What is the Oops pattern by Larry Williams?

Oops is a gap-failure trade. The session opens with a gap beyond the prior day's extreme (below its low for the long version), and the entry is a stop order back at that prior extreme: a fill there means the gap-direction crowd is trapped and covering. If price never trades back through the level, the setup simply never triggers, which is part of its design.

What is a gimmee bar?

The gimmee bar is Joe Ross' range-fade trigger. Inside a sideways market, when price presses toward the range's edge (originally described using Bollinger Bands) and the pressing bar closes against its own direction, that bar is the gimmee; entry is a tick beyond its far side. It expresses the idea that pushes into a range boundary tend to get sold or bought back.

What is the 80-20 setup?

A session-reversion rule popularized in Street Smarts: a day that opens in the top or bottom 10-20 percent of its range and closes at the opposite end marks one-way conviction that frequently overshoots, so the next session is watched for a move back through the prior extreme. Like Oops, the entry is a stop order at a defined level, and no trigger means no trade.

Do the classic bar setups still work?

As written, unevenly. They were built on pit-era daily bars, and market structure has changed: gaps are thinner in around-the-clock markets, and widely published edges attract competition. Published test results vary by market and era. The durable part is the template, trap location plus objective trigger plus predefined stop, which continues to produce workable modern variants.

How are these different from candlestick patterns?

Candlestick patterns name shapes; classic bar setups name trades. A hammer tells you what a bar looks like, while Oops tells you where the entry order sits, what invalidates it, and when it expires. The setups are therefore easier to test honestly and harder to argue about, which is exactly what their authors intended.

Can classic bar setups be automated?

Yes, more readily than most discretionary patterns, because every condition is stated on bar data: gap beyond a prior extreme, close position within a range, order at a defined price. The care points are the same as any automation: session-time handling, realistic fills on stop orders around opens, and regime filters, since the raw rules were never meant to run unsupervised across all conditions.

Concept

Classic Bar Setups

Classic Bar Setups, also known as Oops pattern (Williams), Gimmee bar, are Chart & Candlestick Patterns concepts. The Library holds 1 implementation, a working definition you can pull into Quant.

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Classic Bar Setups

Indicator

What are Classic Bar Setups?

Classic bar setups are the named one- and two-bar entries of late twentieth-century trading literature: patterns like Larry Williams' Oops, Joe Ross' gimmee bar, and 80-20 style reversal bars. What separates them from generic candlestick names is that each ships as a complete rule: a precise bar geometry, an entry level, a direction, and usually a stop, rather than a shape left to interpretation.

The catalogue is a product of the 1980s and 1990s systems-trading books and seminars. Williams described Oops across his short-term trading work, Ross laid out the gimmee bar in his day-trading books, and the 80-20 idea was popularized in the Connors and Raschke Street Smarts collection, which built session-reversal rules on bars that open near one extreme and close near the other. The shared style is unmistakable: small, testable rules with names that made them teachable.

Most of them encode the same underlying event, a trapped initial move. Oops fades an opening gap beyond the prior day's extreme once price trades back through it; the gimmee bar fades a push into the edge of a trading range when the pressing bar closes against its own direction; 80-20 bars (open near one extreme of the day, close near the other) flag potential next-session reversion. Each is a bar-scale false breakout with the trigger written down.

Their durability is uneven, and honestly so. The setups were codified on pit-era daily bars in gap-prone futures markets, and structural changes since, decimalization, around-the-clock sessions, thinner opening gaps, have altered how often the raw conditions even occur. What survives best is the architecture: location thesis plus objective trigger plus predefined stop, which is why the setups remain reference designs for traders building modern rules on the same trap logic.

How to identify classic bar setups on a chart

Each named setup has its own geometry, but they are located and executed the same way.

1Fix the location thesis first: a session open beyond yesterday's extreme for Oops, a mature trading range edge for the gimmee, a full-range trend day for an 80-20 candidate.
2Check the qualifying bar's anatomy against the written rule: gap size, close position within the range, or the bar's relation to the prior extreme, with no discretion added.
3Place the trigger order where the rule says, such as a stop at the prior day's extreme for Oops or a tick beyond the gimmee bar's far side; no trigger, no trade.
4Set the stop the rule defines, typically beyond the trap extreme, so the failed-trap thesis and the exit are the same statement.
5Add a time-stop: setups keyed to opens and session extremes decay fast, so entries that have not triggered within their window are cancelled rather than chased.

How it's calculated

Rule-based single-bar entry setups: Larry Williams' Oops gap reversal at the prior bar's range and Joe Ross's Gimmee bar at the Bollinger Bands.

\text{Oops buy setup: } O_t < L_{t-1} \text{ (open gaps below the prior bar's low)}

\text{Oops buy entry: buy stop at } L_{t-1}\text{, filled only if price trades back up through it}

\text{Oops sell setup: } O_t > H_{t-1} \text{ (open gaps above the prior bar's high)}

\text{Oops sell entry: sell stop at } H_{t-1}\text{, filled only if price trades back down through it}

\text{Gimmee sell bar (range rising into the upper band): } H_t \ge \operatorname{Upper}_t \text{ and } C_t < O_t\text{; sell stop one tick below } L_t

\text{Gimmee buy bar (range falling into the lower band): } L_t \le \operatorname{Lower}_t \text{ and } C_t > O_t\text{; buy stop one tick above } H_t

\operatorname{Upper}_t = \operatorname{SMA}_n(C)_t + k \times \operatorname{SD}_n(C)_t

\operatorname{Lower}_t = \operatorname{SMA}_n(C)_t - k \times \operatorname{SD}_n(C)_t

O_t: open of bar t

H_t: high of bar t

L_t: low of bar t

C_t: close of bar t

H_{t-1}: prior bar's high

L_{t-1}: prior bar's low

Upper_t: upper Bollinger Band at bar t

Lower_t: lower Bollinger Band at bar t

SMA_n(C)_t: simple moving average of the closes C over n bars

SD_n(C)_t: standard deviation of the closes C over n bars

n: Bollinger length (default 20)

k: standard deviation multiplier (default 2)

t: bar index

Williams defined Oops on daily bars, where the session open can gap beyond the prior day's range; if price never returns to the prior low or high, no trade occurs.

Ross restricts Gimmee bars to sideways markets moving between the bands; a band touch during a trend is not faded.

Both are discretionary entry patterns rather than complete systems, and exact filters (minimum gap size, tick offsets) vary by author.

How traders use it

As mechanical triggers at chosen locations: because each setup defines its own entry and stop, traders bolt them onto a location thesis (a level, a session open, a range edge) as the execution rule.
As backtest material: the definitions are objective enough to code, which is also the honest warning; results vary with market regime, so they need testing on the instruments and eras actually traded rather than trust on reputation.
As a vocabulary for trap logic: even traders who never take the setups verbatim use them as clean descriptions of failed opens, failed range pushes, and failed breakouts at bar scale.
As scanner components: the geometries translate directly into screening conditions, flagging every symbol that printed a qualifying bar so the trader only reviews charts where a named rule is live.
As overlays on bar-by-bar reading: the setups combine naturally with the surrounding candlestick patterns vocabulary, an inside bar stack before an Oops open or an outside bar engulfing a gimmee both change how much weight the trigger deserves.

Classic Bar Setups vs neighboring pattern families

Candlestick Patterns: Candlestick names describe shapes and leave execution to the trader. The classic bar setups are complete trades: shape plus entry level plus stop, which is why they backtest cleanly while candlestick claims often dissolve into definition disputes.

Two-bar Reversal: The two-bar reversal is a general strength-against-strength shape read at any extreme. Setups like Oops and the gimmee are narrower: they demand a specific context (a gap open, a range edge) and fire from a defined order level rather than a discretionary read.

Engulfing Bar: An engulfing bar is one bar swallowing another's range, a shape that appears anywhere. A classic setup wraps comparable geometry in location and mechanics, so two similar-looking bars can be one valid Oops and one meaningless engulfment mid-range.

Concept family

Chart & Candlestick Patterns

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