We talked about candlesticks before, identifying certain types like so: >I remember those shaven bottoms! Pay attention. We even had a couple of spreadsheets that looked for certain types of candles, like hammers and dojis ... but we never looked for 2- or 3-day patterns.

>Can you just show the spreadsheet?
Okay, but first an explanation of what we're looking for:

You download a bunch of stock data (5 years worth). You choose four successive candle patterns like this, for example: Then you click a button and the spreadsheet will try to find a matching pattern in the downloaded data. However, it only checks two things: Does the data have 4 successive days with the same colours (Red or Green)? Red means the Close is lower than the Open. Green means the stock closes higher than the Open. Is the Body/Shadow ratio the same as the Search Pattern? In the example on the right, the Body/Shadow Ratio is 0.567 for the Reds and 0.233 for the Green.

Figure 1

>And you expect to find exactly those ratios in the downloaded data? Good luck!
I agree ... that's unlikely, so:

• The spreadsheet has a couple of "Factors": F and G which you can specify.
• If the Body/Shadow Ratio of a specified candle is R, the spreadsheet looks for Body/Shadow Ratios in the downloaded data satisfying:
  G R ≤ Body/Shadow Ratio ≤ F R.
  In the example (Figure 1), R = 0.567. If G = 0.5 and F = 1.5 the spreadsheet will identify red candles where:
  0.5 (0.567) ≤ Body/Shadow ≤ 1.5 (0.567)   that is   0.28 ≤ Body/Shadow ≤ 0.84.

>Can you just show the spreadsheet?

>What are all those buttons?
Click on the picture, download the spreadsheet and play with them.