Three boards, one long day.

What the run has to look like

Three white soldiers is three consecutive rising sessions, and the definition asks three things of them. Each body must be long — 04.02.01's convention, at least 60% of its own range. Each must close higher than the one before. And each must open inside the previous body, so the run climbs without gapping away from itself.

There is a fourth condition that is easy to miss and does real work: the upper shadows stay short, no more than about a quarter of each range. A run of three rising sessions that each gave back a long tail at the top is a different thing, and the books call that an advance block.

Three black crows is the mirror: three long falling sessions, each opening inside the last, each closing near its low.

The parade is one candle

The blend comes out as a marubozu: a body that is nearly the whole range, with no meaningful shadow at either end. Three sessions of steady buying, seen as one period, is a session that opened at its low and closed at its high.

That is the same discovery as 04.03.07, arriving from the other direction. There, three candles blended into a rejection shape. Here, three blend into a momentum shape. In both cases the multi-candle name turned out to be a single-candle shape stretched across more boards.

So the catalogue keeps folding back onto itself. Soldiers are not a fourth thing to learn after momentum candles and marubozu — they are what a marubozu looks like when the period boundary happens to fall in three places instead of one.

Three candles in the same direction blend into one — a single move seen closer up.

The warning that comes with the name

The literature reads soldiers as strong, steady buying, and as a description of three boards that is fair enough. What it cannot do is tell you where in a move they sit, and 04.02.05 already established why that matters.

A run of three strong rising sessions after a long quiet stretch, and the identical run after a rise that has already gone on for months, are the same three boards. The second is the case the same books call buyers being stretched — and there is no way to tell them apart from the candles, because the difference is not in them.

Lakshmi's line covers it exactly, and the parade does not change it: her board tells you what happened today, and it has never once told her tomorrow's price.

A run that carries on, folding into one candle that carries on. The next pattern is a run that pauses — and blending does something much stranger to it.