Candlestick Patterns
Tri-Star Pattern
Three doji in a row, with the middle one gapped away from both neighbors. It is one of the rarest named reversal patterns in candlestick charting, and the scanner below shows exactly how rare.
Scan a thousand windows, count the real ones
Set how strict a doji has to be, as a percentage of the candle's full range that the body is allowed to occupy. Then scan a batch of a thousand random three-candle windows, generated fresh each time, and watch how many clear every condition: three genuine doji, plus a real gap on both sides of the middle one. Loosen the strictness and more windows qualify. Tighten it and the count collapses toward zero, which is the honest picture of how rare this pattern actually is.
Run a scan to see the qualify rate.
Closest genuine tri-star found
No qualifying window yet, try scanning or loosening strictness.
A textbook near miss
Scan to pull one out.
How it works
- All three candles have to be doji. A doji is a candle whose open and close land almost on top of each other, a small body compared to its full high-to-low range. "Almost" is doing real work in that sentence, which is why the strictness slider exists.
- The middle candle has to gap away from both neighbors. Its body can't overlap the first candle's body, and it can't overlap the third candle's body either. Two clean gaps, one on each side, around a tiny body in the middle.
- It shows up after a trend, and it marks indecision at the extreme. Three candles in a row where the market can't commit to a direction, isolated from the bars around it by real price gaps, is a strong statement that momentum has stalled completely.
- Rarity is the reason it's taken seriously when it appears. A single doji is common and means little. Three in a row, gapped on both sides of the middle one, essentially never happens by accident inside an ordinary trend, which is exactly what the scan above demonstrates with real numbers instead of a claim.
- Near misses vastly outnumber real hits. Two doji with a small gap, or three small bodies with only one gap holding, look similar at a glance but fail the strict version of the rule. The scanner tags these as near misses instead of silently rounding them up to a pass.
Where this breaks
Rarity gets mistaken for reliability, and the two aren't the same thing
Because a genuine tri-star is so uncommon, traders who finally spot one tend to treat the rarity itself as proof the signal is powerful. That's a logical shortcut, not a finding. A pattern can be extremely rare and still be an unreliable predictor, the two properties are independent. With so few real historical examples of any single stock or index actually producing a strict tri-star, there usually isn't enough sample size behind any specific ticker to say much about what happens next with confidence. The honest use of this pattern is as a strong statement about the moment, extreme indecision at a potential turning point, not as a statistically validated signal with a known edge. Treating "I have never seen this before" as "this must mean something big" is the trap the rarity itself sets.