Pattern Analysis

The rules are fixed and mechanical. Nothing on this page is a human opinion, and nothing is tuned after the fact to look better.

1. 1Formations are found from swing pivots (a high or low with three lower highs or higher lows on each side) and from candlestick shape. A pivot is only confirmed three bars after the extreme, so every card is published with that lag, never before.
2. 2The target is the measured move: the height of the formation projected from the breakout level. The invalidation level sits one ATR beyond the opposite side of the formation.
3. 3A setup is scored only from the first bar a trader could have acted on it — the bar after the formation became visible, which for pivot-based shapes is three bars after the extreme. Breakouts that happened in that gap are not credited, because nobody could have known the pattern existed yet. It wins if the target is touched before the invalidation level, loses if the invalidation level is touched first, and times out if neither happens within 60 bars. Timed-out setups are counted as not-wins.
4. 4Success rates are measured market by market. A market with too few past occurrences falls back to the 44-market pool, and the card says so. Setups still open at the time of the scan are excluded, so the number is not flattered by unresolved trades.
5. 5Rates are descriptive, not predictive. They are computed on the rules above, on past bars, with no costs, no slippage and no guarantee that the future resembles the past.

Prices: Yahoo Finance OHLC. Median coverage per market — daily bars 22.8 years, 1-hour bars 2 years. Two years is the intraday history Yahoo stores, so the hourly and 4-hour samples are the shallowest.