A shooting star is a single-candle bearish reversal pattern with a small body at the bottom of the bar and a long upper wick — usually at least twice the body length. It says: buyers tried to push higher, sellers absorbed the rally, and price closed back near where it opened.
Inside the bar, buyers tried to extend the prevailing uptrend. Price made a new high — the top of that long upper wick. Then sellers showed up at the highs and walked price back down through the day's action. The visible artifact is the long upper wick with a small body left near the bottom.
The pattern matters most at the top of an uptrend. A shooting star printing after a multi-bar rally into a known resistance level is a real distribution signal. A shooting star in the middle of a range is just an upper wick.
Confirmation comes from the next bar. If it opens at or below the shooting star's body, the rejection had follow-through. If it gaps above the shooting star's high, the rejection was a fakeout and the uptrend is intact.
Shooting stars on individual high-volatility equity names are some of the higher win-rate patterns in our backtested universe. The AI layer treats them as strong candidates when overbought RSI + clear prior uptrend + resistance level all line up. When the confluence isn't there, it skips — most shooting stars in chop or in mid-trend get rejected before reaching execution.
On crypto, shooting stars get detected for the chart but don't trade — Alpaca, our broker integration, doesn't support short crypto. Equity shorts use the same risk plumbing as longs: per-trade risk cap, fee-aware stop placement, and the per-user circuit breaker.
Free practice mode shows live shooting star detections with the AI's reasoning for each one.
Create free account →