Search for a candlestick pattern PDF and you get grids: forty, fifty, seventy named shapes in rows, each with a one-word meaning under it. They are easy to save and almost useless at the moment you need one, because the hard part of reading a candle was never recognising the shape. It was knowing whether the shape means anything where it appeared.
A candlestick pattern PDF is useful for exactly one job: recognising a shape quickly. The Chartix sheet draws all 18 patterns to their real proportions, grouped by bias, with the price that invalidates each one. What no sheet can tell you is whether the shape means anything on your chart, and that depends on the trend before it.
The sheet is free to download here: candlestick patterns cheat sheet (PDF). The rest of this post is the part a sheet cannot hold: what is on it, why it is short, and the order to read it in.
What is on the sheet, and what is not
It is one sheet of A4, printed on both sides, drawn from the same dataset as the pattern library. The front side carries the fifteen directional patterns in two groups: seven that point up and form after a decline, eight that point down and form after a rise. Each card has the pattern drawn to its real open, high, low and close proportions, the number of candles it takes, whether it forms after a fall or a rise, and one line stating the close that invalidates it. The back side carries the three indecision candles with how each is read, and four short notes on using any of them: context before shape, name the invalidation, timeframe changes the weight, check it on a real chart.
What is not on it: no win rates, no targets, no arrows. That is deliberate. A reliability figure without the study, the sample and the market it came from is not information, and a card is too small to carry all four. The sheet gives you the shape and the price that ends the read. The rest of the reading happens on the chart.
Why one page beats a fifty-pattern grid
There are well over a hundred named candlestick patterns. Bulkowski’s testing ranks 103 of them, and the long tail is variants and near-duplicates: a doji with slightly longer legs, an engulfing candle whose second body happens to be white, a star whose middle candle gapped or did not. Learning them as separate entries is memorising the same handful of mechanisms under different names.
The recognition problem is small. Eighteen shapes cover the mechanisms that matter: a long wick rejecting a price, one body covering another, a stall between two long candles, three sessions of persistence, and a session with no decision in it. Every other named pattern is one of those with a footnote. The difficulty was never telling a hammer from a shooting star. It is that the identical drawing is a hammer after a decline and a hanging man after a rise, and no grid can show you which one you are looking at.
How to use a candlestick pattern PDF in the right order
The classic mistake is to start with the sheet, find a matching shape, and read the meaning off the card. The sheet is step three of four. Used in this order it helps; used first it manufactures patterns out of noise.
Trend first. Establish what price was doing before the candle. StockCharts describes the prior trend for a reversal pattern as a real move to reverse, typically one to four weeks of price action on a daily chart, not a single down day. If there is no trend, the candle you are about to look up is not a reversal pattern regardless of its shape. The trend section of the chart-reading guide covers how to see this without indicators.
Level second. Note where the candle formed. A rejection wick at a low that has held before, or at a high the chart has failed at twice, is a candle at a location. The same wick in the middle of a range is a wick.
Shape third. Now open the sheet. Match the proportions, not the rough outline: the card draws each pattern to its real body-to-range ratio because that ratio is the definition. A lower wick that is one and a half times the body is not a hammer, whatever it looks like at a glance.
Invalidation written down. Read the close on the card that ends the read, and write it down before you do anything else. A read with an invalidation level is something you can check tomorrow. Without one it is a feeling with a name.
The patterns, grouped the way the sheet groups them
Each name links to its full page with the context requirement, confirmation and invalidation drawn out. Three are drawn here as examples of the three groups.
Point up, after a decline: the hammer, inverted hammer, bullish engulfing, tweezer bottom, dragonfly doji, morning star and three white soldiers. The bullish patterns post walks through each with its needs and invalidation.
The morning star is the group’s three-candle example: a long down candle, a small-bodied candle that stalls below it, then a long up candle that closes at least midway into the first candle’s body. Bulkowski’s identification guideline has the middle candle gapping below the first body and the third gapping above the second, which is the strict form; the non-gapping form is common on continuous markets and reads as a weaker instance. It needs a decline before it, and a close below the low of the middle candle ends the read.
Point down, after a rise: the shooting star, hanging man, bearish engulfing, tweezer top, gravestone doji, dark cloud cover, evening star and three black crows. The bearish patterns post covers them the same way.
The evening star is the morning star inverted: a tall up candle in a rise, a small-bodied candle that in Bulkowski’s strict form gaps above the bodies on either side of it, then a tall down candle that closes at least midway into the first candle’s body. It needs the rise before it, and a close above the high of the middle candle ends the read.
Take meaning from context: the doji, spinning top and marubozu. The first two are indecision candles; the marubozu is the opposite, a session one side controlled entirely, and it follows whatever trend it appears in.
The spinning top is a small body with upper and lower wicks both longer than the body: a session where both sides pushed and neither held. It is also, in Bulkowski’s frequency ranking, the most common candle on the chart, and his conclusion on the black spinning top is that on its own it does not amount to much. It needs a trend to be indecisive about; in a quiet range it describes nothing. A close beyond either side of its range resolves it, and the direction of that close is the information, not the top itself.
The trap the sheet cannot save you from
Look at the hammer card and the hanging man card side by side. They are the same drawing: small body at the top, long lower wick, little or nothing above. One is listed under “point up” and the other under “point down”, and the only thing that puts each on its side of the sheet is the trend before it. StockCharts’ dictionary makes the same distinction in one clause each: the hammer forms during a decline, the hanging man during an advance.
The inverted hammer and the shooting star are the second such pair, and the morning and evening stars are mirror images. A sheet can label the pairs; it cannot look at your chart and tell you which member of the pair you have. Bulkowski’s testing is a useful caution here: in his data the hanging man behaved as a bullish continuation more often than as the bearish reversal the textbooks describe, a result he calls near random, which is roughly what you would expect from a shape whose meaning depends entirely on something the shape does not contain. The reversal patterns post is built around that single idea: a reversal pattern is a shape in a location, and the same shape elsewhere is a continuation or nothing.
What this post is not
It is not a promise that a printed sheet makes anyone a better reader of charts. Recognition is the easy part and the sheet does it. The difficult part, deciding whether a recognised shape means anything here, takes the trend, the level and the invalidation, and those live on the chart rather than on the card. Treat the PDF as a reference for step three and it earns its place on the desk. Treat it as the whole method and it will find you patterns all day.
For every one of the eighteen patterns with its drawing, context requirement, confirmation and invalidation, see the candlestick pattern library. If the four prices in a candle are still new, how to read a stock chart starts from there.
Sources
Every figure above was checked against these before publishing.
- Bulkowski, Morning Star
- Bulkowski, Evening Star
- Bulkowski, Black Spinning Top
- Bulkowski, Hanging Man
- StockCharts ChartSchool, Introduction to Candlesticks
- StockCharts ChartSchool, Candlestick Pattern Dictionary