Pattern Detail

Bearish Harami

Two-candle reversal: a small down candle held entirely inside the body of a large prior up candle.

A real Bearish Harami on NQ daily bars, Oct 17, 2018. Price then followed through 6.0% over the next 5 bars. The bright candles are the pattern; the dimmed bars are surrounding context.
A real Bearish Harami on NQ daily bars, Oct 17, 2018. Price then followed through 6.0% over the next 5 bars. The bright candles are the pattern; the dimmed bars are surrounding context.
i

How to read this

Everything here is in R, the setup's own risk. 1R is the distance from the entry (the pattern's closing price) to where it would be proven wrong — its highest high over the 2 bars that form it. So "offered 2R" means price ran twice that distance in your favor at some point before the stop. It does not assume you took profit there: a target is a strategy choice.

Room offered (≥ 1R)

46.9%

Reliable

Offered at least 1× its risk before the stop, vs 40.4% for a random short entry (+6.5 pts).

Move size vs normal

1.00×

Realized range over the next 20 bars vs a random bar. About normal.

Typical room (20-bar)

1.20R

Average run in favor (capped at 3R), vs 1.05R for a random short entry.

Summary

Offered at least 1R of room 46.9% of the time vs 40.4% for a random short entry — a 6.5-point gap, wider than the ±0.6-point margin of error from chance, and it holds across the sample. A real, if modest, tendency to offer more room than the market alone.

Room offered, this setup vs a random short entry

Outcome This setup Random entry Edge
Offered ≥ 1R 46.9% 40.4% +6.5
Offered ≥ 2R 31.2% 27.4% +3.8
Offered ≥ 3R 22.2% 19.8% +2.4
Stopped < 1R 52.5% 58.1% -5.5
Went sideways 0.6% 1.5% -0.9

23,171 occurrences · 1,146,594 random-entry controls · 20-bar horizon

A bearish harami is the bullish harami flipped. A large up candle is followed by a small down candle whose body sits entirely inside the one before it. The strong buying abruptly stalls, the small inside candle hinting the advance is losing its grip.

Steve Nison covers the harami in Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques (1991), where a small candle held inside the prior body marks a loss of momentum.

How to spot it

  • The market is rising into the pattern.
  • The first candle is a large up (green) candle that fits the advance.
  • The second candle is small and its body sits inside the first candle’s body: a lower high and a higher low than the prior open and close.
  • The smaller the second candle relative to the first, the more textbook the signal.

The dashed box on the chart above marks the two candles on a real occurrence, with the advance before and the move after.

The psychology

The large up candle is the rally still rolling, buyers pushing price higher with size just as they have all the way into the pattern. As it closes, they hold the upper hand and the advance looks healthy.

Then the second candle stops cooperating. It opens inside the prior body and trades in a narrow range, closing without breaking above or below that big candle. The steady buying that lifted every bar before it has gone flat. Sellers have not taken over, but the demand that powered the climb is suddenly absent, and that stall is the warning a trader reads. The smaller the inside candle, the more thoroughly the upside momentum has drained away.

Whether that pause hardens into a real top is the question the figures below take up.

Does it actually work?

A pattern is a setup, not a trade, so the honest question is not “did it win” but “how much room did it tend to offer before it was proven wrong.” The tabs below answer that across five futures markets (Nasdaq, S&P 500, gold, crude oil, natural gas) and seven timeframes from one minute to one day.

For each occurrence we measure the room the move offered in units of the pattern’s own risk, then set it against what a random entry on the same market would have done. When the pattern offers more room more often than chance, that shows up as a real edge. When it does not, the page says so plainly.

Read it with the sample size in view. On the faster timeframes a pattern can fire thousands of times, enough to trust. On the daily chart it is far rarer, so treat those numbers as a hint rather than a verdict. Thin samples are flagged for you on the page.

How we measured it

  • Entry is the close of the final candle of the pattern.
  • One unit of risk, 1R, is the distance from that close up to the pattern’s invalidation point: the highest high of the two candles that form it. If price trades through there, the setup is wrong.
  • We then follow the next 20 bars and record how far price ran in your favor, in multiples of that risk, before the stop was hit.
  • Every figure is set against a random entry on the same market and timeframe, so the market’s own drift is accounted for.
  • No profit target and no position sizing. Where you take profit is a strategy choice; this measures only the room the pattern tends to give.

What this page does not cover

  • Volume on the pattern’s candles.
  • Whether the pattern forms at a meaningful resistance level.
  • Pairing it with a trend filter or a confirming signal.
  • A profit target or position sizing. We use the pattern’s own invalidation point as the stop to define risk, but where you take profit, and how much you put on, are strategy decisions this page leaves to you.

Sample Bearish Harami Firings (20)

Based on data through Apr 29, 2026

Time Risk (pts) Room offered Result
Apr 29, 2026, 12:40 PM CDT 5.5 0.00R Stopped
Apr 29, 2026, 6:15 AM CDT 12.75 0.76R Stopped
Apr 28, 2026, 10:10 PM CDT 10.5 0.64R Stopped
Apr 28, 2026, 3:20 PM CDT 12.75 0.73R Stopped
Apr 28, 2026, 2:10 PM CDT 17.25 3.00R Ran ≥1R
Apr 28, 2026, 3:30 AM CDT 6.25 3.00R Ran ≥1R
Apr 27, 2026, 5:20 PM CDT 14.25 0.88R Stopped
Apr 27, 2026, 3:40 PM CDT 5 3.00R Ran ≥1R
Apr 27, 2026, 2:35 PM CDT 9.25 1.14R Ran ≥1R
Apr 27, 2026, 11:40 AM CDT 10.25 1.68R Ran ≥1R
Apr 26, 2026, 7:05 PM CDT 14 0.00R Stopped
Apr 26, 2026, 5:30 PM CDT 2.75 0.00R Stopped
Apr 26, 2026, 5:20 PM CDT 3.5 0.00R Stopped
Apr 24, 2026, 3:35 PM CDT 11.5 0.20R Stopped
Apr 24, 2026, 2:55 PM CDT 12 3.00R Ran ≥1R
Apr 24, 2026, 12:55 PM CDT 29.75 1.65R Ran ≥1R
Apr 24, 2026, 11:35 AM CDT 15.5 3.00R Ran ≥1R
Apr 24, 2026, 10:25 AM CDT 6.75 0.00R Stopped
Apr 24, 2026, 10:15 AM CDT 19.25 0.00R Stopped
Apr 24, 2026, 2:10 AM CDT 4.75 0.00R Stopped

Sample backtest

Real backtested runs of this pattern, with commissions and slippage. Open one for the full equity curve and metrics, or backtest it yourself on your own contract and dates.

Backtest this pattern

Run it on your contracts, timeframes, and dates.