Pattern Detail

Bearish Three Black Crows

Three consecutive long bearish candles, each opening inside the prior body and closing lower, after an uptrend.

A real Bearish Three Black Crows on NQ 15-minute bars, Oct 24, 2008. Price then followed through 0.5% over the next 5 bars. The bright candles are the pattern; the dimmed bars are surrounding context.
A real Bearish Three Black Crows on NQ 15-minute bars, Oct 24, 2008. Price then followed through 0.5% over the next 5 bars. The bright candles are the pattern; the dimmed bars are surrounding context.
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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 3 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)

48.3%

Too few to trust

Offered at least 1× its risk before the stop, vs 41.5% for a random short entry (+6.8 pts).

Move size vs normal

1.04×

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

Typical room (20-bar)

1.07R

Average run in favor (capped at 3R), vs 1.07R for a random short entry.

Summary

Offered ≥1R 48.3% of the time vs 41.5% for a random short entry. The 6.8-point gap is no bigger than the ±17.9-point margin of error you would get by chance from 29 occurrences. Not a reliable edge.

Room offered, this setup vs a random short entry

Only 29 occurrences. The breakdown below is shown in full, but a sample this small is anecdotal, a hint, not a measured edge. That is usually a limit of available history, not a flaw in the pattern. For a firmer read, try a lower timeframe or a more active instrument.

Outcome This setup Random entry Edge
Offered ≥ 1R 48.3% 41.5% +6.8
Offered ≥ 2R 13.8% 27.0% -13.2
Offered ≥ 3R 3.4% 18.8% -15.3
Stopped < 1R 37.9% 55.6% -17.6
Went sideways 13.8% 2.9% +10.9

29 occurrences · 1,162,047 random-entry controls · 20-bar horizon

A three black crows is a three-candle bearish reversal. After an uptrend, three long down candles appear in a row, each opening inside the body of the one before it and closing lower than the last. The read is a steady, repeated handover from buyers to sellers, with no real bounce in between.

Steve Nison describes three black crows in Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques (1991), the bearish mirror of three white soldiers.

How to spot it

  • The market has been rising into the pattern.
  • Three long bearish (red) candles appear back to back, each with a body bigger than the recent average.
  • Each candle opens inside the prior candle’s body, not on a gap, then closes near its low.
  • Each close is lower than the one before, so the three step steadily down.
  • Little or no lower wick, which shows sellers held control all the way into each close.

The psychology

Price has been climbing, and the buyers who carried it up are still holding their gains as the top forms. Then a long down candle prints, and the next one opens back up inside its body, the spot where buyers try to resume, before sellers take over again and close it lower. That same thing happens a third time. Three sessions in a row, every attempt to bounce is met and pushed under the prior close.

What traders read into it is conviction on the sell side and none on the buy side. There is no long lower wick to show buyers fighting back, just one steady step down after another. The buyers who are still long from higher up watch three straight sessions go against them, and some begin to give up and sell, which feeds the move. The orderly, repetitive nature of it is the point: this is not a single violent bar that might be a fluke, it is selling that keeps showing up.

Whether that steady pressure carries through is the question the data below takes 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. This is a strict shape, so on many markets and timeframes it fires rarely or not at all. Treat thin or empty samples as a reason to wait, not 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 three 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.

Notes

This page is a draft. The strict definition, long bodies with each candle opening inside the prior body, makes the pattern rare, and on some instruments it does not appear at all in the sample. Where the count is zero or very low, the numbers are not yet something to lean on, and the predicate may be loosened to match how the pattern is commonly drawn before this page is published.

Sample Bearish Three Black Crows Firings (20)

Based on data through Apr 29, 2026

Time Risk (pts) Room offered Result
Feb 20, 2026, 5:00 AM CST 83.5 0.72R Flat
Jan 8, 2026, 6:55 PM CST 27.75 1.39R Ran ≥1R
Oct 25, 2023, 12:25 AM CDT 15.25 1.95R Ran ≥1R
Sep 28, 2023, 7:45 AM CDT 87 0.37R Flat
Apr 21, 2023, 3:20 PM CDT 12.5 1.42R Ran ≥1R
Dec 27, 2022, 3:00 AM CST 30.25 0.77R Flat
Sep 13, 2022, 6:10 PM CDT 26.25 1.21R Ran ≥1R
Sep 12, 2022, 11:05 PM CDT 14.5 0.16R Stopped
Apr 25, 2022, 6:15 AM CDT 65.75 0.00R Stopped
Apr 10, 2022, 6:55 PM CDT 35 1.67R Ran ≥1R
Mar 30, 2020, 10:05 PM CDT 38 1.76R Ran ≥1R
Dec 12, 2019, 6:11 AM CST 11 2.23R Ran ≥1R
May 2, 2019, 10:20 AM CDT 42.25 1.31R Ran ≥1R
Sep 5, 2018, 6:23 AM CDT 6.25 1.36R Ran ≥1R
Jun 26, 2018, 4:37 AM CDT 14 0.71R Flat
Oct 24, 2017, 11:55 PM CDT 5.25 1.86R Ran ≥1R
May 26, 2016, 12:45 AM CDT 4.75 0.11R Stopped
Jan 2, 2015, 1:38 AM CST 4.75 0.11R Stopped
Sep 23, 2014, 10:23 PM CDT 2.75 0.36R Stopped
Aug 27, 2014, 1:08 AM CDT 1 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

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