Concept
Piercing Line
Piercing Line is a Chart & Candlestick Patterns concept. The Library holds 1 implementations, each one a working definition you can pull into Quant.
Top Piercing Line indicators
1 total
What is a Piercing Line?
A piercing line is a two-candle bullish reversal pattern from the Japanese candlestick catalog. After a decline, the first candle is a long bearish body; the second opens below the first candle's close (the strict classical form asks for an open below its low) and then closes inside the first body, above its midpoint but below its open. The mechanism is the recovery: sellers get the weak open they positioned for, and buyers reclaim more than half of the prior session's loss anyway.
Depth is the grading criterion. A close short of the midpoint downgrades the pattern to weaker relatives (the thrusting and on-neck lines of the traditional taxonomy), while a close above the first candle's open upgrades it to a bullish engulfing. Its bearish mirror image at the top of an advance is the dark cloud cover.
How traders use it
- As a reversal trigger at support or after an extended decline, usually with confirmation from the next candle closing higher before acting on it.
- As a strength gauge: the deeper the second candle pierces the first body, the more of the prior selling has been absorbed, so piercing lines are often ranked by penetration depth.
- As a screener condition: the midpoint rule is objective enough to code, which is why the pattern appears in most candlestick scanners.
Related concepts · Candlestick catalog
Concept family
Chart & Candlestick Patterns
84 concepts mapped · 46 in the Library
Piercing Line FAQ
What is the difference between a piercing line and a bullish engulfing?
The second candle's close. A piercing line closes above the midpoint of the first bearish body but below its open; a bullish engulfing closes above that open, wrapping the entire prior body. Engulfing is the stronger statement because the recovery is complete, but both carry the same failed-continuation logic and both still require follow-through before they mean much.
Does a piercing line require a gap-down open?
In the classic stock-market definition, yes: the second candle should open below the prior close, and the strictest reading wants an open below the prior low. In markets that trade nearly continuously, opens rarely gap, so most scanners relax the requirement to an open at or below the prior close, which makes the pattern more common but looser, since the failed gap-down open is part of the classical pattern's logic.
Build Piercing Line your way.
Quant writes, tests, and refines it with you — then it runs on LuxAlgo charting or ports to TradingView.