Most traders trade the bearish and bullish engulfing patterns the wrong way.
And why?
They watch them appear in the charts and trade them everywhere.
But the thing is…
You need to have the right approach.
To increase your success rate, it’s essential to trade them in the right places.
Today you’ll learn:
A bearish engulfing pattern is a trend reversal pattern to the downside.
You want to use them to short the market.
Why?
Because they show a lot of strength appearing to the downside.
This pattern is valid for any trading time frame.
They can appear in two different formats.
The first one, they can delete several small green candles.
Like this:
How do you spot them on a chart?
But this is not the only way that a bearish engulfing can appear on your trading monitor.
A bearish engulfing can also delete one single big candle.
It’s a 180-degree reversal pattern.
Like this:
How do you spot these ones?
The market is always a war between sellers and buyers.
Whoever wins the battle will make the market move in that direction.
During the first part of an engulfing pattern, we see the buyers winning the battle.
It can be by several small green candles or by one big green candle.
As soon as we see a big bearish candle completely deleting all the buyer’s work, we have a big seller’s victory.
The sellers are now in control of the market.
As opposed to the bearish engulfing pattern, the bullish engulfing candle indicates a market move reversal to the upside.
When you see them you want to be on the long side of the market.
And why’s that?
A lot of strength appears pulling the price up, and a potential continuation of the up move has a high probability.
They can appear in two different ways.
The first one is a big green bullish candle, deleting the previous small bearish red candles.
It looks like this:
How can you spot them:
Simple, right?
Now the second form of this pattern.
Instead of several candles, we only need two candles.
Both of them should have a decent size.
But the second one must be bigger than the first one.
They look like this:
How to find them on your charts:
At the first bar, there was a big victory from the sellers.
They were able to send the price down making a decent move at once.
But the buyers were watching.
And after letting the price go down.
They appear hitting the ask and making a violent push to the upside.
Completely deleting all the work that the sellers had to build that previous bearish candle.
This signals a possible continuation of the move to the upside.
Engulfing patterns show an increasing strength either to the upside or to the downside.
They work in bullish and bearish markets.
How can they be used?
Look at these different scenarios:
Most of the time we want to follow the trend.
But we don’t want to enter when the price already made a big move.
So we wait for a pullback.
We wait for the price to slowly come against the trend.
And when we see an engulfing pattern in the direction of the trade, that’s a potential buy opportunity that you don’t want to miss.
It looks like this:
All trends change direction at some point.
A strong engulfing pattern against the trend can sign a potential trend change.
If you’re waiting for the next pullback to go long, be careful because you may be falling into a bull trap.
Remembers, following the market, is always following the strength of the candles.
When you spot these ones, you can do one or both of these options:
In this example, it would be a possible great place to open a short trade and/or close a long trade:
Look…
Most traders see a bullish engulfing pattern and they just go long blindly.
Or a bearish engulfing pattern and shorting immediately.
If you want to take advantage of this powerful setup you need to wait for the right locations along with the current market structure.
So…
When should you avoid trading engulfing patterns?
If the price is trending…
Let’s say, on a downtrend with an angle of around 45º.
It will likely keep going in that direction.
Every engulfing pattern that appears after a move to the downside will have a high chance of failure.
The price will tend to quickly get back to the original trend.
Look at this example on a downtrend:
Parabolic moves attract all newbie traders using a lot of leverage.
They are not steady trends, like the ones at 45º.
If you see something going up like crazy you should enter that race, right?
Wrong…
What will happen is that you’ll most likely enter near the end of the up move.
It’s as if the price created a big building.
But it created it so fast, that the foundations and structure are not going to hold.
And at some point, the building is going to fall.
When you see an engulfing pattern at the top of an uptrend…
After a big move…
Just stay away from that.
You’ll get hurt most of the time.
Here’s an example:
Are you a conservative or aggressive trader?
Aggressive traders trade the engulfing pattern as soon as the previous candle is engulfed.
Conservative traders wait for the close of the engulfing candle.
And then, trade the break of the low/high.
Pros:
Cons:
This is how they look in the charts:
Now let’s look at how to trade engulfing patterns the right way.
These strategies are valid for day trading, scalping, or swing trading.
Every time you place a trade you need to consider all these parameters:
Here are different ways of trading engulfing patterns:
Market structure
Let’s identify the market structure.
The price is making consecutive lower highs and lower lows.
And this means…
Downtrend!
Next.
We draw a line passing through the first two highs and extend it to the right.
Key zones
Here is where we are going to wait for our engulfing pattern.
Our key zone?
The trendline.
A touch on the trendline is the location where we want to look for our short pattern.
Since we are on a downtrend we want to look for bearish engulfing patterns.
Trigger
We had three touches on the trendline.
But only two are bearish engulfing patterns.
Now we want the price to break the low of the pattern.
That’s our trigger to short the market.
Targets and stops
Let’s protect ourselves.
We never know what the market is going to do.
First, place our stop loss.
Above the high of the bearish engulfing pattern is the most common way to do it.
Then we set our targets.
We don’t want to set small targets.
We want a decent risk-reward
Never risking more than the potential reward.
Our target should be after the break of the previous lows.
It can be set as a fixed number of pips/points.
Or it can be set by targeting other types of key zones, like supports and resistances.
Market structure
First, we apply a moving average to our chart.
The period of the moving average should be chosen according to the one that the price is respecting.
The stronger the trend, the smaller should be the moving average period.
Popular moving averages are the ones with 8, 20, 50, and 200 periods.
In this case, we see that the price is on an uptrend.
Key zones
The zones that we want to focus on are the ones where the price touches the moving average.
That’s where the price will tend to touch and come back to the original trend.
Trigger
Our trade will be confirmed when the engulfing pattern appears touching a key zone.
As we saw previously you can trade them aggressively or conservatively (waiting for confirmation).
Targets and stops
To protect ourselves, the most common way is to put the stop loss under the bullish engulfing pattern.
And where do we close in profits?
Two options:
1 – Wait for a move after the breakout of the previous high and close when you have a decent risk/reward.
At least 1:1.
2 – Aim for a previous resistance where the price can revert the trend.
The steps before placing a trade are exactly the same: market structure, key zone, trigger, and setting targets and stops.
Market structure
In this case example, we see that the market is moving sideways.
It’s jumping every time it hits a support line.
During a ranging sideways movement like this, using supports and resistances to trade is a good option.
Key zones
We are trading at a support line.
So, what are we looking for?
Touches of the price in the support line.
We can spot these ones here:
Trigger
When trading a support line we are waiting for a rejection from that support.
We want to go long while the price holds above the support.
So, that rejection should appear as a bullish engulfing pattern.
Here are the engulfing patterns that we found touching our key zone:
Targets and stops
Next…
We calculate the lot size, and then we just place our stop loss and target.
The stop loss goes to the other side of the engulfing pattern.
Our target can be a touch on the previous resistance.
Eventually, we can close our trade partially and let the remaining run, if it breaks the previous resistance.
According to the Encyclopedia of Candlestick Charts by Thomas N. Bulkowski (link), the Bullish Engulfing candlestick pattern has a success rate of 62% while the Bearish Engulfing candlestick pattern has a success rate of 82%.
Here’s what you learned today:
Now, you tell me…
How do you trade engulfing patterns and what is your favorite strategy?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
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View Comments
I do trade the engulfing signals and I am aggressive cause I don't wait for the candles to closed. If I see a signal in the higher time frame I'll go down to the lower to take the trade.
Thank you for sharing Mike.