Candlestick Patterns
Unique Three River Bottom
A rare 3-candle bullish reversal. A long black candle, a black hammer-shaped candle that carves a new low, then a small white candle that opens lower but refuses to make another new low. The water line below tracks the real lows bar by bar.
Watch the water level, not the candles
Four candidate 3-bar sequences below, some genuine and some broken. The blue line under the chart tracks each candle's real low in order. It has to drop to its deepest point on candle two, that's the "river bottom", then hold or rise on candle three. Switch candidates to see the line redraw off the real numbers, and read the pass/fail badge underneath.
Pick a candidate above.
How it works
- Candle one is a plain long black candle. Nothing unusual yet, a real down move that sets the starting depth for the river.
- Candle two has to make a genuine new low. Its low must sit below candle one's low. The water line drops to reflect that, this is the deepest point of the whole sequence by definition.
- Candle two's body sits small and near the top of its own range. A long lower shadow reaching down to the new low, with the open and close bunched up near the high, is what gives it the hammer-like look, and its open has to fall inside candle one's real body.
- Candle three opens below candle two's close but must not make a new low. Its own low has to sit at or above candle two's low. That's the "hold" the water line is checking for, if candle three dips even a cent below candle two's low, the pattern is invalidated.
- The whole read is about where the low stops falling, not the close. A lot of attention goes to closing prices in candlestick analysis, this pattern cares specifically about whether the sequence of lows stopped getting lower.
Where this breaks
A held low is not the same as a confirmed reversal
This pattern only measures whether the third candle avoided making a new low, it says nothing about whether buyers actually took control. A candle three that opens below candle two's close and closes back up without breaking the low can still be a narrow, low-volume bar sitting inside a much larger downtrend that resumes on the next candle. Because the setup is rare to begin with, traders sometimes stretch the rules, letting a low that's a few cents under candle two's low still "count" because everything else looks right. Once the low condition is loosened even slightly, the specific structural claim this pattern makes, that sellers ran out of room on candle two, stops being tested at all.