Candlestick Patterns
Marubozu Breakout Candle
A marubozu candle closes at or near its high or low with almost no opposing wick, showing one side controlled the entire bar.
Watch it form, make your call
A new candle builds in front of you, tick by tick, over roughly three seconds. Twice during the formation, roughly 40% and 70% of the way through, the tick stream pauses and asks for your call: is this bar forming into a genuine marubozu or not. Nothing is decided in advance. The final verdict is computed only once the bar closes, from its actual open, high, low, and close: body at least 90% of the full range, and each wick, upper and lower, no more than 5% of it on its own. After the close, four or five more bars play forward so you can see whether the move actually continued.
Click "Form a new candle" to watch one build tick by tick.
How it works
- The body-to-range ratio is the real test. This drill only calls a candle a genuine marubozu when its real body, the distance between open and close, takes up at least 90% of the bar's full high-to-low range. Anything less and it's a strong candle, not a marubozu.
- Both wicks matter separately, not just combined. A candle can have a small total wick and still fail this test if all of it sits on one side. Each wick, upper and lower, has to independently stay at or under 5% of the range for the pattern to count.
- Direction sets what "breakout" means. A bullish marubozu closes at or near its high, a bearish one closes at or near its low. Same body-to-range math, opposite read on which side controlled the bar.
- Calling it early is a bet, not a read. Nothing about a bar in progress guarantees how it finishes. A candle that looks like a clean marubozu at the 40% mark can still pick up a long wick before the close, which is exactly why the checkpoints in this drill exist.
- What happens after the close is a separate question. A genuine marubozu says one side controlled that single bar. Whether the move actually continues over the next several bars, or stalls right where it closed, is a different question the candle's shape alone can't answer.
Where this breaks
The same shape means different things early versus late in a move
A marubozu printing early in a fresh move and a marubozu printing late in an already-extended run can be mechanically identical: same body-to-range ratio, same conviction score, same clean close at the high or low. But the two often mean close to opposite things. Early in a move, a full-bodied candle can mark real participants stepping in with size. Late in a run, that same shape is frequently the last gasp of buyers or sellers running out of anyone new to pull in, not the start of something. The candle's shape has no memory of how many bars came before it or how far price has already traveled. A trader reading a marubozu in isolation, without asking where it sits in the sequence, can end up buying a breakout that's actually a blow-off.