Turn the head and shoulders over and you have its inverse: three lows, the middle one deepest, with a neckline drawn through the two bounce highs and a breakout above it.
Same logic, mirrored
Everything from the previous lesson applies in reverse. Sellers pushed down twice and failed, pushed harder a third time and still could not hold it, and then buyers took out the ceiling the bounces had been hitting.
The pattern completes on a close above the neckline, and it dies if price closes back below the right shoulder's low.
Why bottoms behave differently
One honest asymmetry: reversal bottoms are often messier and slower than tops. Markets tend to fall faster than they rise — fear is more urgent than greed — so the decline into a bottom is usually sharper than the rally into a top. That means the left shoulder of an inverse formation is frequently a violent drop, and the "shoulders" can look nothing alike.
It also means bottoms take longer to build. Do not expect the tidy symmetry of a top.
The trap with bottoms
Because the preceding decline is steep, inverse head and shoulders formations are very tempting to front-run: price looks cheap, the shape looks done, and buying before the neckline feels like getting in early. It is not early, it is unconfirmed — and a market that has been falling hard can keep falling.
Wait for the close above the neckline. The few pips you give up are the premium you pay for knowing the pattern actually worked.
How to check this yourself
Go back through a major index over the last decade and find the significant lows. Mark how many of them had a recognisable structure before the turn and how many simply V-reversed on a news event. The honest answer — a minority had a clean structure — tells you how much weight to put on pattern recognition at turning points.