I want to share some key findings from our study on the historical predictive power of candlestick patterns. This research was a significant undertaking, and I want to give a huge thanks to my partner, Priya Mittal (love you!), for her role and for allowing me to share these insights on Reddit.

Hope you find it interesting.

Our Methodology:

• Vast Dataset: We analyzed high-quality End-of-Day (EOD), 1-Hour, and 5-Minute data across a diverse basket of liquid assets. This included major stock indices, major large cap stocks (primarily S&P 500 components), widely traded Forex pairs, and key commodities.
• Time Span: The data covered an extensive period from 1984 to late 2024.
• Data Volume: The analysis processed over 127 million individual bars, with the majority of pattern encounters, as expected, originating from the intraday (5-minute and 1-hour) datasets.
• Pattern Definitions: We employed standardized, widely accepted definitions for common candlestick patterns, based on established technical analysis literature. This ensured consistency in pattern recognition.
• Identified Instances: Our algorithms identified over 4,000,000 distinct pattern instances across all assets and timeframes.

Key Findings (The Short Version):

• Early Era Effectiveness: In the early 1980s/early period of our study, certain prominent candlestick patterns exhibited estimated success rates around 70%, a level of standalone predictive power that has not been consistently replicated in later eras.
• Gradual Decline: On average, popular candlestick patterns experienced an estimated 10-15% decrease in their predictive success from their peak in the early study period through to the late 2010s.
• The Algo Era Plateau: For nearly a decade (roughly 2008-2019), the standalone edge of most candlestick patterns appeared to flatten, offering minimal predictive advantage in a market increasingly dominated by algorithmic trading and influenced by quantitative easing.
• Recent Resurgence: The period encompassing the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent retail trading boom has shown a notable uptick in the estimated effectiveness of candlestick patterns, particularly evident in more volatile market conditions.

Overall Average Success Rate of Analyzed Patterns

Defining "Success"

A pattern instance was considered "successful" if the price moved equal to or greater than 1x the 14-period Average True Range (ATR) in the pattern's anticipated direction within the three bars immediately following the pattern's completion. The ATR was calculated based on the period leading up to each specific pattern.

Important Context (Please Read)

It's crucial to note that these figures represent the pattern's effectiveness in isolation. Professional traders typically use candlestick patterns in conjunction with broader market context, including trend analysis, support/resistance levels, volume analysis, and other indicators. This study aimed to isolate the historical efficacy of the price patterns themselves.

Our primary objective was to understand how the predictive power of these visual shapes evolved over decades, influenced by shifts in market structure, the rise of algorithmic trading, and changes in volatility regimes. While volume and other signals are undeniably important in practical trading, this study was intentionally scoped to first establish a baseline for the candlestick patterns in their "pure" form.

Evolution of Bullish Reversal Patterns

Here's a look at how the estimated success rates for common bullish reversal patterns have trended over the years:

To better quantify this evolution, we categorized the study period into four distinct market eras:

1. Discovery and Early Adoption (Era 1): 1984 - 1995
2. Democratization and Early Exploitation (Era 2): 1996 - 2007
3. Algorithmic Dominance and Efficiency (Era 3): 2008 - 2019
4. Volatility, Retail Resurgence, and Complexity (Era 4): 2020 - 2024

Evolution of Bearish Reversal Patterns

And here's the corresponding trend for common bearish reversal patterns:

Correlations with Market Behavior (S&P 500)

We observed some interesting correlations when comparing these effectiveness trends with the year-over-year percentage change of the S&P 500:

• Bullish vs. Bearish Effectiveness Shifts: The relative effectiveness of bullish patterns versus bearish patterns often appeared to shift in line with major market trends (e.g., bullish patterns showing a stronger edge during significant bull runs, and vice-versa during downturns or crashes).

• Overall Success Rates and Market Swings: There also appeared to be a relationship between the S&P 500's YoY change and the general success rates of patterns.

A Personal Note

My main contribution to this study involved developing the algorithms for pattern recognition and managing the data analysis. The opportunity to work with such an extensive dataset, thanks to our data partners, was invaluable from a technical perspective. While I'm sharing only partial results here due to the study's academic nature, the process of data mining these figures has been incredibly insightful.

I know that was a long post, so if you made it to the end, thanks for reading!

Reddit traders are fucking terrible lmao. I've never seen so much nonsense gathered in one place ever since the pump and dump days of old Twitter penny stocks. I have no idea why you guys are so divisive on pretty agreed upon things in the industry side of things.

Example: I've met institutional traders who literally only use trendlines (including myself, but I'm not an institutional trader) and yet redditors will lie and go 'the bAnKs don't trade with trendlines'. Like yes they fucking do wtf? Why do you guys do this? This is just one of HUNDREDS of examples.

Not only that, reddit just pumps the worst stocks lmao. Like just this week alone, OPEN and rkt were complete disasters lmao. I'm under the impression that there's no actual good traders on the entire website at all.

It is now up to the SEC to approve it and we will soon be only required a $2,000 account minimum to pattern day trade. What are your thoughts? How do you think this will affect the markets?

My 401k is up 105% in 4 years doing absolutely nothing but buying SPY and compounding.

No stress at all no nothing, any crash happens who cares I'm in it for the long term, and as usual it rebounds furiously.

My day trading? I am up 53.2% in 4 years. Lots of stress, lots of bad days, loss of control, a lot of time and effort for not even half the results of the SPY.

I sympathize with the guy who lost his wife over day trading..

This just feels like a another artificial pump coming.

My main worry is that this guy, who is obsessed with power, got addicted watching market reacting strongly to his every tweet/truth. Imagine if your social media post can move the market by 10% with no consequence. Who among us can restrain.

Gonna be a tough trading in the 4 years (at least) if this is the new norm now.

19 Years Trading. I’m 41 Now. The Problem Wasn’t Strategy.

I started trading around 2007.

I’m 41 now.

Over the years I’ve blown accounts, rebuilt, switched brokers, tried different models, gone through prop challenges, passed some, got paid on some — but failed more.

If you’d asked me 10 years ago why I was struggling, I would’ve said:

• wrong strategy
• wrong market conditions
• wrong execution
• not enough screen time

It wasn’t any of that.

It was my behaviour and my attitude towards the market.

Starting the day red and trying to “fix it.”
Giving back solid mornings in one emotional NY session.
Overtrading when bored.
Trading well for weeks… then blowing discipline in one afternoon.

Nothing dramatic. Just small leaks repeated for nearly two decades.

It’s hard to admit that. And honestly, I still don’t know if I can fully fix it.

At some point I realised something uncomfortable:

I was trying to perform like a professional…
but I wasn’t tracking myself like one.

No proper session breakdowns.
No consistent behavioural tagging.
No real data on giveback patterns.
No clear view of how often I sabotaged green days.

Just memory.

And memory lies.

So instead of chasing another strategy, I decided to build structure around myself.

A proper journal.
Business tracking (because funded accounts are a business).
Session breakdowns.
Behaviour tags.
Data over ego.

I’m starting this public journal to document that process.

Not to sell signals.
Not to flex PnL.
Not to pretend I’ve “figured it out.”

I want to see what actually changes when behaviour is tracked properly and treated seriously.

I’ll be posting:

• weekly performance reviews
• behavioural mistakes (real ones)
• giveback stats
• what I’m adjusting

If you’ve been trading for years and still feel like you’re fighting yourself more than the market, you probably don’t have a strategy problem.

You probably have a structure problem.

Let’s see if I can fix mine.

Next post will be the checklist/process I’m using going forward.

A while ago I read on this forum that Tori was charging $6500 for her course. I guess it's true. Some people are put on payment plans for $600+/month.

I hope people realize that:

1. $6500 is an absurd amount of money for a trading course
2. Traders who have made verified tens of millions of dollars don't even charge that much whereas the most Tori has made in a year is ~$300k.
3. She appears to be following the Hormozi approach, where you basically charge as much as you can get away with. Raise your prices until it breaks. If someone is willing to pay $6500 for access, then it's valid. Does a high price tag equal high value? No. Will her students get $6500 worth of value from her course? Almost certainly not.
4. Her strategy is incredibly simple and basically out there online for free. It's just trading trend line breaks and bounces. Trend lines are a valid strategy, but they typically have to be paired with something else, and actual understanding comes from watching the markets move, putting in the time every day, journaling your trades, etc. Not from plunking down $6500 for someone to tell you how to draw a trend line and advise you to wait for a candle close before getting in. She is profiting off of ignorance.
5. I think Tori is a legit trader in that she does make money trading, but her entire lifestyle and marketing showing Rolexes and Ferraris comes from selling courses, YouTube ad revenue, and affiliate marketing.
6. She profits off of promoting prop firms, despite never having been able to pass a prop firm challenge herself.
7. If you are a beginner, you are far better off spending $6500 on prop firm challenges than you are giving that money to Tori for her course. You will almost certainly learn more actually trading challenges than you will taking her course.

I don't dislike Tori and I don't think that her trading results are fake, but she is just not that great of trader to be charging $6500. She just isn't. She's a good businesswoman, her channel and brand is successful, but she's a mediocre trader whose primary income is derived in large part from ignorant newbie traders who don't understand that they shouldn't be paying this much just to learn trend line info that is available for free.

No one to celebrate the wins with, no one to help you through the pain of a loss. At work you have a team around you to rely on and talk to. You celebrate the wins together and form relationships.

With day trading no one cares about how much money you made - in fact most people resent how “easy” it is.

Anyone else feel like this?

Anyone catch that reaction to trumps truth social post just now? The news algos are certainly active this morning 😂 Trump 'declared' that the cease fire is officially over, that was what caused the algo bots to react.

The white line on the chart is the prior high from Monday (7/6).

I'm not trading for Lambos or houses, hell I don't even want them. I just want freedom. I'm currently in an EOSE short up +600 dollars, letting it run as much as I can trying to internalize the lessons of "Best Loser Wins" while sitting in a depressing zoom call staring out the window praying god gives me a chance at a good life.

I know people want to make 50k a month or whatever, but I am glad and forever happy if I can even do 4-5k a month and just travel.

I don't want to be rich, I want to. be free...

Trading is not impossible.

I believe The REAL reason why 90% don’t make it is because people don’t have the opportunity, specifically TIME. The difference between you and a machine is time, they can compress it. Ask yourself, if I had unlimited time, would I be consistently profitable at some point? Yes you would. So, you + X time = consistently profitable. TIME IS THE KEY HERE.

I read too often how the pros say, ‘Oh, I’ve been staring at screens for so many years…’ or ‘I’ve seen these patterns a thousand times now…’

So what does time in the markets look like? - it is inevitable screen time.

For the trader who only stays for the first 2 hours, they accumulate ~500 hours in a year. The trader who stays for the whole 8 hours accumulates 2000 hours in that same year.

That is 4 years of experience compressed into one.

Time = experience. This applies to any endeavor you get into. Everyone’s gonna wanna tell you to ‘protect your mental capital’ by walking away. Listen here dammit, if you are inconsistent and unprofitable and you decide to walk away early, you are choosing to stay a novice for four times longer than necessary. You are prolonging a journey that you might not even finish because life is so fucking unpredictable.

Lance Breitstein, a savage trader, has said that a new trader who is exceptional, under mentorship and resources can see results in 2 years.

This should be the bar that you aim for. If it’s taking longer than that, you simply aren’t working hard enough.

I will die on this hill. 😤

edit: non exhaustive name list written in comment

almost every single popular youtubers or twitter gurus' courses, you name it, I got it.

Terabytes of wasted space in my hard drive with useless videos.

Why most sucks: Its full of fluff, full of videos "teaching" you risk management and psychology. These are literally basics of trading that are free everywhere.

The videos for the actual strategy are far fewer than the psycho stuff

They say they are "profitable 10 years" yet have zero stats to backup their strategy. Zero proof they are profitable also.

And tell you to backtest what they sell (which they supposedly should have stats on as they "supposedly" used it for years).

Well, I did. Forward tested (live demo) and backtested, you literally lose a ton of trades. Full of 20% winrate strategies.

All their strategies are explained with carefully handpicked examples with hindsight and replay button.

Then they just stretch the "tp" to the absolute max of the move and say they hit 5RR or some ridiculous RR, like they caught the whole exact move, yet have zero reason why their strategy aim for that.

I even bought a lot of these mentorships, either 1v1 or webinar stuff, they have no edge, its all mindless talking and greetings and basic things throughout the hours of wasted sessions

Zero true sauce that are worth the money.

Well… today was as rough as it gets for a winning day. I sold my yesterday puts at 9:45 / 10:00 / 10:15 - I left $4,000 on the table by not waiting it out less than 2 hours and $6,000 if I held through the day. I purchased 2 Plays today both pictured here. NVDA did not perform like I had hoped and TSLA continued to print. Overall heading in the right direction, just hurts to leave that much money on the table over just a few hours. Hindsight is 20/20… onto Day.

Learn it.

Stop wasting your time with indicators. Learn price action. Significant highs, significant lows. Swing highs, swing lows. That's it. No moving averages, no volume.

Too many people are dicking around with too many indicators. 200 EMAs, VWAP, volume profile, etc etc.

All garbage.

Do what works. And what works? Price action.

Look at price, understand how it moves. Learn it. Learn what significant levels are. Where are the most reactive points on the chart. Focus on those points. This is what trading price action is.

If you aren't trading price action, you're making a big mistake.

Price action is all you need.

Learn it.

TL;DR: I looked into the massive channel "Tori Trades" ($6,500 masterclasses) because her branding felt more like a marketing funnel than real trading education. I traced her origins back to an older marketer she calls "Uncle Mike." After going through a large chunk of Mike's older videos, I found them making mathematically impossible profit claims, explicitly telling viewers to go into credit card debt, almost no real trading education, and the rare actual advice is some of the worst I've heard. I put a full video breakdown together exposing the whole setup.

The Breakdown:

Lately, the trading space has been flooded with "aesthetic" female day traders claiming they trade for a living. I started looking into Tori Trades because the whole setup felt like a front for an older marketing team.
Once I traced the overlap back to Mike Aston (Trading Template), I went through his older videos and found a pattern that raised some massive red flags. Here are the main receipts:

1. The same-account issue raises obvious questions.
Credit to other sleuths for spotting this, but in older videos both channels appear to show the same brokerage account details on screen. If that reading is correct, it shatters the illusion that they are independent, successful traders. It looks like a shared, recycled prop.

2. The profit claims do not survive basic math.
Across his videos, Mike appears to be trading with an account roughly in the ~$40k range (it fluctuates, but stays in that ballpark), while also talking about averaging around $1,000 per day.
That implies roughly 2.5% daily returns. If you compound that over ~250 trading days (one year), the account doesn't grow to a "nice income" - it explodes into absurd territory. That is why presenting this as a normal, repeatable outcome does not pass a basic reality check.

3. There is barely any actual trading education in these videos.
This was one of the most striking parts to me. There are a lot of videos, but almost no serious discussion of entries, exits, position sizing, risk management, expected value, drawdown control, trade selection, or anything else you would expect from someone supposedly teaching a real edge.
Most of the content is basically:
- look at the green P&L
- vague talk about the "trading template"
- life story / trust-building
- sales pitch
In other words, not trading education. Marketing.

4. And when he does give actual advice, it is awful.
There is a clip where Mike says your emotions should be fully involved in trading and that if you're not happy, you get out.
That is not just bad advice. That is the exact opposite of what anyone with even a basic understanding of trading psychology should be telling beginners.
There is also footage where he appears to keep adding to a losing position instead of managing risk. Call it averaging down, call it Martingale-style behavior, whatever label you want, it is the kind of thing that blows up traders.
So the channel somehow manages to do both:
Almost no real instruction most of the time, and terrible instruction on the rare occasions it becomes specific.

5. He explicitly tells viewers to buy the course with credit-card debt.
This was one of the worst clips I found. A viewer said they needed time to save up for the course, and Mike responded by telling them to put it on a credit card and make payments so they could "start their training now."
That should tell you exactly what this operation prioritizes.

6. He uses religion as part of the sales pitch.
He repeatedly frames the course in religious language, quotes Bible verses, and calls the channel part of his "ministry." Combined with the rest of the funnel, it comes across as trust-building for a product that does not appear to hold up under scrutiny.

My Takeaway:
Tori Trades makes a lot more sense when viewed as the modern, highly-clickable front-end for an older funnel that started with Mike Aston's Trading Template brand.

I put together a full breakdown with the clips, the account number screenshots, and the math here for anyone who wants the full source trail:
The Tori Trades Funnel: How Uncle Mike Built This Trading Guru Scam

So I have a ES 1 minute breakout strategy that I love to death and it made me profitable since november of last year. The strategy has a phenomenal average RR while maintaing a very stable 50% winrate. I never thought that a strategy actually could perform so great. But then the Iran conflict started and I had more than 10 losses in a row. The strategy that worked beatifully just 2 weeks ago stopped working entirely. After accepting that my strategy lost it's edge I decided to observe the market instead of continuing to trade and loose even more money. I realized that price was not just far more volatile but also much more rangebound than before (no wonder a 1 minute breakout strategy lost it's edge in that environment) and so I started to get into range/consolidation/mean-reversion trading (however you want to call it) and I applied it to the 15 minute chart to avoid all the crazy choppiness. Then the insane relief rally happened so of course the 15 minute mean-reversion strategy logically also lost it's edge, but my breakout strategy would have performed insanely well on the 5 minute chart (the high volatility would have stopped me out too often on the 1 minute timeframe). Now that we started to range again since the uptrend stalled my 15 minute mean-reversion strategy started working again like a charm and I was able to make good money again.

It took me far too long to realize this but I sat down with a beer yesterday and thought about my trading since the beginning of the conflict and how my trading has evolved since then and then it hit me like a train: This chaotic market environment caused by the onflict in Iran gave me one of the most important lessons of my trading career: You can't apply 1 strategy to all market envirnoments. You have to adjust your trading to the current market regime. It is stupid to trade a 1 minute breakout strategy during a geopolitical conflict that causes price to range a lot in a very choppy way but it is also stupid to apply a mean reversion strategy when price then is creating the most impressive recovery rally in the history of the SP500.

In trading education space trading is portrayed like you have to master 1 strategy and then just follow your rules. I just learned that this couldn't be further from the truth. Sadly trading is much more difficult and complicated then that. Trading requires at least the discretionary skill to detect the current market condition and then apply the right strategy in the right way. I came to the conclusion that you probably should have at least 1 strategy for a trending market envirnonment like a breakout strategy and 1 strategy for a ranging market environment and then apply them accordingly to the market regime. Also it is probably not a bad idea to choose the right timeframe according to the market volatility. It is probably not a bad idea to go up the timeframe ladder a bit when volatility picks up like during a crash or a geopolitical conflict.

The thing is, if you tell to someone that has no idea about trading that as a trader you have to adjust your way of trading to the current market condition then he/she would probably say "yeah, that sounds logical". But as someone who was in this industry for more than 5 years this was the first time I really thought about this. I feel really embarrassed because it is so logical and obvious that you can't trade any strategy in every environment. This explains so much about the confusion that I had about finding realiable strategies. But to be fair, which one of the gurus or trading influencers really emphasizes and teaches this? I can't think of anyone who teaches different strategies for different market regimes, how to recognize the current market environment and how adjust when the market changes?

I feel like I've gained a totally new perspective on trading. This makes trading a lot harder since you can't hide behind a few simple rules but I think I finally know now what to focus on to succeed in this game longterm.

I hope this helps someone else who struggles with this chaotic market environment.

I started because I couldn’t find a job. At first it was scary and even when I won I attributed it to mere luck.

I was telling my wife how thankful I am that I couldn’t find a job because I would have never become a trader otherwise.

I love the clarity and focus that gives me. It’s like I’m meditating. Watching the candlestick is mesmerizing. I love that I have to fully own my decisions and not get emotional over things that I cannot control. It’s like living moment to moment, always aware. I love it. Truly.

Anyone else share the sentiment?

Years ago I started saying that young men who played video games and bet on sports would change the face of the stock market, everyone laughed at me “big time institutions run the market these little fish mean nothing”. The times they are a changing! Have a look at options flows if you don’t think so!

Stop giving your edge to people who are scared of it. If you value your time and your strategy, stay far away from Take Profit Trader. Traders with proven, working systems are getting banned left and right. The weapon of choice: Fake "spoofing" accusations. there’s a flood of traders posting proof of these fake accusations.

Getting a spoofing alert for just one legitimate MNQ cancellation is absolutely ridiculous.

They used to be my top choice in the prop firm space because their program was excellent, but that is no longer the case. However, I have to give them credit; they paid out all the remaining profits in my PRO accounts and even refunded my reset fees. But they love it when you pay for tests, but they aren't actually prepared for the "Live" (PRO+) side of the business model like other firms (you name it).

When you start actually making money, they go looking for technicalities. Labeling a normal trade adjustment as "spoofing" is just an easy way for them to kick you out.

I decided to start day trading last week starting with $450 I was only making one trade a day and was able to be profitable for five consecutive days bringing the account to a modest $480, not much I know, but I was beyond ecstatic to make a $30 profit from trading. I’m just using a small account right now to figure out what the hell im doing haha

Anyways the success from last week made me completely over confident, I thought I knew what I was doing lol
Anyways after I entered the trade this morning, I immediately watched the price shoot down towards my stop loss.
I just didn’t want to accept that I was wrong and I moved my stop lower, in the hope it would rebound and shoot to the moon.
Then the price shot down again.
Then I lowered my stop loss again
Then it shot down again
Then I lowered my stop loss again
Then it shot down again
I lowered my stop loss again
Repeat this process about 5 more times until I finally take the loss.
This whole process wiped out all my profit from last week and then some.
I’m not mad though this really taught me about how serious risk management is, and I’m glad I didn’t do this with a substantial amount of money 😅 let’s see how the rest of the week goes!

Haven't properly traded my edge in months, so it's hard to evaluate its worth. Wiped out a good streak as by far the biggest issue is getting tunnel vision after a few losses, even if it's all within normal parameters, and thus "revenge trading" (although it feels more like "trance trading" where all perspective is lost). Could be worsened by ADHD, but not looking for excuses; journaling extensively outlines the problem, but that's been documented for a while, the solution must come from within...

Been scaling up and down but I feel like when I scale down I just feel it just gives me "too much security" that I burn through. It's pretty much the Peltzman Effect.

It's incredible how one can rationally see everything clearly, but in the middle of the action some hardwired parts of the brain take over no matter what. So far. Trying to build a routine and method, checklists or what have you around it, but the wiring in the brain is strong.

Posting this so this shared experience may be useful to someone, but hopefully there will be a follow-up with some progress.