Bullish harami pattern
A bullish harami is a two-candle pattern in which a small up bar sits entirely inside the previous large down bar's body — after heavy selling, a session where the decline simply failed to continue.
The geometry inverts the engulfing idea: a big red bar first, then a small green one contained wholly inside it. The second session opens above the prior close and never leaves the previous body's shadow — no dramatic reversal, just a decline that stopped declining. That is the harami's specific claim: the sellers who owned yesterday could not follow through even once today. Where the engulfing bar overwhelms the prior session, the harami merely refuses it — a quieter, earlier form of the same shift.
Refusal only signifies after real selling, so the pattern belongs on charts that have already fallen. Halfway down a healthy pullback it is a rest stop; after a sharp, extended decline it is the first session in which the sellers' control lapsed. The site's bullish-harami scan draws that line with momentum: pattern is bullish_harami with RSI(14) under 45, confining the signal to charts washed out enough that a failure to continue lower is actually news.
The harami is among the gentler reversal claims — hesitation is not accumulation, and a small green bar inside a large red one is often just the pause before the next leg down. It tests weaker than the engulfing pattern for exactly that reason, and needs the following bars to build on it before the story holds. The hit-rate replay on the scan page is the corrective: run the oversold-filtered version across past sessions and let the base rate speak.
In Sift
Written as pattern is bullish_harami. A working scan — bullish harami candles on washed-out charts:
where pattern is bullish_harami and rsi(14) < 401
of the 500 most-traded NSE stocks match today, as of 20 Aug 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
What does a bullish harami indicate?
That a decline failed to continue. After a large down day, the next session opened higher and spent the whole day inside the previous bar's body — sellers had every opportunity to press and did not. It is an early, tentative sign the selling is exhausting, meaningful mainly on charts that have already fallen hard.
What is the difference between a harami and an engulfing pattern?
They are geometric opposites. In an engulfing pattern the second bar swallows the first — an active takeover. In a harami the second bar hides inside the first — a failure to follow through. The engulfing is the stronger, later claim; the harami is the quieter, earlier one, and it tests weaker without a context filter.
How reliable is the bullish harami?
On its own, poorly — small inside bars after big declines are frequently just pauses before further selling. Its usefulness comes from context: printed where RSI shows the chart genuinely washed out, the failure to continue lower means more. The replay on the scan page lets you check how often the filtered version has marked an actual turn.