Not every reversal announces itself. Some of the most durable bottoms are the least dramatic: price stops going down, drifts sideways in a shallow curve, and then starts going up. These take weeks to months and are easy to miss precisely because nothing exciting happens.
The saucer
A rounding bottom has no sharp turning point to mark. There is no neckline in the usual sense — instead there is a rim: the price level on the left side where the decline began. The pattern resolves when price climbs back above that rim.
The signal that you are in one is a change in the character of the pullbacks: early lows are deep and fast, later lows are shallow and slow. Selling pressure is draining out.
Cup and handle
A rounding base followed by a small, shallow pullback — the handle — and then a breakout. The handle is thought to shake out the last weak holders before the move.
Two practical rules keep this honest:
- The handle should be shallow. A pullback that retraces most of the cup is not a handle, it is the base failing.
- The handle should be short. A handle that takes as long as the cup did is a range, not a pause.
Why these are harder to trade
Because there is no clean line, there is no clean invalidation. You cannot point at a price and say the pattern is dead. The practical approach is to use the low of the base: if price closes below the lowest point of the curve, whatever was building is not building any more.
Also, the target is genuinely unknown. Measured-move projection (Part 4) is much less reliable on round structures than on sharp ones, so these are better traded with a trailing exit than with a fixed target.
How to check this yourself
Pull up a weekly chart and look for long, slow curves rather than Vs. Sketch the rim level and note how long price took to get back to it. Then ask a blunt question: would you have actually held this for that long? If not, this family of patterns is not for you, and that is a perfectly good conclusion.