Most candlestick cheat sheets are a wall of eighty shapes with a green or red arrow next to each one. They are easy to make and almost useless to trade from, because the arrow is the one part that isn't true — no pattern points up or down on its own.
This is the reference version. What each pattern looks like, what it is actually claiming about the people trading that day, and what has to be true around it before the claim means anything. It is built to print, and there is no email box in the way.
What a candle is actually telling you
Every candle is four numbers — open, high, low, close — drawn so you can read them at a glance. The body spans open to close. The wicks reach to the extremes that got rejected.
That last word is the whole point. A long upper wick means price went there and could not stay. A tiny body means the session ended roughly where it started, whatever happened in between. Every pattern below is a sentence built from those two facts, and the sentence is always about the same thing: who ran out of conviction, and where.
Once you read them that way, you stop needing to memorise eighty names. Most of them are the same three observations in different clothing.
The cheat sheet
Grouped by what they claim rather than alphabetically, because that is how you use them.
Bullish reversal — sellers ran out
| Pattern | Shape | What it claims |
|---|---|---|
| Hammer | One candle, small body at the top, long lower wick | Price was pushed well down and bought back before the close. Sellers had the day and lost it. |
| Bullish engulfing | Two candles; a green body that fully covers the previous red one | Yesterday's whole range was reversed in one session. The clearest one-day shift on the list. |
| Morning star | Three candles: long red, small indecision, long green | Selling, then hesitation, then buyers taking it back. The middle candle is the tell — the pressure stopped before it turned. |
| Piercing line | Two candles; green opens below the prior low and closes past the midpoint of the red body | A softer bullish engulfing. Take it as a hint, not a signal. |
| Bullish pin bar | One candle, long lower wick, small body | The same story as the hammer, named by traders who care where it sits rather than what it's called. |
| One white soldier | Two candles; a long green body opening inside the prior red candle and closing above its open, with barely any wick | One session undid the previous one from within its own range — no gap needed. The close above the prior open is the pattern; without it, it's just a green day. |
| Three white soldiers | Three long green candles, each opening inside the previous body and closing higher | Sustained buying rather than one spike. The "opening inside" part matters — three gap-ups are a different, more fragile thing. |
Bearish reversal — buyers ran out
| Pattern | Shape | What it claims |
|---|---|---|
| Shooting star | One candle, small body at the bottom, long upper wick | Price reached higher and could not hold it. The mirror of the hammer. |
| Bearish engulfing | Two candles; a red body that fully covers the previous green one | An advance erased in a session. |
| Evening star | Three candles: long green, small indecision, long red | The morning star upside down. Rally, hesitation, give-back. |
| Dark cloud cover | Two candles; red opens above the prior high, closes below the midpoint of the green body | A weaker bearish engulfing. Same caveat. |
| Bearish pin bar | One candle, long upper wick, small body | Rejection at a level. Most useful when the level was already worth watching. |
| One black crow | Two candles; a long red body closing near its low with barely any wick, after a long green one | The advance was given back in a single session and closed at the worst price of the day. Look for it after a swing high. |
| Three black crows | Three long red candles, each closing lower and near its low | The same, sustained. Three sessions of selling rather than one bad afternoon. |
Indecision — nobody is in charge
| Pattern | Shape | What it claims |
|---|---|---|
| Doji | Open and close nearly equal; wicks either side | The session went nowhere and told you nothing about direction. Its value is as a pause, especially inside a three-candle pattern. |
| Spinning top | Small body, wicks both sides | A doji with a little more body. Same meaning, weaker. |
| Harami | A small candle contained inside the previous large one | Momentum stopped. It does not say what happens next, only that the run paused. |
Continuation — the trend is resting
| Pattern | Shape | What it claims |
|---|---|---|
| Rising / falling three methods | A long candle, a few small ones against it, then another long one the original way | The pullback got absorbed. This is a pullback setup in candle form. |
| Flat-base pause | A cluster of small bodies after a strong move | Not a named candle pattern so much as what a healthy pause looks like — see the impulse-pullback strategy. |
That is the working set. There are longer lists — you will find sheets claiming seventy-five — but the extra sixty are mostly variants with regional names, and the ones that aren't are too rare to build anything on.
The trap in every cheat sheet, including the ones above
Two of those shapes change meaning depending on the trend they appear in, and they get a different name when they do.
A hammer — small body, long lower wick — is bullish after a decline. The identical shape after a rally is a hanging man, and it is read bearishly. Same candle, opposite conclusion.
The shooting star works the same way in reverse: small body, long upper wick, bearish after a rally. The same shape after a decline is an inverted hammer, read bullishly.
No table can encode that, which is why the column above is headed "what it claims" rather than "buy" or "sell". The shape is half the information. The trend it interrupts is the other half — and if you take only one thing from this page, take that.
The three questions that decide whether it means anything
The same shape can be a strong signal or complete noise depending on what surrounds it. Before you act on any pattern above, answer these.
Where is it in the trend? A hammer after a long decline is a claim about exhausted sellers. The identical hammer in the middle of a sideways drift is a claim about nothing. Reversal patterns need something to reverse.
Is it at a level anyone cares about? A rejection wick at a prior high, a moving average people watch, or the top of a range is a rejection by someone. The same wick in open space is one participant changing their mind.
How big is it relative to what came before? An engulfing candle that swallows a small body is barely news. One that swallows a week is. Cheat sheets almost never mention scale, and scale is most of the signal.
If those three don't line up, the pattern is decoration.
The part most cheat sheets skip
A candlestick pattern is not an edge. It is a description of one or three days of trading, and by the time you can name it, everyone else can too.
This matters more than any individual shape, so it is worth being blunt: published pattern win rates are usually quoted without costs, without slippage, and from whichever sample the author measured. Test the same rule across a different decade and the number usually shrinks. Sometimes it inverts.
That is not a reason to ignore candles. Reading rejection and exhaustion off a chart is a genuine skill and it makes you better at timing entries you were going to take anyway. It is a reason to stop treating a pattern as a reason to trade rather than a detail of how you enter one. We wrote about the wider version of this in what actually beats the market.
Test one before you trust it
The honest way to find out whether a pattern does anything on the instruments you actually trade is to run it.
Our free backtester takes a rule and runs it over real historical bars, with a buy-and-hold comparison alongside it so you can see whether the strategy beat simply owning the thing. No account needed. If you have never run one, buy the dip: a backtest reality check is a good demonstration of how a strategy everyone believes in holds up when you measure it.
Two things to look for when you do: does it survive a different date range, and does it survive after costs. A rule that only works in one window found the window, not an edge.
Can a scanner find these for you?
Sort of, and the honest answer differs by tool.
Finviz has a candlestick dropdown in its screener, free tier included. Be clear about what it covers: single-candle shapes — hammers, inverted hammers, dojis, spinning tops, long shadows, marubozus. Not the stars, not engulfing, not the pin-bar setups, and nothing with three candles in it. So it will not find most of the table above.
What it is genuinely good for is learning. Filter for hammers and you get fifty real examples in one screen, which teaches you the shape faster than any diagram. The trade-off past that is you get the tool's definition, not yours, and you cannot see how it decided.
TC2000 does not detect patterns for you, and we would rather say that plainly than imply otherwise. As of 2026 it has no automated pattern recognition — what it has is a formula language, so you write the condition yourself: body size relative to range, wick length, where the close sits. More work, and exactly the definition you meant rather than someone else's. If that is how you want to work, there is a no-card trial, and our EasyScan guide covers how the scans are built. Note that real-time scanning needs the Premium tier, not Basic — what each TC2000 plan costs sets out the difference, including the data feeds that are billed separately.
Which one suits you depends on whether you want the pattern found or defined. We compared them properly in TC2000 vs Finviz, and if you are still working out which category of tool you need at all, the five kinds of analysis tool is the map.
Go deeper on the individual patterns
Each of these has its own guide, with the conditions that make it worth acting on:
- How to trade the morning star
- How to use the evening star
- How to trade the bullish pin bar
- How to trade the bearish pin bar
- How to use one white soldier
- How to use one black crow
What to pair them with
Candles tell you about one session. They are most useful next to something that describes the weeks around it.
- Moving averages — the trend context question, answered mechanically.
- Bullish divergence and bearish divergence — when momentum stops confirming price, a reversal candle at that spot is saying the same thing twice.
- MACD and the stochastic oscillator — momentum readings that give a candle something to agree or disagree with.
- The swing trading playbook — where the entry actually sits in a whole trade, which is the level candles operate at.
Common questions
Is there a PDF? This page is the PDF. Print it, or save it to PDF from your browser — the tables are laid out to survive it. We are not going to make you trade an email address for a reference sheet.
How many candlestick patterns are there? Depends who is counting; sheets claiming seventy-five are common. The number is marketing. The set above covers what you will realistically see and act on, and the rest are variants or too rare to matter.
Which candlestick pattern is the most reliable? There isn't one, and any source giving you a single percentage is measuring one sample. Engulfing patterns and three-candle stars carry more information than single candles simply because more sessions went into them — but reliability comes from where the pattern appears, not which pattern it is.
Do they work on crypto and forex? The reading does, because the logic is about rejection and exhaustion, not about stocks. What changes is the session boundary: a daily candle means something specific when a market closes overnight and something much vaguer when it never does. Weight them less on 24-hour markets.
What time frame should I use? Longer is more reliable and slower. A pattern on a daily chart survived a whole day of participants; the same shape on a five-minute chart survived five minutes of noise. If you are learning, start on daily.
Are candlestick patterns enough on their own? No. See the section above — that is the honest answer, and it is the reason this page exists rather than another wall of arrows.