Candlestick Patterns
Three-Line Strike
Three candles run hard in one direction, each closing beyond the last, then a fourth candle opens even further out and erases the entire run in a single bar.
Sculpt the strike bar
The first three candles are fixed: a clean run where each close beats the prior close. The fourth candle's open is fixed too, gapping one notch further in the same direction, which is part of the definition. Drag the handle on the fourth candle to set where it closes. The meter below tracks how much of the three-bar run that close has erased, live, off the real open and close numbers. Full retracement means the close crosses back past the first candle's open.
Drag the handle on candle four.
How it works
- Three candles, same direction, each closing beyond the last. In an uptrend that's three closes in a row, each higher than the one before. In a downtrend it's three closes in a row, each lower. No pullback bars allowed in between.
- The fourth candle opens beyond the third close first. It has to gap (or at least open) one more step in the trend direction before doing anything else. That's what makes the eventual reversal so violent when it happens, the bar starts by looking like a fourth leg of the same move.
- Then it closes past the first candle's open. Not just back to where the run started, past it. One bar erases all three legs of the prior move and then some. That is the entire definition, measured off real open and close prices, not off how the bar looks on the screen.
- Despite the shape, it was originally classified as a continuation pattern. Thomas Bulkowski's original research on the three-line strike found that after this dramatic-looking one-bar reversal, price more often continued in the direction of the original three-candle run than it reversed. The play-forward button samples that split live, it will not always agree with any single run.
- That's the whole point of testing it, not reading it. A pattern that looks exactly like a reversal but has a documented tendency to resolve as continuation is precisely the kind of setup where "it looks obvious" is the least reliable part of the decision.
Where this breaks
Traders read the dramatic reversal bar and trade against the documented tendency
A candle that erases three prior bars in one shot is visually the loudest signal on the chart, and loud signals pull traders toward acting on the shape instead of the history. The three-line strike's own name gives away the trap: it looks like a reversal, it is catalogued as a reversal pattern in most references, and yet the original sample study behind it found continuation showing up more often than not once the strike bar closes. A trader who sees the fourth candle wipe out the run and immediately fades the reversal, betting the strike marks a genuine turn, is betting against the pattern's own documented behavior. The failure is not that the pattern is unreliable, it is that its visual read and its statistical read point in different directions, and most traders only ever look at the visual.