Three Black Crows

Three Black Crows enforces every qualification the tradition attaches to its three-candle decline — the first faithful detector of three black crows here. Each crow must print a long dark body against the pre-pattern average, close near its own low, and open inside the prior crow's body, with closes stepping lower after a confirmed advance. Patterns are boxed and labeled.

How to Trade the Three Black Crows?

• Pattern label: an advance met by three qualified crows — one of the stricter entries in the candlestick reversal catalog.
• Identical Three Crows: each crow opened at or near the prior close — the rarer, traditionally more bearish variant, labeled separately.
• Structure break: a third crow closing below the last confirmed swing low is annotated and alerted.
• Bounce levels: dashed lines at the pattern midpoint and first crow's open mark where many traders wait to sell a bounce instead of shorting the stretched third close; each dims once touched.

Three Black Crows Settings

• Body Average Length (default 14) and Long Body Multiplier (default 1.0): the yardstick for long bodies.
• Lower Shadow Tolerance % (default 30): largest lower shadow allowed relative to the body.
• Similar Bodies (default on) with Min % (default 50); Suppress Overlapping Signals (default on).
• Exhaustion Multiplier (default 1.5): a third body at this multiple of the first two's average is annotated as possible short-term exhaustion.
• Require Preceding Advance (default on) with Context Test (default Either) and Context Length (default 14).
• Flag Identical Three Crows (default on) with Open Tolerance % (default 10); Prior Swing Low Break (default on) with Swing Length (default 5).
• Show Bounce Levels (default on) with Watch Window (default 20), plus label, box and context-average toggles.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does the pattern relate to Three White Soldiers?

They are mirrors: the soldiers pattern marks renewed demand after a decline, the crows mark reloaded supply after an advance, with the equivalent grading applied on the bearish side.

Why did an obvious run of red candles produce nothing?

Usually context or quality: a run of dark candles inside a downtrend is simply the trend continuing, modest bodies, long lower tails or dissimilar sizes fail the candle tests, and overlapping triples are skipped while dedup is on.

What are the bounce levels for?

By the third close the near-term move is often partly spent, so the two lines give the standard retracement references; alerts fire when price trades back into either inside the Watch Window.