Three boards add up to one.

The three sessions

A morning star is three boards. A long falling session. Then a small-bodied one, low and quiet, going almost nowhere. Then a rising session that closes well up into the first body.

The evening star is the same thing mirrored after a rise: a long rising session, a small quiet one, then a fall back into the first body.

Read literally, that is a decline, a pause, and a recovery. The middle session is the part the name turns on — it is 04.02.03's small body, doing what small bodies do, which is very little.

Blending, and what it is for

Here is a rule that applies to any run of consecutive sessions, not just to this one. Blend them into a single candle like this: take the first session's open, the last session's close, the highest high of the group and the lowest low.

That is not a trick. It is exactly the candle you would have got if the whole run had been drawn as one longer period — three daily boards blended give you the three-day candle, in the same way 04.01.01's daily board is twenty-odd hourly ones blended.

So blending is a change of timeframe, done by hand. And it lets you ask a question that turns out to matter: what single shape does this famous multi-candle pattern actually amount to?

What that means for the whole chapter

The blended candle is a hammer shape: a small body near the top of the range, with a long shadow beneath. That is 04.03.02, which the reader met three lessons ago, and 04.02.02 before it.

The evening star blends the same way into a shooting star — the mirror, from 04.03.03.

So a morning star is not a fourth thing to learn alongside hammer, engulfing and piercing line. It is the same rejection shape, spread over three sessions instead of one. The market did what it did; the number of boards it was written across is a consequence of where the period boundaries fell, which 04.01.01 said were chosen rather than natural.

This is the single most useful idea in Part 04, and it is why the catalogue of patterns is far smaller than the list of names suggests.

A three-candle star blends into a single rejection candle. Multi-candle patterns are lower-resolution single candles.

One blend, and a three-candle pattern collapses into a shape from four lessons ago. The last pattern in this chapter barely survives the same treatment — and what it turns into is not a candle pattern at all.