Candlestick Patterns
Separating Lines
A counter-trend candle appears, then the next candle opens at essentially the same price and reverses hard back in the original direction, separating cleanly from the bar before it.
Drag the open, watch it snap to the magnet
An uptrend runs into one counter-trend candle. Drag the handle below to set where the next candle opens. A shaded tolerance band marks the counter-trend candle's real open price, and the open-to-open distance updates live as you drag, in both percent and price terms. Release inside the band and the tool auto-completes a real strong close back in the trend direction, then plays the continuation forward. Release outside the band and you get an ordinary, unrelated candle instead, for contrast.
Drag the gold handle to set candle 2's open.
Waiting for you to release the handle.
How it works
- The trend has to already be established. Separating lines is a continuation pattern, it needs a real prior trend for the second candle to separate back into.
- The counter-trend candle is the setup, not the signal. One candle against the trend, however sharp, is common on its own and means little by itself.
- The match is open to open, nothing else. This tool checks candle two's open against candle one's open specifically, not the high, the low, or the close. That's what separates this pattern from a tweezer, which matches highs or lows, and a stick sandwich, which matches closes.
- The tolerance band decides "essentially the same price." Real charts never print two identical opens, so a small tolerance band stands in for "close enough," and the tolerance slider controls exactly how tight that band is.
- The close is what confirms it. A matching open with a weak or ambiguous close isn't separating lines, it's just noise. The pattern needs a genuinely strong close back in the original trend direction to count.
Where this breaks
A tight open match is easy to mistake for structure that isn't really there
Because separating lines is defined by a single price match, open to open, it's vulnerable to coincidence in exactly the way this drill demonstrates. Widen the tolerance band far enough and almost any two candles will "qualify," which doesn't mean the market is actually respecting that price, it means the bar got set low enough to catch noise. The continuation hold rate tracked above will drop as the tolerance widens, which is the honest tell that a looser match is a weaker signal, not the same signal caught more often. A trader using a wide tolerance in practice risks reading meaning into an open-to-open coincidence that the market never actually treated as a level.