Most candlestick guides treat continuation and reversal patterns as equivalent tools. They're not. Reversals carry asymmetric payoff when they fire correctly — entry near a turning point, stop just beyond a defined extreme, target multiple bars away. Continuations ask you to chase a move that's already happened. This page is a reference to the reversal patterns Thesis trades and why we don't bother with the rest.
A reversal pattern fires after a multi-candle move has played out. The market has produced a swing low or high, the indicators are at an extreme (oversold or overbought), and the pattern itself captures the moment one side ran out of orders. Two things are true at that exact location:
Continuation patterns invert all three. The stop is wide (you're chasing into the trend, with no nearby pivot to stop against). The target is unclear (the trend was already extending; how much more is left?). And the test is slow (continuations can underperform for many bars before failing outright).
Every pattern on this page is recognizable on a chart. Anyone with an hour of practice can spot a hammer, a bullish engulfing, a morning star. None of that is proprietary. The win rate of "trade every reversal pattern" is approximately a coin flip — because most of them fire in the wrong context.
What turns a reversal pattern into a tradeable setup is the confluence around it: RSI extreme, location at known support or resistance, news sentiment that doesn't contradict the reversal, market regime that allows it. Each individual filter cuts out a portion of false positives; together, they raise the baseline win rate to something tradeable.
Thesis runs that confluence layer automatically — pattern detector on every 1-hour close, deterministic pre-filter, then an AI reasoning pass with the full context — before any order gets placed. See how the AI layer works.
Continuation patterns — marubozu, three white soldiers, three black crows, rising three methods — fire after a strong move has already developed. The pattern confirms momentum that's already in the chart. Entry price is unfavorable, stop distance is wide, and the next bar is often a retracement that stops out the entry before the trend can resume.
Our detector still tracks them as context for the AI reasoning layer, but the pre-filter rejects them as standalone trade triggers. If continuation patterns start working on different data — different timeframes, calmer regimes — we'll re-enable them with sample size.
Free practice mode shows the live pattern feed for every reversal pattern listed above.
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