Candlestick Patterns
Inside Bar / NR7 Breakout
A candle that trades entirely inside the range of the one before it is coiling, and the trade is the break of that small range, not a guess at direction.
Watch the range coil, then arm the break
Candles print one at a time on a real OHLC chart. Every bar is checked against two real rules the moment it closes: is it an inside bar (high and low both inside the prior bar), and is it an NR7 (its range is the narrowest of the last seven bars). When either fires, a signal line appears below the chart and you can arm a two-sided breakout order, a buy-stop above the bar's high and a sell-stop below its low, before the next bar prints.
Trailing 7-bar range rank (current bar highlighted)
Click "Start printing bars" to begin the replay.
How it works
- An inside bar is a strict range test. The current bar's high has to be less than or equal to the prior bar's high, and its low has to be greater than or equal to the prior bar's low. Nothing about the body or the close matters, only the wick extremes.
- NR7 measures contraction against history, not just one bar back. The bar's own range, high minus low, has to be the smallest of the last seven bars including itself. A bar can be tight in absolute terms and still not qualify if the six bars before it were tighter.
- The breakout order is symmetric on purpose. A buy-stop sits above the signal bar's high and a sell-stop sits below its low. Neither side is a prediction, the market picks its own direction and the order that gets hit first defines the trade.
- A bar can be both at once. When the current bar is inside the prior bar's range and also the narrowest of the last seven, the coil is doubly confirmed, tighter on an absolute basis and tighter relative to its own recent history.
- Holding means the break doesn't immediately round-trip. After a stop triggers, the simulator tracks whether price keeps moving away from the triggered level over the next several bars or snaps back through the entry range, the tally below sorts every armed signal into one of those two outcomes.
Where this breaks
A tight range on thin volume triggers both stops in the same session
Inside bars and NR7 bars measure price range, not participation. A range can contract because real buyers and sellers are in balance and about to resolve directionally, or it can contract because almost nobody is trading, a lunch-hour lull, a pre-holiday session, a stock waiting on news. In the second case the eventual break is often just the first order of any real size clearing a thin book, and it fails to hold because there was never a crowd behind it. The buy-stop triggers, prints two or three bars of follow-through on nothing, then the sell-stop triggers a few bars later on the same lack of volume. Watch for this specifically on a bar with an unusually small range relative to the whole chart, not just relative to the last seven bars, since an outlier-quiet bar is a volume warning the range math alone can't see.