Bearish Side By Side White Lines

A bearish side by side white lines is a continuation pattern in a falling market. A down candle leads, then price gaps lower and prints two up candles side by side, opening and closing at nearly the same levels as each other. The two green candles look like a bounce, but they sit entirely inside the gap below the first candle and never climb back into it. The selling gap holds, and the trend stays down.

How to spot it

• The market is falling into the pattern.
• The first candle is a down (red) candle in the trend.
• Price gaps lower, and the next two candles are both up (green) candles.
• The two up candles open at matching prices and close at matching prices, side by side.
• They stay below the first candle, inside the gap, without filling it.

The dashed box on the chart above marks the 2 candles on a real occurrence, with the decline before and the move after.

The psychology

The first down candle is the downtrend doing its work, sellers in charge and price falling in line with them. Then the market gaps lower, opening a clear space below that candle, which is sellers pressing their advantage even harder.

The two up candles that follow look at first like buyers fighting back. Both close green, side by side at matching levels. But notice where they sit: entirely inside the gap, below the first candle, never climbing back to fill the space the sellers opened. The buying is real but it is penned in. It can lift price a little within the gap and no further, so it amounts to a shallow bounce that never reclaims any lost ground. This is a pause where sellers let a small rally exhaust itself against the ceiling of their gap before they press on. The trend was down before these candles and the gap stays unfilled through them.

Whether the slide resumes after that contained bounce is what the figures below weigh.

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.