Candlestick Patterns
Mat Hold Pattern
A strong candle, a gap, three small pullback candles that give a little back without giving up the low, then a fresh push to a new high. Looser than its strict cousin, and that's the entire point of it.
One sequence, three rule sets, tested live
Step through a fresh five-candle sequence one candle at a time. Before the final candle prints, guess whether the pullback holds up as a real Mat Hold. Then watch all three rule boards resolve off the same real bars, strict containment, standard Mat Hold, and a loose version, so the exact condition each one relaxes is visible instead of implied.
Candle 1 of the pattern is up. Step through to build the rest.
Strict (Rising Three style)
Standard Mat Hold
Loose (any held pullback)
How it works
- The strict version demands full containment. Every pullback candle's open and close has to sit inside the first candle's high-low range, and the confirmation candle has to close above the first candle's high.
- The standard Mat Hold trades containment for a gap. It requires the pullback to gap above the first candle's close, then only asks the pullback to stay above the first candle's low, a looser floor, and the confirmation candle only needs to clear the pullback's own high, not the first candle's.
- The loose version is the sanity floor. It just checks that the pullback never gives back the entire first candle and the last candle closes at a fresh high above the first candle's close, nothing about gaps or exact highs and lows.
- All three run on the exact same five candles. Nothing about the underlying price action changes between rule boards, only which conditions are being checked.
- A sequence passing the loose test and failing the other two is common and telling. It shows how much of what looks like "the pattern" on a casual glance is really just an uptrend continuing, not a specific five-candle shape.
Where this breaks
Looser rules catch more setups and more false ones
Mat Hold exists as a separate, named pattern specifically because the strict containment rule throws out sequences that still behave like a genuine pause-and-continue. Loosening the floor from the first candle's body to its low catches those. But the same loosening also lets in weaker sequences, ones where the "pullback" is really just chop that happened to hold above one specific low by luck. The stat tracking how often Mat Hold passes while the strict test fails is the honest way to see this tradeoff directly, a higher number there means the standard rule is doing real work, but it also means a wider net that will occasionally tag noise as a pattern.