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Testing The Bullish Hikkake Pattern On US Stocks

LOREM IPSUM DOLOR SIT AMET

The Hikkake pattern is a simple price action or candlestick pattern that is used to find market turning points.

The pattern is essentially an inside day with a fake breakout and is originally credited to Daniel Chesler CMT.

The website oxfordstrat also talks about the Hikkake pattern and shows some robust performance in some futures markets.

In this post, we will test the pattern to see if it has any profit potential when applied to US stocks.

Bullish Hikkake Pattern Rules

For this test I will define the rules of the Hikkake Pattern as follows:

  • The first bar is an inside bar
  • The second bar has a lower high and a lower low than the first bar

The formula I will be using for this pattern is as follows:

BullishHikkake = (Low[1] > Low[2] AND High[1] < High[2]) AND (Low[1] AND High < High[1]);

Following is an example of the bullish Hikkake pattern in action in CBS. Here we go long on the open after the pattern and exit five days later:

Bullish hikkake example trade in CBS

Testing the Bullish Hikkake Pattern

Before devising any sophisticated trading strategy it is a good idea to first test the raw profit potential of the pattern on the historical data without any money management or transaction costs.

I therefore tested all occurrences of the Hikkake pattern on S&P 500 stocks between 1/2008 – 1/2018 and produced the following results with a 1-day holding period. Entries are executed on the next day open following the pattern:

Bullish Hikkake pattern results one

You can see that buying a Hikkake pattern on the next day open and exiting one day later produced an average profit of 0.03% per trade on S&P 500 stocks with a 51.56% win rate. You can also see that this is an extremely common pattern.

Unfortunately, this result is no better than the benchmark result (average daily profit for all stocks in the sample) and is not large enough to cover transaction costs.

Next, I tested the pattern on the same sample of stocks but increased the holding period:

Bullish Hikkake pattern results two

You can see that we get a larger average profit of 0.37% per trade if we extend the holding period to five days. We are doing better than the benchmark result now and the win rate has crept up to 55%.

Full Table Of Results

Following you can see a table of results of my full research into the Hikkake pattern. I ended up testing three different stock universes across three holding lengths.

You can see that the only good result came with a 5-day holding period on S&P 500 stocks (0.37% average profit):

Conclusions

In this article we looked at the profitability of the Hikkake candlestick pattern when applied to US Stocks. Unfortunately, we did not find any real edge with this pattern.

This is a very common pattern that likely needs a lot more refinement.

This pattern compares unfavourably with some of the other traditional patterns that I analysed in the course Candlestick Analysis for Professional Traders.

It may work in other settings but in our analysis we did not find much edge.

Simulations in this article produced with Amibroker with data from Norgate Premium. Data is adjusted and assumes no transaction costs. All trades executed on the next day open.


Comments (1)

You tested the pattern in a way that is inconsistent with how the pattern was originally designed. Hikkake patterns require confirmation via price move up and through the high of the inside day (for bull variety) or down and through the low of the inside day (bear variety).

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