Is the Pin Bar Profitable? 252 Backtests on USD/JPY

A pin bar has one long wick. A long lower wick is read as buying that came in below, a long upper wick as selling that came in above, and the usual rule is to enter against the wick.

"Long" is a number here. Formiq's backtester compares the wick with the body, at a default of two times, and this article moves that from 1 to 5.

One thing came out of the counting first. At the default of 2, between 27.57% and 30.38% of all bars qualify — nearly one bar in three.

Raising the number barely moves the result. On the hourly chart in 2024 a ratio of 1 reads 51.46% and a ratio of 5 reads 51.69%, while the candidates fall from 2,973 bars to 859.

What moved the result was changing what the wick is measured against. Comparing it with the bar's whole range instead of its body clears the base rate in five cells of six.

wick at 2x the body (the default)wick at 70% of the rangeUSD/JPY, judged on the close ten bars later

What the pin bar condition actually tests

• lower wick ≥ body × ratio, and lower wick > upper wick → long
• upper wick ≥ body × ratio, and upper wick > lower wick → short

The wick is the part outside the body: from the lower of open and close down to the low, and from the higher of the two up to the high.

The comparison is wick against body. The range, high to low, never enters it. A bar with a small body clears any ratio easily; a bar with a large body fails it however long the wick is in absolute terms.

The default calls nearly one bar in three a pin bar

Counting bars where one wick is longer than the other and the ratio of 2 is met:

27.57% to 30.38%: about 1,800 a year on the hourly chart and 6,900 on the 15-minute. A description that fits one bar in three is not filtering much.

Settings and the one number it takes

Nothing is drawn; the pattern is a single candle already on the chart.

The same value applies to both sides. There is no way to make one side stricter.

The published trading rule

Enter at the close of the pin bar, against the wick: long on a long lower wick, short on a long upper wick. The usual exit is an opposite pin bar, and the usual stop sits at the tip of the wick.

How this was measured

One note on the control. The pin bar produces long and short signals, so comparing a short-heavy group with the share of bars that closed higher would penalise it in a year that rose. Each group is therefore compared with a base rate blended to its own count of long and short signals.

Walking the wick-to-body ratio from 1 to 5

Share of signals that closed against the wick ten bars later, with the gap to the base rate in brackets:

On the hourly chart in 2024 the gap at a ratio of 5 is +1.02 points, against +0.81 at a ratio of 1. In 2025 the gap shrinks as the ratio rises, reaching -0.02 at 5.

The 4-hour chart peaks at a ratio of 3 in 2025 (+5.73) and at 2 in 2024 (+4.18). The ratio that worked best does not agree between the two years.

The 15-minute chart is below its base rate at all seven steps: -0.90 to -0.40 in 2025 and -1.06 to -0.06 in 2024.

Raising the ratio does one thing reliably, and that is cutting the count: 2,898 down to 806 on the hourly chart in 2025.

Measuring the wick against the range instead

The same bars, cut by how much of the bar's high-to-low range the longer wick occupies:

The 70% row clears the base rate on the hourly and 4-hour charts in both years. On the 15-minute chart it clears in 2024 by +0.34 and misses in 2025 by -1.36, so five cells of six.

The default wick-to-body ratio of 2 clears in four cells, by 0.83 to 4.18 points. The range measure wins on both counts: more cells, and larger gaps.

The two rules do not pick the same bars. On the hourly chart in 2025, 1,757 bars meet the ratio of 2, 1,971 have a wick at half the range or more, and 1,506 do both. 251 bars are chosen only by the ratio and 465 only by the range, so roughly a quarter of each set is unique to it.

Formiq's backtester has no "wick at N% of the range" condition, so the range measure here is a count rather than something to trade directly.

A bar with no body can never qualify

The test requires body > 0. A bar whose open and close are exactly equal is never a pin bar, however far the wick runs.

They are 0.13% to 0.42% of bars, so not many. What they are, though, is bars whose wick takes 60 to 80% of the range, excluded because the divisor is zero. Under a ratio test, a body of zero is not an infinite ratio; it is out of scope.

How the hammer differs

A hammer is the long side of a pin bar with one more requirement: the upper wick must not exceed the body. The long pin bar only asks that the lower wick be the longer of the two.

On the hourly chart in 2025 there were 937 long pin bars, of which 306 (32.66%) also met the hammer requirement. Ten bars later, 50.69% of the pin bars had risen against 54.58% of the hammers.

All 306 hammers are inside the 937 pin bars. They cannot be compared as separate methods.

Trading all 252 runs

Entering at the close and holding until an opposite pin bar, hourly:

Three of the seven cleared both years (2, 2.5 and 5), with 3 and 4 failing in between. The survivors are not a contiguous range.

The 4-hour chart cleared six of seven (everything but 2.5). The 15-minute chart cleared none of the seven, at either exit. With a fixed ten-bar exit the hourly chart cleared two and the 4-hour four.

The 4-hour figures differ sharply between years. At a ratio of 2 the average trade returned +0.60 pips in 2025 and +14.40 in 2024, on 224 and 243 trades.

Splitting 2025 in half

Only the 2.5 ratio was profitable in both halves. The ratio of 2, which finished 2025 at +858.9 pips, lost 149.3 of them in the second half.

Last year's best ratio, held through this year

Only the hourly pick held its position. The 4-hour ratio of 2 went from +3,498.7 pips to +133.8, sixth of seven.

Stops, targets and cost

Hourly, ratio 2. The 60 / 30 exit gives the highest win rate and the only losing year of the four. The entries are identical; the win rate runs from 43.46% to 54.92%.

Spread paid matched trade count times 0.3 pips. The 15-minute chart at a ratio of 2 still returns -1,505.6 pips at zero spread, so the loss is in the entry rather than the trade count.

Related articles

• Candlestick pattern win rates: the pin bar and the hammer among 17, over the same two years
• Is the engulfing candle profitable?: another body-and-wick threshold, measured against a control
• Is the inside bar breakout profitable?: an ordinary break of the same level as the control
• Morning star and evening star: a three-bar reversal taken apart clause by clause
• Do Indicator Settings Transfer Between Pairs? 3,024 Tests: this setting won the 4-hour chart on USD/JPY in 2024 and came 1st of 42 on EUR/USD as well

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. The detection code is a rewrite of the backtester's own test; at the default ratio of 2 it matches the engine's counts and rates in all twelve cells of three timeframes by two years by two sides. Bars whose upper and lower wicks are exactly equal point in no direction and are excluded. Because the horizons run out to 20 bars, that many bars at the end of each year are excluded from the counts.