This is the companion to the bullish list, and it runs on the same rule. A bearish candlestick pattern is a record of a specific thing that happened between buyers and sellers, and it is only information in the right place.
The right place, for every pattern below, is after a rise. Each shape is a session, or a short run of sessions, in which buyers had the advantage and visibly lost it, which is only a change in the situation when there was an advance to lose. The identical shape in the middle of a range is a chart doing what ranges do.
So each entry names what must have happened before the pattern, the close that confirms the read, and the close that ends it. If a body and a wick are still new to you, how to read a candlestick comes first.
1. The shooting star
A single candle with a small body near the bottom of its range and an upper wick at least twice the body’s height, forming after an advance.
The upper wick is the whole message. Price reached higher than at any point in the move and buyers could not hold any of it into the close. That is a session where a new high was offered and refused.
- Needs: a measurable advance before it.
- Confirmed by: the next candle closing below the shooting star’s body, ideally below its low.
- Invalidated by: a close above the shooting star’s high, which turns the rejected level into accepted ground.
The shooting star is drawn identically to the inverted hammer; what came before it is the entire difference. Inside a strong trend, single-session rejections happen repeatedly without the trend ending, which is why the confirming close does the real work here.
2. The hanging man
A small body near the top of its range with a lower wick at least twice the body’s height, forming after an advance.
This is the hammer’s shape, unchanged, in the opposite location. After a decline that drawing records sellers being tested and failing. After a rise it records something quieter: for the first time in the move, sellers pushed price meaningfully lower during the session. The close hides it, because buyers recovered the ground, and the recovery is exactly why the candle gets ignored.
- Needs: an advance before it. Without one it is a hammer.
- Confirmed by: the next candle closing below the hanging man’s body, with the low taken out.
- Invalidated by: a close above the hanging man’s high, which reasserts the advance and leaves the intraday selling as an anomaly.
Of every pattern on this page, the hanging man is the one that most needs the following candle before it is anything, and the reason is mechanical. The candle closes near its high, so on the day it looks like the trend holding. The only bearish information in it is intraday, and a dip that buyers absorbed is, on its own, just as readable as healthy demand as it is as the first crack in the advance. The next session’s close below the body is what separates those two readings. StockCharts’ reference material says it plainly: the hanging man requires bearish confirmation before action. Bulkowski’s testing finds the shape alone behaves close to random, which is not a reason to discard it, it is the reason to wait for the close.
3. The bearish engulfing
Two candles: an up candle, then a down candle whose real body completely covers it.
One session undid the previous one outright. Price opened above the prior close and sellers drove it through the entire prior body, which takes sustained supply rather than a single burst.
- Needs: a visible advance before it.
- Confirmed by: a close below the engulfing candle’s low.
- Invalidated by: a close above the engulfing candle’s high, which says the selling was absorbed.
As with its bullish twin, bodies are compared, not wicks, and relative size is everything. Covering a tiny body is easy and means close to nothing; covering a long-bodied up candle at the end of a run is a real event, and a screener that flags both identically is not telling you what you think it is. See bearish engulfing.
4. The evening star
Three candles: a long up candle, a small-bodied candle that stalls above it, then a long down candle closing below the midpoint of the first candle’s body.
Three sessions, one story. The advance is working; then it stalls at a high with neither side able to extend it; then it resolves downward hard enough to erase most of the first session’s gain. The middle candle is the pivot, because it is the session where buying stopped being effective.
- Needs: a visible advance before it.
- Confirmed by: candle three closing below the midpoint of candle one, which is most of the pattern’s own definition. A fourth session continuing lower adds to it.
- Invalidated by: a close back above the high of the middle candle, which reclaims the stall and says the pause was a consolidation rather than a top.
The middle candle is where people get loose. In the classical definition its body sits above the bodies on either side of it. If it does not, the sequence is an up day followed by a down day, which happens constantly. See evening star.
5. Three black crows
Three consecutive long down candles, each opening inside the previous candle’s body and closing near its own low.
The mirror of three white soldiers. Each session opens inside the last one’s body, so the decline is being sold rather than gapped away, and each closes near its low, so there is no late recovery. Three of those in a row is supply with persistence behind it.
- Needs: an advance, or the top of a long range, before it.
- Confirmed by: itself, largely, by the third close. The decline breaking a level that held before adds weight.
- Invalidated by: a close back above the open of the first crow.
Watch the lower wicks. The closes-near-lows condition is the part of the definition that carries the meaning, and long lower wicks on the second and third candles quietly break it: a long lower wick means buyers stepped in and pulled price off the low, the opposite of what the pattern is testing for. Three red candles with long tails underneath are a decline being bought, not one being sold with conviction. And after a long decline rather than a rise, the same three candles more often mark the end of a move than the start of one. See three black crows.
6. The gravestone doji
A candle that opens and closes at or very near the low of its range, leaving a long upper wick and effectively no body.
Buyers took price a long way up and finished with nothing to show for it. Unlike the shooting star there is no body at all, so there is not even a residual gain to argue about. Every buyer who acted during that session ended it underwater.
- Needs: an advance, or a level price has failed at before.
- Confirmed by: the next candle closing below the doji’s low.
- Invalidated by: a close above the doji’s high, which converts the rejected level into support.
Because a doji has no body, the following candle carries proportionally more of the case than it does for a pattern that closes directionally. The caution from the bullish list carries over: an exact doji is rare on liquid instruments and common on thin ones, so on an illiquid asset or a very short timeframe it is often a liquidity artefact rather than a decision. Bulkowski’s own guidelines list no prior-trend requirement for the shape itself, which is precisely why the location has to come from you. See gravestone doji.
7. Dark cloud cover
Two candles: a long up candle, then a down candle that opens above the first candle’s high and closes below the midpoint of its body, while staying above its open.
The session opens above everything the previous one reached, then spends the rest of the day unwinding. Closing past the halfway point of the prior body means most of the previous session’s gain is gone, and anyone who bought the strong open is underwater by the close.
- Needs: an advance before it, and a genuine opening gap above the prior high.
- Confirmed by: a close below the low of the dark cloud candle. The deeper the penetration into the first body, the more of the case the pattern makes on its own.
- Invalidated by: a close above the dark cloud candle’s high, which reclaims the gap.
The midpoint rule is the pattern, and it is the rule most often waived. With illustrative prices: if the first candle opens at 100 and closes at 104, its midpoint is 102. A second candle that opens at 104.60 and closes at 101.50 is dark cloud cover. One that closes at 102.80 is a normal pullback and nothing more. Close below 100 and it is no longer dark cloud cover either, it is a bearish engulfing.
The opening gap is the other half. Bulkowski and the classical definition ask for an open above the prior high; some references, StockCharts among them, accept an open above the prior close. Either way it needs a session boundary, a moment where the market stopped and reopened somewhere else. On a market that trades continuously the open of one candle is the close of the last, so the gap is rarely there, and what gets labelled dark cloud cover on those charts is usually a strong down candle at a high: worth reading, but a different thing. That is why the pattern is common on daily equity charts and scarce elsewhere; the crypto post goes through which patterns that affects. See dark cloud cover.
What this list is not
It is not a ranking by reliability. Published work on candlestick performance varies widely by market, timeframe and the exact definition used, and any article quoting you a clean win rate for “the shooting star” has quietly picked one study and dropped the conditions that produced it. What these seven have in common is that each describes a specific, observable event, and each comes with a price that settles the argument.
That last part matters more on the bearish side, because most of these shapes close looking fine. The hanging man closes near its high, the gravestone where it opened, the shooting star with a small gain on the day. Their information is in what happened during the session, and the only way to know whether it meant anything is the close that follows. Naming that close before you do anything turns an impression into something you can check tomorrow.
The candlestick pattern library has every pattern here, plus the bullish and indecision ones, each drawn to its real proportions, and the candlestick patterns PDF puts them on one printable page with the level that ends each read. The indecision candles get their own walk-through in long-legged doji, and the other indecision candles. For the mechanics underneath all of them, how to read a stock chart is the place to start.
Sources
Every figure above was checked against these before publishing.
- Bulkowski, Shooting Star (thepatternsite)
- Bulkowski, Hanging Man
- Bulkowski, Bearish Engulfing
- Bulkowski, Evening Star
- Bulkowski, Three Black Crows
- Bulkowski, Gravestone Doji
- Bulkowski, Dark Cloud Cover
- StockCharts ChartSchool, Introduction to Candlesticks
- StockCharts ChartSchool, Candlestick Bearish Reversal Patterns