What is a pipe bottom pattern?

A pipe bottom is two adjacent bars with unusually long downward spikes of similar depth, standing well below the surrounding price action, classically identified on weekly charts after a decline. The twin probes show sellers forcing price down twice and failing to keep it there. Confirmation is usually a close above the tops of the two spike bars; the pattern is not traded on the spikes alone.

Why are pipe, horn, and tower patterns called rare?

They occur far less often than staples like double tops or head and shoulders, partly because their definitions demand outlier bar ranges that most weeks never produce. Rarity cuts both ways: the patterns are distinctive when they do appear, but small sample sizes make any published success statistics less stable, so most chartists treat them as secondary evidence that needs confirmation.

What is a horn top pattern?

Two long upward spikes of similar height separated by one smaller bar, classically found on weekly charts after an advance. The market probes the same high twice within three weeks and fails both times. Confirmation is typically a close below the lows of the two spike bars, with the spike high serving as the invalidation level.

What is a tower top or tower bottom?

A tower top is a strong advance of long candles, a short shelf of small-bodied congestion, then an equally steep decline; a tower bottom is the mirror image. The name comes from the tall candles standing on both sides of the pause. It reads like a stretched-out star reversal, the same stall-and-reverse story told across more bars.

Do pipe and horn patterns work on daily charts?

The published definitions and statistics are weekly, and the weekly aggregation is part of why the spikes are meaningful: each bar summarizes a full week of trade. Traders do hunt analogous twin-spike shapes on daily and intraday charts, but they are then trading an adaptation whose behavior the classical studies never measured, which is worth acknowledging in the risk plan.

How reliable are rare reversal patterns?

The honest answer is that the evidence is thin because the samples are. Bulkowski's stock-market tests gave some of these formations respectable marks, but a pattern printing a few dozen times in decades cannot support precise success rates. Most practitioners treat them as secondary evidence, act only on confirmation, and let the spike extreme define the exit if the reversal fails.

Concept

Rare Reversal Patterns

Rare Reversal Patterns, also known as tower, pipe, horn tops/bottoms, are Chart & Candlestick Patterns concepts. The Library holds 1 implementation, a working definition you can pull into Quant.

Bulkowski

Top Rare Reversal Patterns indicator

The top custom implementation, built on the original standard Rare Reversal Patterns formula.

1 total

From studying Rare Reversal Patterns to trading it: take the implementation below into Quant and backtest it instantly.

Horns Pattern Identifier

Indicator

What are Rare Reversal Patterns?

Rare reversal patterns are the low-frequency turning-point formations cataloged in Thomas Bulkowski's chart-pattern research and the Japanese candlestick literature: pipe tops and bottoms, horn tops and bottoms, and tower tops and bottoms. Pipes are two adjacent, unusually long parallel spikes that stand out from the surrounding bars, classically identified on weekly charts; horns are the same twin spikes separated by one smaller bar between them. Towers come from the candlestick tradition: a run of strong one-directional candles, a short congestion, then an equally steep run the other way.

What unites them is the anatomy of abrupt failure: an outsized excursion, often on heavy volume, that cannot hold and reverses, closer in spirit to a key reversal or island reversal than to a gradual rounded turn; an outside bar slamming shut against the trend compresses the same abruptness into a single candle. The repetition is the message. One long spike can be an accident of news; two probes to the same extreme that both fail show the auction rejecting a price twice in quick succession.

The relatives clarify the mechanics. A pipe bottom is effectively a double bottom compressed into adjacent bars, its single-bar cousins are the hammer and shooting star, and the engulfing bar expresses the same rejection through body overlap instead of twin tails. Horns loosen the pipe by allowing one small bar, frequently an inside bar, between the spikes. Towers stretch the whole failure across more candles, an extended cousin of the morning star at bottoms and the evening star at tops.

Because they print rarely, per-pattern sample sizes are small and their statistics are less stable than those of common formations. Bulkowski's tests on historical US stock data generally treated pipe bottoms favorably, but figures drawn from limited samples and specific eras travel poorly across instruments and decades, which argues for treating these patterns as evidence needing confirmation rather than standalone signals.

How to identify pipe, horn, and tower patterns

The classical definitions are timeframe-specific and outlier-driven, so identification is mostly about insisting on both.

1Work on the weekly chart for pipes and horns; that is where the classical definitions and statistics live, even though traders sometimes adapt the shapes to daily bars.
2Find two spikes that reach similar extremes and stand well beyond the surrounding price action: adjacent bars for a pipe, separated by one smaller bar for a horn.
3Insist that both bars are outliers, visibly longer than their neighbors, ideally on above-average volume.
4For towers, look for a steep run of long candles, a brief sideways pause, then a comparably steep run the other way; the tall candles standing on both sides of the pause are the towers.
5Wait for confirmation before treating the reversal as live: classically a close beyond the spikes' opposite extreme, above the tops of a pipe bottom or below the lows of a pipe top.
6Set invalidation at the spike extreme itself; trade beyond it says the reversal failed.

How traders use it

As exhaustion alerts after extended trends: twin spikes (pipes or horns) below the market are read as a selling climax, with entries taken on strength back above the spikes rather than inside them.
As candidates from range-and-volume scans: unusually long bars relative to their neighbors, such as wide-range bars on elevated volume, surface possible pipes, horns, and towers for manual review.
As context for stop placement: the extreme of the spike or tower defines the invalidation point, since a return beyond it says the reversal failed.
As reinforcement for larger structures: twin spikes probing one level are effectively a compressed double bottom or top, so a pipe at a prior major level, or one completing a larger base, carries more weight than one printing in the middle of nowhere.
As a reason to lighten rather than flip: at tops especially, some traders use horns and towers to tighten stops or scale out of longs instead of initiating counter-trend shorts, since a rare pattern plus a fight with the trend stacks two fragile bets.

Pipes, horns, and towers vs. nearby patterns

Double Top/bottom: The everyday version of the twin-test idea, with the two touches separated by weeks and a reaction in between; its neckline supplies the classic trigger and measured objective. Pipes compress both tests into adjacent bars, with confirmation taken from the spike extremes instead.

Pin Bar: A single-bar rejection with a long tail. A pipe is essentially two of them side by side at the same extreme, and the repetition is precisely what upgrades the read from a routine wick to a rare pattern.

Two-bar Reversal: The common two-candle turn: a strong close one way, then a strong close the other. It trades body direction, not outlier range; pipes demand that both bars be exceptional spikes, which is why two-bar reversals print weekly and pipes print rarely.

Concept family

Chart & Candlestick Patterns

84 concepts mapped · 84 in the Library