6 Candle Wick Patterns in Price Action

Price action wick or tail patterns are some of the clearest, simplest signals on a price chart. They matter because they often give a strong read on what the market may do next, more than most other types of price bars.

This lesson is a rundown of the price action wick patterns I look for most often on the price bar. These are the same patterns I check for when I analyze charts, and I trade them regularly. You’ll learn what these tail patterns look like, how to identify them, and what they mean. It’s a solid starting point for beginners working through wick-based price action strategies, and a useful refresher for anyone who already has a basic grasp of trading with candle wicks and what I look for on daily charts.

If you want to go deeper into learning price action trading, you can read the definition of price action, which includes an illustrated chart of these patterns and how price behaves on the chart.

This lesson assumes you already know the basics of candlestick charts. If you’re not familiar with that yet, check the candlestick chart tutorial first. I won’t go into detail on specific entries and exits using the patterns covered in an earlier lesson, candlestick patterns, since that’s a full topic on its own — I plan to cover it in more depth in other articles or courses later on.

Now let’s look at some of the best price action patterns.

What Are Price Action Candle Wick Patterns?

Price action patterns formed by price movement generally aren’t treated as an indicator-style trading tool — they’re the raw data that every other tool is built from. Swing traders and trend traders tend to work closely with price action, skipping fundamental analysis to focus on support and resistance levels for reading breakouts and consolidation. Even these traders need to watch a few extra factors beyond the current price, since trading volume and the timeframes used to mark levels both affect how reliable their reading is likely to be.

• Candle wick price action patterns are somewhat subjective by nature, but what I mean by a ‘tailed bar’ is a bar with a tail noticeably longer than its body, or real body — the space between the open and close.
• Wick price bars — sometimes called shadows or wicks — are worth reading closely for what they show. They point to a rejection of a price level or zone, and a small, medium, or large reversal that happened quickly. That tells us the area where the wick formed got exhausted, which carries real weight. When a price area is exhausted, that’s something worth paying attention to. The candle wick shows that buyers genuinely wanted to buy there, or sellers genuinely wanted to sell there — why doesn’t really matter, since what we care about is what happened and how.
• A wick on a candlestick bar means price may move in the opposite direction soon — this is clearly a huge piece of information for a price action trader, and you could honestly build your entire trading approach around candle wicks if you wanted to. In my opinion, daily candlestick bars are the most important bars, which is why daily chart bars matter most.
• Even without a fully clear price action signal, like my favorite, the pin bar pattern, or maybe a fakey pin bar combo signal, we can still gather a huge amount of information from simple wicks, which we’ll get to shortly.
• In short, price bars are your guide in the market, maybe the best one you have. Get close to them and understand them as much as you can — you need to read them and respond to what they’re telling you. Keep them in view; they’re what will guide you toward spotting opportunities when trading the forex market.

Examples of Price Action Wick-Bar Patterns

The Classic Pin Bar Candlestick Pattern

The pin bar pattern is a candle wick that shows a sharp price reversal within that bar’s timeframe. So a pin bar on the daily chart shows a sharp reversal over that day, while a one-hour pin bar shows a reversal within that single hour. The higher the timeframe, the more weight the signal carries, or the more significant it is.

A pin bar’s tail is usually longer than its body, and the body is the distance between the open and close. The tail on a pin bar should be at least two-thirds of the bar’s total length, ideally three-quarters. Sometimes there’s little or no body at all, as in the second pin bar examples shown below. Here are a couple of bars that look different but carry the same meaning: a price reversal shown by the long tail. The implication is that price may move in the direction opposite the tail.

Here’s a Real Example of the Classic Pin Bar Pattern

The long-tail pin bar pattern is exactly what its name suggests: a pin with an unusually long tail. This may well be the most important price action wick pattern across all types of trading, and it’s rare too. When you spot a long-tail bar, stop and take note, because it’s strong evidence that price is about to swing the other way. Long-tail pins often point to major directional shifts in the market, even full trend changes.

Long-tail pin bar patterns usually have a smaller real body than the classic pin bar, and their tails are always much longer than any bar around them, so they’re impossible to miss. They can sometimes be good entry zones on a 50% retracement of the bar — a trading approach I use myself. Here are two examples of ideal long-tail pin bar patterns. For anyone new to the terms: bullish means a possible buy signal, and bearish means a possible sell signal.

Here’s a Real Example of a Long-Tail Pin Bar Pattern

Another Example of a Classic Long-Tail Candlestick Pattern

The Double Pin Bar Candlestick Pattern

It’s not unusual to see consecutive tail bars appear in the market, often at major support and resistance levels, where the market is testing those zones to see which side wins out between the bulls and the bears — buyers and sellers. You’ll most commonly see double pin bars, or two similar-looking pins, though I’ve seen three in a row before, which is rare. Double pins carry a powerful signal when they form in the right market context and with confluence. They can be a clear warning sign that price is about to push in the other direction. Here’s what that looks like.

Here’s a Real Example of a Double Pin Bar Pattern

Note: you may notice that price barely breached the low of the double pin bar. That happens sometimes, which is why you need a solid grasp of proper stop-loss placement before you start trading. A properly sized stop-loss — one wide enough — keeps you from getting stopped out before the trade has room to move into profit.

Short-Tail and Long-Tail Bars

The chart below shows what I simply call tailed bars. These are price action bars with long tails that aren’t quite clean enough to count as a proper pin bar signal. As I mentioned in the intro, tails are often large, so we need to treat any bar with a wick as potentially influencing the market’s near-term direction, even when it isn’t a textbook pin bar signal. I plan to dedicate entire future lessons to this on its own.

The chart below shows a fairly classic tail bar. This was an upward-tilting bar that formed at a support level within a market generally trending higher, and we can see it led to a strong push upward. Note that it wasn’t a clean bullish pin bar, since the lower tail wasn’t quite long enough relative to the body and the upper tail was a bit long too — but the lower tail was still long enough to classify it as a bullish price action tail bar.

In the image below, you can see the differences between long-tail and short-tail bars, alongside the classic pin bar pattern.

Pin Bar and Inside Bar Combination Patterns

There are other, more advanced candlestick price action patterns I cover further along in this course, but for now let’s briefly look at some of the more common ones.

Below you’ll see a price action pin bar inside an outside bar pattern — this is an inside bar pattern that follows a pin bar and forms within the outside bar’s structure. After that you’ll see an inside bar pattern; to avoid confusion, this is not the same as the outside bar pattern above. Here, the pin bar is itself the inside bar, so it’s an inside bar pattern where the inside bar happens to be a pin. It’s treated much like a regular inside bar pattern, just weighted a bit higher, since you have that extra bar as an added piece of confluence. Finally, there’s a combined fakey pin bar setup, where the fake or false part of the pattern is also a pin bar.

Below, we can see a real example of an outside bar within a bearish pin bar candle. This led to a sizable decline, as the pattern implies. Also note the downward-tilting tail bar that followed, which gave another clean sell signal in that downtrend.

Here’s a Real Example of a Pin Bar Within Inside Bars

Here’s a Real Example of a Fakey Pin Bar Pattern

One last note: candlestick price action patterns aren’t meant to be traded on their own. Never buy or sell just because one of these patterns has appeared — combine it with other tools, such as Fibonacci retracement or classic technical analysis, and treat candlestick patterns as confirmation within a broader strategy rather than a signal by itself.

Conclusion

Beyond the price action patterns visible on the chart, many technical analysts also use price action data when calculating technical indicators, with the goal of finding structure in price movement that can otherwise look random.

Price action patterns that form on the chart can also be used to gauge a possible breakout, since price movement can show that bulls have tried to break through a level on several occasions, picking up momentum each time.

I hope you found this lesson on candlestick price action patterns and what these wick bars mean useful. It’s been a brief introduction to these patterns, but you should now know enough to start spotting them on your charts and practicing with them on a demo account.

This site will cover many more price patterns, going deeper into each one gradually across future articles and strategies. We’ll go further into how to enter trades using these wick patterns, how to read the right chart context for an entry and confirm it, and how to filter signals under different market conditions. I’ll also show you how to read charts from left to right, like reading a book — a core skill in trading well.

Read more:

• Wedge Pattern: A Breakdown of Its Key Traits
• What Are Harmonic Patterns in Trading?
• What Are Forex Signals? Types and How to Use Them

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