Shooting Star Candlestick Pattern: How to Spot It and Trade It

If the hammer marks sellers losing control at the bottom of a downtrend, the shooting star is its mirror image at the top of an uptrend — same shape, opposite location, opposite implication.

What a shooting star looks like

• A small body near the bottom of the candle's range.
• An upper wick at least twice the length of the body.
• Little to no lower wick.
• It appears after a clear uptrend — without that context, it's just a candle with a long upper wick.

The story it tells: price opened, buyers pushed it well above the open during the session, and then sellers stepped in hard enough to drag it back down near where it started before the close. Buyers were winning for most of the period and lost that lead by the end.

Why the uptrend is non-negotiable

The same shape sitting in a sideways range or partway down a downtrend isn't a shooting star in any meaningful sense — the pattern's implication depends entirely on it showing up after a run-up, where a rejection of new highs actually tells you something about buyers running out of demand.

What confirms it

• The next candle. A strong red candle closing below the shooting star's low adds real weight to the reversal case.
• Volume. A shooting star on unusually high volume suggests genuine distribution, not a quiet, low-conviction wick.
• Where it forms. A shooting star at a level that was already a resistance zone carries more information than one in open space.

The mistake to avoid

Same failure mode as the hammer, just flipped: treating the shooting star itself as the entry signal instead of waiting for the next candle to confirm the shift. One candle is one data point. Size the trade — and the confidence — accordingly.