Everything that you need to know about the Three Black Crows candlestick pattern is here.
Today you’ll learn:
The Three Black Crows is a Japanese candlestick pattern.
It’s a bearish reversal pattern.
Usually, it appears after a price move to the upside and shows rejection from higher prices.
The pattern is bearish because we expect to have a bear move after the Three Black Crows appear at the right location.
It’s a reversal pattern because before the Three Black Crows appear we want to see the price going up, thus it’s also a frequent signal of the end of a trend.
The Three Black Crows pattern is also a mirrored version of the Three White Soldiers candlestick pattern.
The Three Black Crows candlestick pattern is formed by three candles.
Here’s how to identify the Three Black Crows candlestick pattern:
It looks like this on your charts:
The Three Black Crows candlestick pattern may appear a little different on your charts.
You can have a big gap between the close of one candle and the open of the next one, making them start from inside of each other.
It’s also usual to see the candles decrease in size as they form.
Here’s what it may look like on your charts:
To trade the Three Black Crows candlestick pattern it’s not enough to simply find a series of candles with the same shape on your charts.
Let me explain.
What makes a pattern valid is not just the shape, but also the location where it appears.
This means that the same shape appearing at different locations may have different meanings.
When trading the Three Black Crows, we want to see the price first going up, making a bullish move.
A Three Black Crows appearing after this bullish move is a sign of a possible reversal to the downside.
It looks like this:
Now you’re thinking.
“When do I open my trade?”
It’s simple, the Three Black Crows pattern is traded when the low of the last candle is broken.
That’s your conservative trigger to short.
It looks like this:
Now, you also want to protect yourself because when trading things don’t always move as we expect.
And for that, we use a stop loss.
There are several different types of stop losses.
The most common is to use the other side of the pattern to set it.
But wait, don’t jump into trading the Three Black Crows right yet.
There are a few more things to know.
Ideally, to increase the accuracy, we want to trade the Three Black Crows candlestick pattern by combining it with other types of technical analysis or indicators.
Here are a few strategies to trade the Three Black Crows pattern.
As a bearish reversal pattern, the Three Black Crows is a great pattern to watch for when the price is on a downtrend.
Just wait for a pullback to start, and then spot when the Three Black Crows appear.
That often signs the end of the pullback and the start of the new leg to the downside.
Here’s an example:
Support and resistance levels are great places to find price reversals.
Since we are looking for moves to the downside, we want to trade the Three Black Crows using resistance levels.
How does it work:
Here’s an example:
Moving averages are great trading indicators to trade trends.
The idea here is to trade pullbacks to the moving average when the price is on a downtrend.
How does it work:
This is a bit different from the other trading strategies.
To find a bearish RSI Divergence we want to see the price on an uptrend first, making higher highs and higher lows.
Here’s how it works:
It looks like this:
Another popular way of trading the Three Black Crows candlestick is using the Fibonacci retracement tool.
Fibonacci shows retracement levels where the price will tend to revert frequently.
Depending on the strength of the trend, different levels are more likely to work better with the Three Black Crows pattern. Here you can learn more about the different Fibonacci retracement levels.
Here’s how the strategy works:
Pivot Points are automatic support and resistance levels calculated using math formulas.
If you are day trading, the Daily Pivot Points are the most popular, although the Weekly and Monthly are frequently used too.
Here’s how to trade the Three Black Crows pattern with Pivot Points:
According to the Encyclopedia of Candlestick Charts by Thomas N. Bulkowski (link), the Three Black Crows candlestick pattern has a success rate of 79%.
Now I want to hear from you.
Do you trade the Three Black Crows candlestick pattern?
Let me know in the comments below.
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