Candlestick Patterns
Hammer & Shooting Star (Pin Bar)
A long wick and a small body at one end of a candle mark a failed push that reversed hard before the close.
Drag the threshold, watch the signals move
Sixty-five candles, engineered with pin bars at a range of wick-to-body ratios plus ordinary body candles as noise. Slide the threshold and the page recomputes, in real time, which candles qualify as hammers or shooting stars at that ratio, and what the forward hit rate looks like for the ones that do.
How it works
- The wick has to dominate the body. A hammer needs its lower wick to measure at least the slider's multiple of the real body (open to close), with the upper wick staying small, roughly under half the body. A shooting star is the mirror: a long upper wick, small lower wick.
- Context matters as much as shape. A hammer only counts after a short decline into it; a shooting star only counts after a short advance into it. The same wick-heavy candle sitting in flat chop is not classified as either, since there is no failed push to mark.
- The threshold trades quantity for quality. A low ratio like 1.3x accepts almost any candle with a slightly longer wick on one side, which pulls in weaker, noisier signals. A high ratio like 3.0x only accepts the most extreme wick-to-body candles, which cuts the signal count but raises the hit rate among what is left.
- The hit rate is measured, not asserted. For every qualifying candle at the current threshold, the page checks whether price actually moved away from the wick's direction over the next several bars in the underlying data, then compares that rate to the same measurement taken across a random sample of all bars.
Where this breaks
A loose threshold buries the real signal in false wicks
Drag the slider down toward 1.2x and watch the qualifying count climb while the hit rate drifts back toward the random-bar baseline. That is the pattern's actual failure mode: a small enough wick-to-body ratio shows up constantly in ordinary price noise, with no real rejection behind it, so a loose threshold turns the hammer or shooting star into a coin flip dressed up as a signal. The pattern only earns its keep at a ratio high enough to filter out that noise, and even then it is reading a single candle's fight, not confirming that the other side actually stepped in behind it.