The final set of price action patterns we’re going to to be looking at today are price action candlestick patterns. There are lots of candlestick patterns out there, but I just want to focus on the two which I think are most important for price action traders to understand.
Pin Bar/Hammer Candlestick
The pin bar is a single candle pattern which can be found forming across all currencies and all time-frames in the market. It falls into the category of price action reversal patterns due the fact it’s appearance is supposed to be a signal a reversal is going to occur. Although it must be said that very few pin bars actually cause large reversals to take place in the market, (I’ll explain why in a minute).
Like most price action patterns the pin bar comes in two varieties:
The bullish pin bar, which signals a reversal to the upside may be about to take place, and the bearish pin bar, which is a sign a reversal to the downside is probably going to occur.
Here’s an image of some bullish pin bars which formed on the 1 hour chart of EUR/USD
You can see that the vast majority of these bullish pins did cause the market to reverse once they had formed, but they didn’t all cause it to reverse for the same duration of time. Some caused large upswings to take place whilst others only created small retracements.
In this image we can see some bearish pin bars that formed on the 1 hour chart of USD/JPY.
Again, you can see that the pin bars which formed on here also caused reversals of varying sizes to take place. The reason why pin bars cause different sized reversals to occur, is because of the action that caused the pin bar to form in the first place. Pin bars and all the other candlesticks you see forming on your charts, form as a result of traders making decisions in regards to the market price. Pin bars happen to form exclusively from the bank traders either placing trades because they want to make the market reverse, or from taking profits off trades which they’ve already got placed.
The reversal created by the pin bar which has formed as a result of the bank traders taking profits off their trades, is naturally much smaller than the reversal caused by the pin which has formed from the bank traders placing trades to make the market reverse. It’s obvious why this is, I mean if you took some profits off a trade you would want the market to continue moving in the direction to which your trade had been placed so you could make more money from the trade. The bank traders want the same to happen when they cause a pin bar to form from taking profits off their own trades, which is why the reversal caused by some pin bars forming are much smaller than the reversals caused by other pins forming.
Bullish and bearish pin bars are really good reversal patterns to watch out for if you’re a price action trader, but they must be traded in the right way and you must understand why they form in the market. Most of the books and guides out there on pin bars do not teach traders what causes them to form, when it’s knowing what causes them to form that will allow you to determine which pins have a high probability of working out successfully.
If you want to learn more about what causes pin bars to form in the market, go and check out some of the other pin bar articles I have available on the site, or take a look at the Pin Bars Uncovered book found on the cool stuff page, as this is a book dedicated solely to helping traders understand why pin bars form in the market and how to trade them profitably.
The Definite Guide To Trading Pin Bars
Engulfing Candlesticks
The other really important candlestick pattern I think price action traders need to have knowledge on is the engulfing candlestick. Like the pin bar the engulfing candle is a reversal pattern, which means that a reversal is supposed to take place immediately after you see one form in the market. Unlike the pin bar the engulfing candlestick is a two bar reversal pattern, a pattern which requires there to be two candlesticks present in order for it’s formation to be complete.
Here’s an example of a bearish engulfing candle which caused a reversal to occur on EUR/USD.
The formation of a bearish engulf is always a signal that a reversal to the downside is about to take place. The pattern itself consists of two candlesticks. The bearish engulfing candlestick itself, which I’ve marked with an arrow, and the bullish candlestick that formed an hour before. The bullish candle is first candle required in the bearish engulf setup. This is the candlestick which the market will always engulf with a bearish candle immediately after it’s formation. In order for a bearish engulfing candle to form, a bullish candle must have formed immediately prior. You can’t have a bearish candlestick engulfing another bearish candle, it has t0 be a bullish candle in order for it to be a bearish engulf.
Here you can see an image of a bullish engulfing setup which caused a reversal on EUR/USD.
Bullish engulfing candlesticks are of course the opposite to bearish engulfing candles, which means their appearance is a sign the market is going to reverse to the upside. Like the bearish engulfing candle they are also a two bar pattern, but instead of the first candle in the pattern being a bullish candlestick, like we see with the bearish engulfing formation, the first candle in a bullish engulfing setup will always engulf a bearish candle. A bullish engulfing candle cannot engulf another bullish candle, it can only engulf bearish candles.
Engulfing candlesticks are best used as signals to enter trades at pre-existing points where you expect the market to reverse, such as support and resistance levels or supply and demand zones. They can be traded on their own without any other confirming factors being present, but in my opinion they don’t tend to work out as well as pin bars do.
Summary
Whilst the patterns I’ve talked about in this article aren’t all the price action patterns that can form in the market, they are the ones which are the most important, and you should really take some time out to study these patterns on your own. It would be a good idea to go back on your charts and look for times when these patterns have appeared in the market and watch to see how they form and how they cause a continuation or reversal to take place. By doing this you’ll be able to not only recognize patterns more easily, but you’ll also find it easier to determine when they are about to cause a reversal or continuation to occur, which will allow you to get trades placed at more profitable prices.