# Shooting star candlestick

> A shooting star is a candle with a long upper wick and a small body at the bottom of the range — a session where buyers pushed price well up and lost all of it by the close.

Canonical: https://patternsradar.com/learn/shooting-star

The geometry is a small body at the base of the bar with a long shadow rising above it. During the session, buyers had price well above the open — and could not hold an inch of it. By the close the advance had been sold back to where the day began. The bar records a failed attempt higher: demand showed itself, supply answered, and supply won. It is the hammer's mirror, told from the sellers' side.

The failure carries weight only where there was an advance to fail. A long upper wick in a falling chart just restates the downtrend; one printed at the top of a run is buyers reaching and being refused in public. The site's shooting-star-top scan supplies that setting: pattern is shooting_star with RSI(14) above 60, which places the candle at the end of an advance — the one location where a rejected high is news.

Like its inverted twin, the shooting star fails often without context, and even the filtered version is a single session's evidence against a trend that may simply pause and resume. A close above the star's high retires the signal. The honest way to weigh it is the hit-rate replay on the scan page: run the extended-chart version against a year of history and see how often the rejected high actually marked one.

## In Sift

Written as `pattern is shooting_star`. A working scan — stocks printing a shooting star after a run:

```sift
where pattern is shooting_star and rsi(14) > 60
```

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

## Scans that use it

- [Shooting star after a run](https://patternsradar.com/screener/shooting-star-top.md): A long upper wick with RSI above 60 — buyers tried and could not hold it.

## Common questions

### Is a shooting star always bearish?

No. The bar records one rejected advance, and strong uptrends absorb rejected advances routinely — price often pauses a session or two and continues. The pattern earns attention when the chart is already stretched, which is why the scan pairs it with RSI above 60. Even then it is a warning to watch, not a verdict.

### What is the difference between a shooting star and an inverted hammer?

Same geometry — small body low, long upper wick — different location. After an advance the shape is a shooting star, read as a failed push higher; after a decline it is an inverted hammer, read as early buying pressure. The scanner detects the shape; a momentum filter such as RSI tells you which chart it printed on.