Candlestick Patterns
Concealing Baby Swallow
Every habit in this library exists because I paid tuition for the mistake first.Jason Parker, Founder of Trading Habits
A rare four-candle bearish continuation. Two black marubozu, a candle that gaps down below the second one but pokes an upper wick back into its body, then a fourth candle whose body swallows the third one whole, wick and all.
Drag the four cards into order
Seven candle cards sit in the tray below, four belong in this pattern and the rest are decoys with the wrong color, the wrong open, or a body that doesn't fully cover the one before it. Drag a card into each of the four slots, in order. On desktop, drag and drop directly. On touch, tap a card to select it, then tap a slot to place it. The badge checks the genuine open, high, low, and close of whatever sits in each slot the instant all four are filled.
Fill all four slots to run the containment check.
How it works
- Candles one and two are near-full black marubozu. Open near the high, close near the low, almost no wick either side. Two of them back to back is already an aggressive, one-directional decline.
- Candle three gaps down below candle two's close, then pokes an upper wick back into candle two's body. It has to open below candle two's real body low (a genuine gap down, not an open inside the body), stay black by closing lower than it opened, and its high has to reach back up into candle two's real body, not just approach it.
- Candle four's genuine body has to cover candle three completely. Not just the body, the whole thing including the upper wick. Its open has to sit at or above candle three's high, and its close has to sit at or below candle three's genuine body low.
- Containment is checked on the numbers, not the picture. A card that looks close in the tray can still fail the moment its genuine open, high, low, and close get compared against the slot next to it.
- This is genuinely rare. Most traders will go long stretches of intraday charts without ever seeing a clean, textbook version of this exact four-candle sequence. Treat this drill as a lesson in what "concealment" means structurally, not a signal worth actively hunting for.
Where this breaks
Rarity itself is the risk, not just the trade
A pattern this specific shows up so infrequently that waiting for a clean textbook version means waiting through long stretches where nothing qualifies at all. Traders who go looking for it tend to loosen the rules without noticing, accepting a candle three that opens near but not inside candle two's body, or a candle four whose genuine body covers most but not quite all of candle three's upper wick. Once the rules bend, the statistical basis for treating it as a distinct four-candle continuation signal is gone, and what's left is closer to a generic strong-trend continuation read that didn't need this much specificity to identify in the first place.
