Candlestick Pattern Win Rates: 17 Patterns Tested

A candlestick pattern is a name given to the shape of one, two or three bars. The long lower wick is a hammer, a bar that swallows the one before it is an engulfing candle, three rising bars in a row are three white soldiers. Each arrives with a reading attached: price reverses here, or price continues from here.

Formiq's backtest carries 17 of them: hammer, shooting star, pin bar, marubozu, large candle, dragonfly doji, gravestone doji, doji, engulfing, harami, tweezers, inside bar break, morning star, evening star, three white soldiers, three black crows, and three same-coloured candles in a row. All 17 were counted on the same charts with the same exit, on USD/JPY through 2024 and 2025.

The comparison was fixed before anything was counted. Every pattern is measured against the bars that formed no pattern. "Price was higher ten bars after a hammer 54.58% of the time" says nothing on its own, because 50.35% of all hourly bars in 2025 were higher ten bars later. The difference is 4.22 points.

That difference did not survive the change of year. Across 78 cells — 26 pattern directions on three timeframes — the excess over the control was positive in both 2024 and 2025 in 19 of them.

above the controlbelow the controlthe control, 49.63–50.35% of all barsUSD/JPY hourly 2025, the close ten bars later

What the seventeen patterns actually test

Every one of them reduces to the sizes of the body (open to close), the wicks, and the range (high to low). No indicator is calculated. The table gives each condition and how often it occurred on the hourly chart in 2025.

The rate is the share of the 6,216 hourly bars of 2025. Tweezers appeared on 35.68% of them and the pin bar on 28.26%, while the gravestone doji appeared 13 times, on 0.21%. One word covers both a shape that occurs on one bar in three and a shape that occurs 13 times a year.

The settings behind each pattern

None of them draws anything. These conditions read the candles already on the chart, so no line and no lower pane appears. In the backtest builder each one is a named condition, and the eight with a threshold expose it as a number.

The other nine conditions have no numeric field at all. Dragonfly doji, gravestone doji, engulfing, harami, inside bar break, morning star, evening star, three white soldiers and three black crows are defined entirely by the shape.

The published trading rule

The presentation is the same in every case. Reversal shapes (hammer, shooting star, pin bar, dragonfly doji, gravestone doji, doji, engulfing, harami, tweezers, morning star, evening star) are read as a turn and traded against the move that preceded them; continuation shapes (marubozu, large candle, three white soldiers, three black crows, three in a row, inside bar break) are read as a push and traded with it.

Every test here enters in the direction the pattern points, at the close of the bar that completed it.

How this was measured

Fixing the exit at a bar count is what makes the 17 comparable. Eight of them (hammer, dragonfly doji, morning star, three white soldiers, shooting star, gravestone doji, evening star, three black crows) only ever produce one side. A hammer is a buy and there is no hammer that sells, so there is no opposite signal to close against. Giving half the set a signal exit and the other half a clock would turn the comparison into a comparison of exits.

Seventeen names, but not seventeen different bars

Before counting anything forward, the conditions were checked against each other: how often two of them fired on the same bar in the same direction, hourly, 2025.

All 723 three-soldier signals were also three bullish candles in a row. There were 758 such runs, so the extra clauses that make a run of three into three white soldiers (each open at or above the previous open, each close above the previous close) removed 35 bars, 4.62% of them. Three black crows behave the same way: 667 of the 698 bearish runs qualified.

The hammer is the same story. All 306 hammers were pin bars, 32.66% of the 937 long pin bars. A hammer is the long side of a pin bar with one clause added: the upper wick must not exceed the body.

The overlap matters when the results arrive. Comparing three white soldiers with a plain run of three is comparing a set of bars with 95% of itself.

Against the bars that made no pattern, the edge disappears

Over the 6,216 hourly bars of 2025, 50.35% closed higher ten bars later and 49.63% closed lower. That is the control. The 26 pattern directions, counted the same way:

The morning star finished below its control in both years. It occurred 210 and 215 times on the hourly chart, and 50.00% and 53.95% of those signals were followed by a higher close ten bars later, against controls of 50.35% and 54.91%. The evening star came in at 37.33% in 2024 against a 45.01% control, 7.68 points short.

The two widest gaps, the long marubozu at +13.60 and the long large candle at +11.36, came from 86 and 128 occurrences. Both are continuation shapes: a large bullish body followed by a higher close, not a reversal.

Counting the 15-minute and 4-hour charts the same way gives 78 cells. The excess was positive in both years in 19 of them. The sign agreed across the two years in 43, against the 39 a coin would give.

Restricted to the 57 cells with at least 100 signals in each year, the correlation between the 2024 excess and the 2025 excess is -0.15, and the sign agreed in 31 of the 57. Beating the control one year did not predict beating it the next.

No pattern direction cleared its control in all six cells (three timeframes × two years). The long hammer, the long large candle and the short harami each managed five. The long hammer's miss was the 15-minute chart in 2025, by 1.13 points.

A 58% win rate mostly records whether the year went up

The control itself moves a long way between years and timeframes. With no pattern involved, entering on every bar and holding a fixed number of bars:

USD/JPY opened 2024 at 140.87, reached 161.95 on 3 July and 139.58 on 16 September, and closed the year at 157.20. It opened 2025 at 157.23, bottomed at 139.89 on 22 April, and closed at 156.67. One year ended higher than it began and the other ended where it began, and the table records exactly that.

On the 4-hour chart in 2024, buying any bar at all and holding ten bars was followed by a higher close 59.16% of the time. The same thing in 2025 gives 49.56%. That 9.6-point gap is close to the widest gap any pattern produced (the long marubozu, 13.60 points). When a bullish pattern is quoted at a 58% win rate, the control has to be quoted beside it before the number means anything.

Requiring a downtrend before the hammer did not help

Most write-ups say the shape alone is not enough: a hammer counts only after a decline, and the identical shape inside an uptrend does not.

Each set of signals was split by the close-to-close move over the five bars leading into the pattern — the way the pattern is supposed to reverse, or the other way. The 128 cells where both halves held at least 30 signals:

The textbook half had the higher rate in 58 of the 128 cells. On the hourly chart in 2025 the hammer read 54.61% with the decline and 54.90% without it, and the long engulfing was 7.05 points better when the five bars before it had risen.

The requirement also halves the number of signals. Halving the count without moving the rate leaves nothing behind.

Backtested: seven patterns at most cleared both years

Counting closes is not trading. Each pattern was entered at the close of the signal bar at 0.3 pips of spread, 0.1 lots, and closed ten bars later.

Hourly

Six patterns finished both years in profit on the hourly chart: hammer, pin bar, marubozu, large candle, engulfing and three white soldiers. On the 15-minute chart two did (marubozu and morning star) and on the 4-hour chart seven did (hammer, shooting star, gravestone doji, doji, engulfing, inside bar break and three white soldiers). The 4-hour gravestone doji traded twice in 2025 and once in 2024.

No pattern cleared both years on all three timeframes. The hammer and the engulfing candle, which both cleared the hourly chart, do not survive the 15-minute one: the hammer went from +1376.9 pips in 2024 to -25.2 in 2025, and the engulfing candle lost money in both years there (-485.2 and -496.7).

The 15-minute losses are a trade-count problem. Tweezers traded 1,952 times in a year and paid 585.5 pips of spread doing it.

Split 2025 in half

Every combination that cleared both years, measured again over January to June and July to December of 2025:

Six of the 15 combinations were profitable in both halves. The hourly three white soldiers finished 2025 at +663.8 pips and the first half of it at -457.3. Two profitable years is not the same as a consistently profitable rule.

Buying last year's winner

Take whichever pattern earned the most in 2024 and hold it through 2025.

All three beat the following year's median, which is the opposite of what most indicators in this series have done. The amounts shrank in every case: +1376.9 pips became -25.2 on the 15-minute chart. Seventh place still beats the median there because 11 of the 17 patterns lost money on the 15-minute chart in 2025.

Does three in a row need to be three?

Three white soldiers, three black crows, the morning star and the evening star are all defined on three bars. Running the count from two to six changes how many same-coloured bodies are required before entry.

Five and six cleared both years on the hourly chart. Three was the worst of the five on that chart: +1418.5 pips in 2024 and -1249.9 in 2025, the widest swing in the ladder. Neither the 15-minute nor the 4-hour chart produced a count that cleared both years, so 2 of the 15 combinations survived and both of them sat at five or six bars.

Longer runs are rarer. The hourly six-bar run traded 84 times in 2025, and +32.2 pips over 84 trades is 0.38 pips each. At a 0.7-pip spread instead of 0.3, that year finishes negative.

Stops, targets and cost

The win rate is set by the exit

The same entry, with the exit changed. Hourly hammer:

Identical entries, and the win rate runs from 43.29% to 62.61%. A stop at twice the target raises the win rate and lowers the net pips in both years. A pattern advertised at "60% winners" is describing an exit as much as an entry.

The trade count rises from 202 to about 230 because a stop or target ends a position early, which frees the engine to take signals it would otherwise have sat through.

Cost

Spread paid matched trade count × 0.3 pips in every one of the 51 timeframe-pattern runs.

Removing the spread entirely flipped the sign of 2 runs out of 51: the 15-minute hammer and the 15-minute large candle. The rest of the losses come from the entry, not from paying for it too often.

Related articles

• Is the engulfing candle profitable?: one of these 17 taken apart, against the colour flips that did not engulf
• Do morning and evening stars reverse price?: the three-bar pair taken apart, starting with the gap they are named for
• Is the inside bar breakout profitable?: taking the break and fading it, against an ordinary break of the same level
• Is the pin bar profitable?: the wick measured against the body and against the range, on the same bars
• Do fair value gaps really get filled?: the same control group applied to another price-action claim
• Double tops and double bottoms tested: reversal rates for multi-bar shapes over the same two years
• What Heikin Ashi actually changes: a chart that rewrites the candles themselves
• SMC: structure breaks and liquidity sweeps: another vocabulary laid over the same price data

Notes

The data is USD/JPY from 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2025. Fills are at the close, the spread is fixed at 0.3 pips, and the lot is 0.1. Detection uses the same code path as the backtest and reads bars from before the test window. Because the horizons run 1, 5, 10 and 20 bars forward, that many bars at the end of each year are excluded from the counts. The dragonfly doji and the gravestone doji occur around 20 times a year on the hourly chart and between 1 and 6 times on the 4-hour chart, so their figures move a long way on a single trade.