Classic chart patterns
Shapes that hint where price goes next
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Every pattern is a snapshot of the same fight between buyers and sellers. When that fight keeps drawing the same shape, it often ends the same way.
Green Call here! 🏝️ A chart pattern is not magic geometry. It is supply and demand drawing you a picture of who is winning and how tired they are getting. Learn the handful of shapes that repeat and you get a head start on the next move — not a crystal ball, but a head start.
Reversal patterns
These form at the end of a trend and warn that the tide may be turning.
Double top — two failed pushes to the same high; buyers give up. Double bottom — two bounces off the same low; sellers give up. Head & shoulders — a peak between two lower peaks, a top forming. Inverse head & shoulders — the same shape flipped, a bottom forming.
There is a shortcut for remembering them: tops look like an M, bottoms look like a W, and head and shoulders is the one with three humps where the middle one is tallest.
Continuation patterns
These form in the middle of a trend, while price pauses to catch its breath, and usually resolve in the same direction it was already going. A rest stop, not a U-turn.
Triangles — ascending, descending or symmetrical squeezes. Flags & pennants — a tight pause right after a sharp move. Wedges — a tilted, narrowing range.
The old trading-floor line is that flags fly at half-mast: the pause tends to appear about halfway through the whole move, which is also where the measured target comes from.
The playbook
Here is the good news: every pattern in both lists trades the same way. Four steps.
First, spot the shape — but do not trade it yet. Second, wait for the break of its neckline or trendline. Third, let a candle close beyond it to confirm, ideally on rising volume. Fourth, measure the pattern's height and project that distance from the breakout point to get your target.
Spotting the pattern is not the trade. The break, the close and the volume are the trade.
A clean shape that breaks the wrong way is not a broken tool, it is a normal outcome. That is exactly why the stop goes on the other side of the pattern before you enter, and why you never size a trade as though the picture guarantees anything.
Most losses on patterns come from entering while the shape is still forming, because it looks obvious. If you find yourself predicting the break rather than reacting to it, you are trading your opinion, not the pattern.
Spot it, wait for the close-through, confirm with volume, measure the height. Same four steps, every shape. 📐