Bullish harami pattern
A bullish harami is a two-candle pattern in which a small up bar sits entirely inside the previous large down bar's body. After heavy selling, the decline simply failed to continue.
The geometry inverts the engulfing idea: a big red bar first, then a small green one contained wholly inside it. The second session opens above the prior close and never leaves the previous body's shadow. Nothing dramatic happens. A decline stopped declining, and the sellers who owned yesterday could not follow through even once today. Where an engulfing bar overwhelms the prior session, the harami only refuses it, which makes it a quieter and earlier form of the same shift.
Refusal signifies only after real selling, so the pattern belongs on charts that have already fallen. Halfway down a healthy pullback it is a rest stop. After a sharp and extended decline it is the first session in which the sellers' control lapsed, and the bullish-harami preset draws that line with momentum: pattern is bullish_harami with RSI(14) under 45, which confines the signal to charts washed out enough that a failure to continue lower is actually news.
I have never traded a harami on its own and I do not know anyone who has. A small green bar inside a large red one is usually the pause before the next leg down, which is why it tests weaker than the engulfing pattern and why the bars after it have to build on it before the story holds at all. The replay on the scan page is the corrective: 250 sessions of the oversold-filtered version, close to close, with no costs or slippage in it.
In Sift
Written as pattern is bullish_harami. A working scan — bullish harami candles on washed-out charts:
where pattern is bullish_harami and rsi(14) < 401
of the 500 most-traded NSE stocks match today, as of 25 Sept 2026
Scans that use it
Prebuilt scans in the library whose query reads this pattern — each with a hit-rate replay over the last 250 sessions.
Common questions
What does a bullish harami indicate?
That a decline failed to continue. After a large down day the next session opened higher and spent the whole day inside the previous bar's body, so sellers had every opportunity to press and did not. It is an early and tentative sign of the selling exhausting itself, and it means most on charts that have already fallen hard.
What is the difference between a harami and an engulfing pattern?
They are geometric opposites. In an engulfing pattern the second bar swallows the first, an active takeover. In a harami the second bar hides inside the first, a failure to follow through. The engulfing is the stronger and later claim; the harami is the quieter and earlier one, and it tests weakly without a context filter.
How reliable is the bullish harami?
Poorly on its own, because small inside bars after big declines are frequently just pauses before more selling, and what usefulness it has comes from printing where RSI shows the chart genuinely washed out.