How a pattern is found on this site

Every chart and count on this site comes from daily price histories the site keeps itself, for two Indian share indices: the S&P BSE Sensex and Nifty Bank. Each history is a stored copy of ten years of daily bars, read once from Yahoo Finance on 6 November 2026, and every chart is drawn from that copy. This page explains the written rules behind each candle model and what the site refuses to do with them.

What each candle must look like to count

Each model begins with a written rule that is the same for both indices. For the hammer (rule HM-1) the candle's range must be at least 1 ATR, the body must take 5 to 35 percent of the range, the lower shadow must be at least twice the body and at least 60 percent of the range, and the upper shadow at most 10 percent of the range. The rule compares the open, high, low and close with each other, not with a reader's eye, and a near miss is not counted. A candle with a long lower shadow but a body in the middle of its range may look like a hammer; the rule rejects it.

ATR is the average true range of the last 14 sessions, and the sizes in every rule are written in it, so the same test means the same thing on a quiet year and a wild one. The seven models of this site (hammer, hanging man, shooting star, bullish and bearish engulfing, doji, morning star) each have such a rule, and each page quotes it. A model the rule does not find is reported as not found; the rule is not bent to make a page look complete.

The trend before the pattern is part of the definition

A hammer is only a hammer after a fall, and a hanging man only after a rise; the trend is a condition in the rule, not a matter of opinion. For both, the close of the session before the candle must stand at least 3 ATR below the highest close of the 10 sessions ending there (fall) or at least 3 ATR above the lowest close of those 10 sessions (rise). The shooting star uses the rise test; the two engulfing pairs and the morning star use a shorter one, 2 ATR over 5 sessions. The doji needs no trend at all.

The reason is that a candle model is a statement about a fight between buyers and sellers. After a fall, a long lower shadow shows that sellers pushed price down and buyers pushed it back. After a rise, the same shape shows the opposite fight. The shadow is the same; the story depends on what came before. Making the trend a number means a pattern cannot be claimed in a market that was not trending.

What the site refuses to do

This site does not say that a pattern works. It does not rank patterns, and it does not mark a buy or a sell. A drawn example shows one occurrence from the stored history in which the rule found the model. It does not show how often the pattern worked, and it does not show what happened after other occurrences. The site keeps no count of wins and losses, because a pattern is not a strategy. A strategy requires an entry, an exit and a position size, and none of those are decided by a candle.

The site also draws nothing but daily candles. Each chart says so, and the rules are written for daily bars; a candle built from an hourly or a one-minute chart is a different object, and this site never mixes them. Where several occurrences exist, the caption says how many and that the example is the cleanest by the rule's own measure, never the one that looks best afterwards. The refusal to promise, rank or signal is not modesty; it is the only honest way to teach a pattern.

How the history is kept

The price histories are kept by the site itself, not taken afresh for each chart. They cover two instruments, the S&P BSE Sensex (2,464 daily bars) and Nifty Bank (2,467), from 7 November 2016 to 5 November 2026. The history was read once, from Yahoo Finance's public chart service, on 6 November 2026, and stored. It is not extended as new closes arrive and no chart is redrawn from a newer copy: a chart shown today is the chart shown tomorrow, and the date under it says when the source was read. There is no live market feed, and no claim of one.

One cleaning step comes before any search. A bar whose high equals its low carries no trading range; the source prints exchange holidays and empty days that way. Such bars are left out of the history before the rules run, so a holiday cannot pass for an inside bar or a doji. In these two series that removed one bar in all, on Nifty Bank.

The rule reads the stored open, high, low and close values directly, not a picture of a chart. No adjustment is made for dividends or other events, because both instruments are indices. The history is a plain record of prices and the rule is a plain test on that record.