Candlestick Patterns
Bull/Bear Harami Reversal
A small candle sitting completely inside the prior candle's real body shows the market suddenly losing conviction after a strong move.
Drag the box, watch the badge
Five candidate spots below each show a small candle following a larger one. Pick a candidate, then drag the top and bottom edges of the containment box until it matches the small candle's real body. The badge below the chart recomputes live off the actual open/close numbers, not off how close the box looks. A few of these are near misses where the small body pokes just outside the prior body, close enough to look right and still fail the real test.
Select a candidate above to begin.
How it works
- The rule is about the body, not the wick. A harami tests whether the current candle's entire real body, both its open and its close, sits inside the range spanned by the prior candle's open and close. Wicks are ignored entirely.
- The prior candle has to be the dominant one. A tiny candle following an equally tiny candle is not a harami, it's just two quiet bars. This drill requires the prior body to be at least 1.8 times the size of the current body before the containment even counts.
- "Inside" means both edges, no exceptions. If the small candle's open sits inside the prior body but its close pokes even a cent outside, the pattern fails. There's no partial credit, which is exactly why the near-miss candidates in this drill matter.
- Direction comes from context, not the small candle itself. A harami after a strong up move warns of a bearish reversal, the same shape after a strong down move warns of a bullish one. The small candle only signals hesitation, the prior trend supplies the direction being questioned.
- Confirmation happens after the pattern, not during it. A harami by itself is indecision, not a signal to act. What happens over the next several bars, whether the hesitation turns into an actual reversal or the original trend reasserts itself, is what the play-forward tracks.
Where this breaks
A shallow harami inside a strong trend is often just a pause, not a reversal
The pattern only measures containment, it says nothing about how much conviction is actually draining out of the move. A harami where the small candle's body takes up 60% of the prior candle's range is a very different signal from one where the small body is a sliver at 15%, even though both pass the same mechanical test. In a strong trend, a shallow harami often resolves as a one or two bar pause before the trend simply continues, especially when the prior candle itself was unusually large relative to the stock's normal range, meaning the "reversal" reading was really just profit-taking on an overextended bar. Traders who treat every passing containment test as an equal signal get caught holding the reversal side while the underlying trend rolls right back over them.