The hammer and shooting star are single-candle shapes defined by a small body and one long wick. This guide explains how traders identify each pattern, what the long wick is often read to suggest about a session, and why context and confirmation matter. Educational only — these shapes are not signals to act on and nothing here is predictive. Trading carries risk of loss.
Both patterns are single candles built from the same parts: an open, a high, a low, and a close. What makes them distinctive is the proportions.
A hammer has a small real body near the top of the candle's range and a long lower wick (shadow) extending below it. A common rough guideline traders use is a lower wick roughly two or more times the height of the body, with little or no upper wick. The body can be green or red; the shape matters more than the colour.
A shooting star is the vertical mirror image: a small real body near the bottom of the range and a long upper wick extending above it, with little or no lower wick.
In plain terms, a hammer describes a session where price was pushed well below the open but came back up to close near where it started. A shooting star describes a session where price was pushed well above the open but came back down to close near the lower end of the range. That is a description of one session's path — nothing more.
Identification is the objective part, and it helps to make your rules explicit so you label candles the same way every time. A simple, transparent set of measurements:
A hammer is a candle where the lower wick is large relative to the body and the upper wick is small. A shooting star flips that: a large upper wick relative to the body and a small lower wick.
Here is a short Pine v6 snippet that flags candles meeting one example definition. The exact ratios are illustrative, not a recommendation — choose thresholds that fit the instrument and timeframe you actually trade, and remember that flagging a shape says nothing about what price will do next.
//@version=6
indicator("Hammer & Shooting Star (educational)", overlay = true)
body = math.abs(close - open)
upWick = high - math.max(open, close)
lowWick = math.min(open, close) - low
// Example ratios only — adjust to your own definition
isHammer = body > 0 and lowWick >= 2 * body and upWick <= body
isStar = body > 0 and upWick >= 2 * body and lowWick <= body
plotshape(isHammer, title = "Hammer", style = shape.triangleup, location = location.belowbar)
plotshape(isStar, title = "Shooting Star", style = shape.triangledown, location = location.abovebar)This only labels the shape. It does not judge whether the candle means anything — that depends entirely on context, covered next.
The long wick is the whole story of these candles, so it is worth being precise about what it does and does not tell you.
For a hammer, traders often read the long lower wick as a sign that sellers pushed price down during the session but were unable to keep it there by the close. For a shooting star, the long upper wick is often read as buyers pushing price up but failing to hold the gain into the close.
Notice the framing: these are interpretations of what already happened, not forecasts of what comes next. A single candle cannot tell you who will be in control in the next session. Many candles that look like textbook hammers or shooting stars are followed by continuation in the original direction rather than a reversal. The shape recording a rejection in one session is not evidence that the rejection will hold.
This is why many traders treat these candles as a prompt to pay attention, not as an instruction. Nothing about the pattern is predictive, and any single candle can be followed by a move in either direction. These shapes are educational context only — they are not buy or sell signals, and trading on them carries a real risk of loss.
The same shape carries very different weight depending on where it appears, which is why two identical-looking candles are not interchangeable.
Location in the trend. A hammer that forms after a sustained decline is often read differently from one that appears in the middle of a sideways range — in the range, the long wick may be just noise. The candle's shape is constant; the situation around it is not.
Proximity to a level. Traders frequently give more attention to a hammer or shooting star that forms near a price area they were already watching, such as a prior swing high or low. The candle on its own adds little; some traders find the candle plus the level more informative.
Timeframe. A shooting star on a 1-minute chart and one on a daily chart describe rejections of very different scale. Neither is automatically more 'valid' — but they are not the same event, and treating them identically is a common mistake.
None of this turns the pattern into a signal. Context can make a candle more interesting to a trader, but it never removes the uncertainty about what happens afterward.
Because a single candle is just one session, many traders who study these patterns wait for the next candle or two before drawing any conclusion. One common approach is to watch whether the following candle continues in the direction the wick might imply — for example, whether price stays above a hammer's range or below a shooting star's range. Waiting is a way of letting the market disagree with your read before you commit to it.
It is also worth being honest about base rates. These candles are common. Most of them lead nowhere in particular, and no candle shape has a reliable success rate you can count on. Treating every hammer or shooting star as meaningful will produce far more noise than insight, and acting on each one mechanically can compound losses quickly.
A grounded way to think about it: identification is mechanical and you can automate it, as the Pine snippet shows. Interpretation is judgment, and judgment has to account for trend, level, timeframe, and what the next candles do. Even with all of that, the outcome is never certain. These shapes are a lens for reading what already happened, not a tool for predicting what comes next, and trading always carries the risk of loss.
Educational only — not financial advice. Trading involves substantial risk of loss.