is the low and the close is the high.
Price rose from the first trade of the session to the last without ever being pushed back below the open. Whatever else it means, it is a clean statement that one side held control for the whole period.
A long down candle with no wicks: the open is the high and the close is the low.
The mirror image — the session never traded above its open. Two of these back to back describe a market that is not pausing to be bought.
A long up candle, three small down candles that stay inside its range, then a long up candle closing above the first one's high.
A drift back that never reached the low of the session that started it, followed by a session that cleared the whole thing. The pattern is really a description of a shallow pause: the small candles giving back only part of the first one is the entire point.
A long down candle, three small up candles contained within its range, then a long down candle closing below its low.
The inverse: a weak recovery that never reclaimed the session that caused it, ended by another decisive one. If any of the small candles clears the first candle's high, the shape is no longer this pattern.
This is a calculator, not advice. It works only on the numbers you type in — it has no market data and no opinion on what you are trading. Nothing here is a recommendation to open, close or size a position, and technical analysis describes probabilities rather than outcomes. A pattern describes the period that has already closed. None of these is a signal on its own.
A pattern is named by what is around it
The same candle is a hammer or a hanging man depending on the move it interrupts, which is the one thing a cheat sheet cannot tell you. Chart AI reads a photo of your own chart and describes the trend it sits in, the levels either side of it, the volatility and the volume.
Every candle is four numbers from one period: the price it opened at, the highest and lowest it traded, and the price it closed at. The body spans open to close, and the wicks reach out to the extremes. That is the whole encoding — a candle carries no information about what happened in what order inside the period, which is why a hammer and a session that fell steadily and rebounded in the last minute look identical.
Patterns are just named combinations of those four numbers across one to five periods. The names are Japanese in origin, from rice traders in the eighteenth century, and were brought into English-language technical analysis largely through Steve Nison's work in the 1990s. Nothing about the naming makes any of them predictive; it makes them a shared vocabulary for shapes people were already looking at.
Four of the patterns on this page are the same drawing as another one. Hammer and hanging man are identical; so are inverted hammer and shooting star. What separates each pair is the move it interrupts — the shape is evidence about one session, and the trend around it is what gives that evidence a direction.
This is also why a cheat sheet, this one included, can only take you so far. Matching a shape is the easy half. The judgement is in whether the level it formed at has mattered before, whether the volume behind it was unusual, and whether the move it is supposedly reversing was long enough for a reversal to be a meaningful idea.
Less than most introductions suggest. Published tests of candlestick patterns have produced mixed and often weak results, and they are sensitive to how the pattern is defined — how small a body counts as "small", how long a wick has to be, whether a near-gap counts as a gap. Change those thresholds and the same dataset gives a different answer, which is a strong hint that the effect being measured is not large.
The defensible use is descriptive. A long lower wick genuinely does record that price traded much lower during the period and did not stay there. That fact is worth having, whether or not the pattern it belongs to has a name, and it stays true regardless of what the next period does.
The four groups on this page describe what a shape records, not what it forecasts. Reversal patterns are sessions where a prevailing move met resistance from the other side. Indecision patterns are sessions that finished where they started. Continuation patterns are pauses that stayed inside the range of the move they interrupted. A pattern landing in the "bullish" group is a statement about which side won that session, and nothing more than that.
None of them is reliable on its own, and the studies that have tried to rank them disagree with each other — results shift with the market, the period tested, and how strictly the pattern is defined. What is consistent is that the same shape means different things in different places: an engulfing candle at the end of a long slide, on heavy volume, at a level price has already turned at twice, is a different observation from the identical candle in the middle of a quiet range.
The shapes form on any OHLC data, so all of them appear. The ones that depend on a gap do not translate cleanly, though — a textbook morning star has its middle candle gapping below the first, and in a market that never closes there is nothing to gap over. In practice you see the compressed version, where the middle candle merely opens near the previous close. Worth knowing before dismissing a pattern as absent.
The higher the timeframe, the fewer patterns and the more participants who saw each one. A daily engulfing candle is one session's worth of decisions by everyone trading the instrument; the same shape on a one-minute chart can be a single order. Nothing stops you reading them on any timeframe — the trade-off is simply that low timeframes produce far more shapes, and a much larger share of them are noise.
Nothing at all, in shape. Both are a small body at the top of the range with a long lower wick. It is a hammer if it appears after a fall and a hanging man if it appears after a rise. This is the clearest illustration of the rule that runs through the whole subject: candlestick patterns are named by their context, not by their geometry.
Between one and five. Single candles such as the doji and the hammer describe one session; two-candle patterns such as engulfing and harami compare a session to the one before it; three-candle patterns such as the star formations tell a short sequence; and the three methods patterns run to five. More candles generally means a stricter definition and fewer matches.
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