Evening star pattern
An evening star is a three-candle top: a strong up bar, a small-bodied pause, then a strong down bar closing through the midpoint of the first. Enthusiasm, doubt and exit, told across three sessions.
The sequence runs: a substantial up day, buyers in charge; then a small-bodied bar where the advance stalls and conviction goes quiet; then a strong down day that cuts back through the midpoint of the first bar's body, surrendering more than half of its gains. The third bar is the pattern's spine. Without that decisive close into the first candle's gains, the stall was only a rest.
The confirming bar lands last, so a completed evening star is frequently a session old by the time anyone scans for it, and the evening-star preset searches pattern is evening_star within 2 bars for exactly that reason. Of the star pair this is the one most useful to people already holding positions. It prints at the top of an advance by construction, and its message is about names you own: the buyers who drove bar one did not show up for bar three.
The base-rate caution applies here as everywhere. Strong uptrends stage three-bar stumbles and then carry on, and an evening star absorbed within a few sessions is a common sight. The pattern nominates a possible top, the following bars either honour it or retire it, and a close back above the star cancels the story. What the scan page's replay adds is the record of past prints against what actually followed, close to close over 250 sessions with no costs in the arithmetic.
In Sift
Written as pattern is evening_star — or within 2 bars for recent prints. A working scan — stocks completing an evening star in the last two sessions:
where pattern is evening_star within 2 bars1
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
Is the evening star a sell signal?
It is a top-of-advance warning rather than an instruction. The three bars record buyers driving, stalling and then being decisively answered, which is a coherent story of demand exhausting. Strong trends absorb such stumbles routinely, so traders typically treat a fresh evening star as a reason to watch the next few sessions and manage risk.
How is an evening star different from a shooting star?
Scale. A shooting star is one candle, a single session's rejected push higher read from its long upper wick. An evening star is three: an up bar, a pause, and a down bar closing through the first bar's midpoint, which records a completed shift from buyers to sellers. The three-bar version makes the larger and generally stronger claim.