Bearish Tri Star

A tri star is a three-candle top built from indecision. After a rise, three small doji candles appear in a row, where each open and close sit close together. The middle doji gaps up above the first, then the third gaps back down below the middle. Buyers and sellers are both exhausted, and that stall near the high often marks the end of the advance.

Steve Nison documents the tri-star in Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques (1991), an unusual cluster of three consecutive dojis.

How to spot it

• The market is rising into the pattern.
• All three candles are doji, meaning each opens and closes at nearly the same price.
• The second doji gaps up, sitting above the first.
• The third doji gaps back down, sitting below the second.
• The cleaner the two gaps and the smaller the bodies, the more textbook the signal.

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

The psychology

A rise carries the market up to these three candles, but the candles themselves stop telling a one-sided story. Each is a doji, opening and closing at nearly the same price, which means that within every session buyers and sellers fought to a standstill. After a clean advance, even one doji is a pause. Three in a row says the push that drove the trend has stalled completely.

The two gaps add to the picture. The middle doji gaps up above the first, a last reach for higher prices, and then the third gaps back down below it, surrendering that reach. Buyers tried to extend and could not make it stick, and sellers could not yet take command either. What traders see is exhaustion at the top: the trend has run out of fuel, and a market that can no longer make progress higher often tips the other way. The smaller the bodies and the cleaner the two gaps, the more textbook that exhaustion looks.

Indecision at a high is a clue rather than a conclusion, and the figures below put a measure on it.

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 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.