What the six are
Every one is a stricter form of a relationship you already have. Nothing below introduces a new idea; the extra conditions are what earn the extra name.
Homing pigeon. A long falling session, then a second falling session whose whole body sits inside the first. That is the harami from 04.03.05 with the second candle falling instead of rising. The containment is identical; only the colour differs.
Matching low. Two falling sessions that close at about the same price. The second reached no further down than the first. Note that it is the closes that match, not the lows — the name is older than the habit of drawing a floor at the low.
Stick sandwich. Two falling sessions with a rising one between them, where the two falling closes are about equal. A tweezer's shared price, spread across three sessions instead of two.
Ladder bottom. Five sessions: three falling steadily, a fourth that falls but pokes upward with a long shadow, then a fifth that opens above the fourth's body and rises.
Unique three river bottom. A long fall, a second fall whose body sits inside the first but whose low goes below it, then a small rising session that still closes below the second's close.
Three stars in the south. Three falling sessions, each smaller than the last, each holding above the previous low, ending in a small session with almost no shadows.
Homing pigeon — a harami in one colour
The second body sits entirely inside the first. The only thing separating this from a bullish harami is that the second session also fell.
04.03.05 taught the containment. This name exists for the case where the contained session happens to close lower than it opened.
Putting a number on “rare”
Rare is the word every catalogue uses for this end of the list, and it is almost never measured. It is cheap to measure. 04.05.04 built a thousand boards from a random walk with no information in them; run these six names over the same boards and the word splits in two.
Four of them fired zero times. Ladder bottom, unique three river bottom, three stars in the south and homing pigeon did not occur once in a thousand sessions of noise. Their conditions are many and tight, and tight conditions are genuinely infrequent.
Two of them fired regularly. Matching low appeared 14 times and stick sandwich 16 — more often than morning star, which managed 3. They sound exotic and they are not. Two falling sessions closing at about the same price is not a demanding thing to ask of a market that moves in paise.
| Name | Sessions | Times it fired in noise | Where you met the idea |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stick sandwich | 3 | 16 | 04.03.08, the shared price |
| Matching low | 2 | 14 | 04.03.08, the shared price |
| Homing pigeon | 2 | 0 | 04.03.05, containment |
| Ladder bottom | 5 | 0 | 04.04.01, a run of sessions |
| Unique three river bottom | 3 | 0 | 04.03.05, containment |
| Three stars in the south | 3 | 0 | 04.04.01, a run that shrinks |
A name that sounds rare and a pattern that is rare are different things, and only one of them can be checked.
What the zero does and does not mean
It does not mean those four patterns never happen. A thousand boards is a small sample for an arrangement that needs five conditions to hold at once, and absence in one sample is weak evidence.
It does mean something more useful about the two that fired. Anyone claiming a stick sandwich is a meaningful event has to contend with it occurring sixteen times in prices where nothing whatsoever occurred. That is not a refutation — 04.05.04 laid out what a refutation would need — but it is the first question, and it costs a minute to ask.
And it cuts the other way for the rare four. A pattern that genuinely occurs a handful of times a decade is one about which almost nothing can be established, because there is nothing to establish it on. Rarity is not a mark of quality. It is a shortage of evidence.