Bullish engulfing pattern
A bullish engulfing is a two-candle pattern in which an up bar's body completely swallows the previous down bar's body. One session of buying overwhelms the whole of the prior session's selling.
Two bars make it. First a down day, then an up day whose body opens below the previous close and closes above the previous open, so the green body wraps the red one entirely. Everyone who sold during the first session is underwater by the end of the second.
That is what separates it from an ordinary up day. An ordinary up day recovers some ground; this one erases the sellers' entire session and finishes past it, a completed transfer of control inside two prints.
Engulfing candles form constantly, and in the middle of a range they are close to meaningless, so the weight comes from location. Printed where a stock is sitting on a level the whole market watches, the reversal has an audience and a reason. The bullish-engulfing-support scan encodes exactly that: pattern is bullish_engulfing with close within 3% of the 50-day average, so the buyers' takeover happens at a moving average plenty of participants treat as the line.
Two-bar patterns test better than single candles, because they record a finished shift rather than one session's hesitation. The unfiltered base rate is still unimpressive, and an engulfing bar into heavy overhead supply routinely goes nowhere. Run the support-filtered version through the replay on its scan page, 250 sessions close to close with no brokerage or slippage in it, and read what comes back.
In Sift
Written as pattern is bullish_engulfing. A working scan — bullish engulfing candles forming at the 50-day average:
where pattern is bullish_engulfing and close within 3% of sma(50)1
of the 500 most-traded NSE stocks match today, as of 6 Oct 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
How reliable is the bullish engulfing pattern?
Better than most single-candle signals, because two sessions record a completed shift in control. In isolation it still forms constantly and fails often. The record improves markedly with location: at a watched support such as the 50-day average the takeover has context, and the scan page's replay measures that difference across the last 250 sessions instead of asserting it.
What confirms a bullish engulfing pattern?
Traders typically look for the next session to hold the engulfing bar's gains. A close above its high strengthens the case and a close back inside the swallowed red body weakens it. Volume on the engulfing day matters too, since a takeover on heavy participation is a firmer statement than the same shape on a thin tape.
Does the engulfing candle need to swallow the wicks?
No. The standard definition, and the one this scanner uses, compares bodies: the up bar's open-to-close range must contain the previous down bar's. Wicks are excursions that did not hold, so the body-to-body test is the one that captures the real transfer, where every seller of the first session finished the second one underwater.