Candlestick formation · Bullish
What is it, in one line
An inside bar, a false break down, then a break up.
Bullish · 4 candles · verdict: rule and thresholds below
An inside bar, a false break down, then a break up. The engine checks the formation as an executable condition over open, high, low and close, with a trend filter applied before the count is kept.
Method
Three candles: a mother bar, an inside bar, then a bar that makes both a lower high and a lower low. The break looks bearish and is set up to fail, which is what the name means — a trap.
The traditional claim
Traditionally read as a bullish trap: the breakdown attracts sellers who are then squeezed when price recovers into the inside bar’s range.
How this detection is wrong
This is the setup, not the confirmation — the classical pattern also requires price to close back above the inside bar’s high within a few candles, which is a separate test the engine does not fold in here.
Published so the count can be reproduced. Every figure below is a parameter of the rule, not a preference: change one and the occurrence count changes with it.
| Parameter | Meaning | Default |
|---|---|---|
| minMotherRangeAtr | range of the enclosing bar, at least, in ATR | 0.5 |
| atrPeriod | bars of ATR used to size everything below | 14 |
These share enough geometry that a detector can return more than one of them on the same bar. The engine reports every match rather than picking a winner.
Every pair on the site that can be mistaken for another, and what separates each: the look-alikes index.
Three candles: a mother bar, an inside bar, then a bar that makes both a lower high and a lower low. The break looks bearish and is set up to fail, which is what the name means — a trap.
It is read as bullish. Traditionally read as a bullish trap: the breakdown attracts sellers who are then squeezed when price recovers into the inside bar’s range.
This is the setup, not the confirmation — the classical pattern also requires price to close back above the inside bar’s high within a few candles, which is a separate test the engine does not fold in here.
As an executable rule over open, high, low and close, with 2 named parameters — including range of the enclosing bar, at least, in ATR 0.5, bars of ATR used to size everything below 14 — all published on this page so the count can be reproduced. Strict and loose variants are defined as well, so the sensitivity of the count to those thresholds is visible rather than assumed.
Measurement pending re-run
No hit rate is published here yet. The run that would supply one was computed on engine ca6d9e36c81c; the engine is now cfb08765de7c. Its candlestick rows included the still-forming bar, and it predates the chart formations entirely, so those figures have been withdrawn rather than published with a caveat. The definition above is unaffected: it is what the detector tests, and no re-run changes it.
This formation has a mirror
Its mirror is the same construction inverted, read in the opposite direction. Everything the two rules test is the same except the sign, so the thresholds on this page apply equally to both — and a result measured for one says nothing about the other until the other is measured too.
Bearish Hikkake: An inside bar, then a candle with a higher high and a higher low — a failed breakout.