Three black crows pattern
Three black crows are three consecutive strong down bars, each closing near its low — persistent, orderly selling with no panic in it, read as a campaign of distribution rather than a single bad day.
Three substantial red candles in succession, each finishing near its low, make the pattern. What distinguishes it from a crash is its composure: there is no capitulation spike, no washout wick, no single outsized bar — just a seller returning every session with more to do and pressing to each close. One big down day is an event that may exhaust itself; three consecutive controlled ones are a campaign, and campaigns imply the seller was not finished when the third bar ended.
The pattern's reputation rests on what it is not — there is no panic in it to fade, which removes the mean-reversion buyer's usual comfort. Because the third bar completes it, the finished pattern is often a session old when a scan runs, and the site's three-black-crows preset accounts for that: pattern is three_black_crows within 2 bars, so a print completed yesterday still surfaces. For holders, it is less a shorting prompt than the tape's clearest early notice that distribution is underway.
Its failure mode mirrors the soldiers': three hard down days leave a stock short-term oversold, and the sessions immediately after often bounce — acting on the third crow's close is frequently selling the local low. The pattern describes the seller's persistence; it does not time the exit. The hit-rate replay on the scan page replays past prints against what followed, which is the fair test of whether the crows kept flying or the bounce came first.
In Sift
Written as pattern is three_black_crows — or within 2 bars for recent prints. A working scan — stocks completing three black crows in the last two sessions:
where pattern is three_black_crows within 2 bars1
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 do three black crows mean?
Persistent, controlled selling. Three consecutive strong down bars, each closing near its low, record a seller who came back every session and pressed to the close — a campaign rather than a shock. The absence of panic is the point: there is no capitulation spike to fade, which suggests the selling was deliberate and possibly unfinished.
How reliable are three black crows?
As a description of what just happened, entirely; as a forecast, mixed. Three hard down days leave a stock short-term oversold, so an immediate bounce is common even when the larger decline continues — reacting on the third close often sells the local low. The replay on the scan page shows how past prints actually resolved over the following sessions.