Candlestick Patterns
Kicking Pattern
Two near-full marubozu candles of opposite colors, separated by a gap where the real bodies never touch. Rarer and stricter than the standard kicker, and most "kicker" setups you see intraday don't actually clear this bar.
Two gauges, one AND-gate
Each event on the tape below is a color-flip gap, generated live from real open/high/low/close numbers. The two gauges score how much of each candle's full range is real body, the closer to 100%, the closer to a pure marubozu. Drag the threshold slider, then watch how rarely both gauges clear it at the same time as a genuine zero-overlap gap.
Reading the tape…
How it works
- Purity is body divided by full range. A candle that is 96% body and 4% wick reads as 96% purity. A true marubozu approaches 100%, meaning the open and close sit almost exactly at the high and low.
- Both candles have to clear the same bar. The slider sets one threshold and applies it to both gauges at once. If candle 1 reads 95% purity and candle 2 reads 89%, a 92% threshold fails the second gauge and the whole pattern fails, even though one candle looks perfect.
- The gap is measured body to body, not wick to wick. Zero overlap means the higher of the two real bodies sits entirely below, or entirely above, the lower of the two. A wick can dip into the other candle's territory and it still counts as a clean gap for this test.
- Color has to flip. One candle closes near its low (or high), the next opens on the other side of the gap and closes near the opposite extreme. Same-color pairs never qualify no matter how pure either candle is.
- Tightening the threshold makes true kicking patterns rarer, not more accurate. Moving the slider from 88% to 99% does not improve the setups you're finding, it filters harder for the textbook version. Watch the stat row to see how thin the "true kicking pattern" count gets as you tighten it.
Where this breaks
Demanding textbook purity means missing the trades that actually pay
Real fills on a violent marubozu-to-marubozu gap can be far worse than any simulated chart implies. When both sides are one-directional all session, there is often no liquidity resting near the gap, and market orders can fill well through the level you planned around. At the same time, holding out for a 97% or 98% purity reading on both candles means passing on plenty of single-marubozu kicker setups that would have worked fine, because a small wick on one side does not erase the conviction the pattern is trying to capture. Chasing the rare, pure version of this pattern can leave a trader waiting for a setup that shows up a handful of times a year, while the more common one-sided version was tradeable the whole time.