Candlestick Patterns
Spinning Top Indecision Candles
A spinning top has a small body roughly centered between two long wicks, both sides pushed price around and neither one won.
Scan the tape, test the edge
Candles print automatically on the tape below, roughly one a second once you hit play, or one at a time if you'd rather step through manually. The three stacked bars under the chart break the most recent candle down into upper wick, body, and lower wick as percentages of its range, updating with every new print. Set how small the body has to be and how closely the two wicks have to match with the sliders below, and the scanner marks every candle that clears both conditions with a small gold dot the moment it prints. Click any marked candle to freeze the tape and play the next six bars forward, classified as up, down, or flat once they close.
Hit play, or step forward, to start the tape. Sliders apply to new candles going forward, not ones already printed.
How it works
- Three conditions have to line up at once. A spinning top needs a small body, a real upper wick, and a real lower wick, all showing up on the same bar and all measured as percentages of that bar's full range. Meeting just one of the three makes it a different pattern, not this one.
- Symmetry is the tell, not size. A tiny wick on one side and a long one on the other, with a small body sitting in between, is a hammer or a shooting star wearing a spinning top's small body, not a genuine spinning top. This scanner checks how close the two wick percentages sit to each other, not just whether both happen to exist.
- The pattern names a fight, not a winner. Price got pushed up and pushed down inside the same bar and closed back near where it opened. That's a description of a contest playing out, not a call on who wins the next one.
- Context still decides what happens next. The candle itself only describes one bar's range. Whether the next move runs up, down, or flat depends on everything around it, the trend, the level, the volume, none of which the shape alone can tell you.
- This drill tracks outcomes on purpose. Running enough trials keeps the up, down, and flat split close to a coin flip, which is the honest read on what a spinning top by itself actually predicts: very little about direction.
Where this breaks
Treating a volatility signal like it points somewhere
The mistake is reading a spinning top as if it names a direction, when the pattern is really a volatility signal dressed up as a candle. It says a bar got contested, not which side is about to win. A trader who spots one forming at what looks like a resistance level, and calls it a top signal, is usually pattern-matching the shape to a bias they already walked in with, not reading anything the candle itself proved. The directional-edge stat tracked on this page exists specifically to make that mistake visible: across enough flagged candles and enough six-bar replays, the up and down outcomes land close to even, because a small body between two long wicks describes indecision in that one bar and nothing about which way the next bar breaks. Betting a direction on the shape alone is betting on a coin the pattern never claimed to load.