Chart Patterns
Diamond Top / Bottom
A broadening formation immediately followed by a symmetrical triangle, volatility expands and then contracts on the same chart, usually marking a reversal.
Find the pivot bar
The shaded band is a real rolling envelope, the highest high and lowest low of the last five bars, recomputed at every bar. Watch it widen and then narrow as the candles print. Click the single bar where you think the envelope stops expanding and starts contracting, that is the diamond's actual midpoint.
Click anywhere on the chart to place your pivot guess.
Envelope width at your pivot: —
Click a bar to place your pivot guess.
How it works
- The envelope is a real trailing calculation, not a drawing. At every bar from the fifth one onward, the tool takes the highest high and lowest low of that bar and the four before it, and plots the gap between them. That gap is what widens and narrows, and it is computed off the actual candle data every single bar.
- Your pivot pick is graded against the real argmax. The tool separately finds the exact bar where the envelope reached its widest point, using the same rolling calculation, and measures how many bars your click landed from that true maximum.
- Two phases have to genuinely slope the right way. Everything before your pivot has to show the envelope trending wider on balance, and everything after has to show it trending narrower. Both are checked with a real slope calculation across each half, not just eyeballed.
- A widening ratio of at least 1.8 is required. That is the widest envelope reading divided by the narrowest one across the whole pattern. Below that, the expand-then-contract shape is too shallow to call a real diamond, it is just normal volatility drifting up and down.
Where this breaks
The diamond is one of the rarest patterns for a reason, and rarity makes it easy to force
Because so few real formations are clean broadening-into-triangle shapes, traders scanning for diamonds tend to relax the rules until almost any choppy stretch with a wide middle and narrow edges qualifies. This tool holds a hard 1.8 widening ratio and requires the slope to genuinely reverse, which is exactly the discipline that gets skipped when someone is staring at a live chart wanting to find a diamond. A shape that expands for three bars, chops sideways for six, then contracts for three often gets pattern-matched to a diamond in hindsight even though the middle six bars never actually reversed the envelope's direction the way the math here demands.