Hammer candlestick pattern
A hammer is a candle with a long lower wick and a small body at the top of the range. Sellers drove price well below the open during the session and buyers took all of it back before the close.
A small body sits at the top of the bar with a long shadow hanging below it. That shadow is the story. At some point in the session sellers had price far under the open, and by the close every bit of that ground had been retaken, which makes the bar a record of a sell-off attempted and rejected inside one day. Supply showed up and demand absorbed it at a price the whole market could see.
The rejection only means something if there was real selling to reject, so context does most of the work here. A hammer in the middle of a quiet range is noise. A hammer after a decline is the first measurable evidence that the decline met a buyer, and the hammer-oversold scan builds the distinction in with pattern is hammer and RSI(14) under 40, so the long lower wick has to print on a chart that has actually fallen far enough for a rejection to matter. Hammers are common, and without that condition the shape alone tests close to chance. Even in context it is a one-session claim that the following bars have to honour, and a close back below the hammer's low cancels the story outright.
In Sift
Written as pattern is hammer. A working scan — stocks printing a hammer while oversold:
where pattern is hammer 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
Is a hammer candlestick bullish?
It leans bullish in the right place and means very little anywhere else. The long lower wick records a sell-off that was fully bought back, which is worth something after a decline and close to nothing mid-range. Screened with an oversold condition such as RSI under 40, the shape at least points at charts where the rejection has something to reverse.
What is the difference between a hammer and a hanging man?
The bar is identical: small body on top, long lower wick. The name changes with location. After a decline it is called a hammer and read as a rejected sell-off; after an advance the same shape is called a hanging man and read as a warning. The scanner flags the geometry, and a context filter like RSI supplies the location.
How reliable is the hammer pattern?
Alone, poorly. Hammers print constantly and most of them lead nowhere. The record improves when the chart is genuinely washed out, which is why the preset pairs the shape with RSI under 40, and rather than quote a folklore percentage the replay on that scan page reports what the filtered version did across 250 sessions, close to close and before any costs.