Breakout side versus catalog labels on finished candle recipes

When a multi-bar recipe is finished

A multi-bar candlestick recipe is complete only after every required line has printed. A doji is a candle whose open and close are the same or nearly the same, leaving little or no real body. The four-price doji prints as a minus-sign mark when open, high, low, and close coincide, and it is associated with thinly traded names.

A collapsing doji star is complete only when a first candle gaps above a doji whose shadows do not overlap neighboring wicks and a later black candle then gaps below that doji. Until that later black gap prints, the recipe is not finished.

The first close outside the box

A breakout is a close beyond the high or the low of the completed candlestick pattern. The archive workflow uses that first close, not the catalog title, to grade the setup.

A candlestick that ranks well after a completed breakout is not automatically a useful reversal candidate, because the close that exits the pattern can contradict the catalog continuation or reversal label.

Crows, soldiers, and the easier exit

Three black crows is read after an advance as three tall black candles, each closing at a fresh low, with the last two opening inside the prior body and all closing near their lows. Tall is judged against average candle height over the prior week or two. Because the three-crow sequence already trends lower, a close beneath the pattern low is the easier downward breakout, so the setup is catalogued as a bearish reversal of the preceding rise. An upward breakout was the minority outcome in the sample, occurring 22 percent of the time.

Identical three crows differs from three black crows because the last two candles open at or near the prior close rather than merely inside the prior body. Of 921 cases, most exited downward and the pattern behaved as a bearish reversal 79 percent of the time.

Three white soldiers is the white counterpart of three black crows: three tall white candles in a decline, each closing higher and near its high, with the last two opening inside the prior body. Downward breakouts from soldiers were one-fourth as common as upward ones.

The bearish three-line strike often finishes near the top of its range, so a close above the highest line is mechanically easier than a close below the low. In the test it behaved as a bullish reversal 84 percent of the time rather than as the theoretical bearish continuation, and only 85 examples were found.

Rare recipes and look-alikes

The bearish breakaway is a five-line recipe after an uptrend: a tall white candle, a white body that gaps from the first body, a higher close of either color, another higher-close white, then a tall black that closes inside the first body gap, ignoring the first two shadows. The strict rules produced only 36 matches.

A concealing baby swallow is a downtrend sequence of two black marubozu, a third black candle that gaps lower with a long upper wick and trades into the prior body, and a final black candle that engulfs the prior bar including shadows. A marubozu is a candle with no shadows, so the real body spans the full high-low range. The search located four examples in 4.7 million lines.

Mat hold is distinguished from a rising three-methods look-alike by an upward gap on the second candle and is framed as a compact rise-retrace-rise.

Catalog names after the exit close

The archive facts show that some recipes already lean toward one side of the box, that some catalog names disagree with the later exit, and that a few strict searches return only a handful of prints. Editorial reading keeps the catalog name as a hypothesis until the first close leaves the finished pattern, and it treats any ranking built on those thin samples as fragile.