Lock the ohlc-bar before a flag or candle becomes a setup

Draw the bar before the pattern

Editorial reading: treat the bar glyph as the first filter. Lock how open, high, low, and close are drawn before a flag, pennant, or short candlestick cluster is turned into a setup you can later invalidate.

An ohlc-bar can represent minutes, hours, days, or weeks. The vertical segment is that period's high-to-low range, with the open marked to the left and the close to the right.

Same four prices, different glyph

Candlesticks use the same four prices as ohlc-bars and need a usable open. The real-body spans open to close and is drawn light when the close is above the open and dark when the close is below the open. Each shadow marks the high or the low.

A candlestick pattern may be treated as complete after one to three candles, whereas a comparable reversal profile on ohlc-bars may take weeks to finish.

Recurring candlestick families

Recurring candlestick families include three parallel continuation lines; three unlike candles with a gapped center doji such as morning star, evening star, or abandoned baby; three serial gaps among four like-colored bodies; three-mountain tops; and three-river patterns with a center doji.

Whether a candlestick setup is treated as usable is said to depend on accurate identification, its place in the trend and in the wave that started from a peak or valley, the open-to-close path inside each bar, and the market under study.

Flags, pennants, and the pennant-flag

Flags and pennants sit in the same bar-chart pattern set as head-and-shoulders, rounding tops and bottoms, cups and saucers, and broadening formations. They are treated as drawings of floor supply and demand.

A flagbar is built from a vertical flagpole between the high and low and a pennant-flag whose left fly is the open. A downflag means the low printed before the high. An upflag means the high printed before the low.

Close above open can describe either a simple rising continuation bar or a double-reversal-bar that set the high first, sold off, then recovered. The pennant-flag encoding is what distinguishes those two paths.

Runs, climaxes, and the encoded path

A run of similar rising or falling flagbars with shrinking ranges or growing flags is presented as spending that side's momentum. A wide bar with little or no flag can be read as a buying or selling climax.

When bar construction also encodes how long a block of trades took, wide bars are associated with fill-or-kill at the bid and lighter slippage on market buys, while long thin bars are associated with more slippage and priced limit orders.