# 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 that overwhelms the whole of the prior session's selling.

Canonical: https://patternsradar.com/learn/bullish-engulfing

The geometry takes two bars: first a down day, then an up day whose body opens below the previous close and closes above the previous open — 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: it does not merely recover, it 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 — the pattern's weight comes from location. Printed where the stock is sitting on a level the whole market watches, the reversal has an audience and a reason. The site's bullish-engulfing-at-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 — but the unfiltered base rate is still unimpressive, and an engulfing bar into heavy overhead supply routinely goes nowhere. The pattern is the trigger; the location is the reason to care. The hit-rate replay on the scan page turns that claim into a number: run the support-filtered version over a year of sessions and read the result.

## In Sift

Written as `pattern is bullish_engulfing`. A working scan — bullish engulfing candles forming at the 50-day average:

```sift
where pattern is bullish_engulfing and close within 3% of sma(50)
```

1 of the 500 most-traded NSE stocks match today, as of 2026-08-21.

## Scans that use it

- [Bullish engulfing at support](https://patternsradar.com/screener/bullish-engulfing-support.md): An engulfing candle forming while the stock sits on its 50-day average.

## Common questions

### How reliable is the bullish engulfing pattern?

Better than most single-candle signals, because it records a completed shift in control across two sessions — but in isolation it still forms constantly and fails often. Its record improves markedly with location: at a watched support such as the 50-day average, the takeover has context. The scan page's replay lets you measure that difference rather than assume 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, a close back inside the swallowed red body weakens it. Volume on the engulfing day matters too: a takeover on heavy participation is a stronger 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: every seller of the first session finished the second one underwater.