How long should the wick of a pin bar be?

There is no official rule. A common one is that the wick is at least two thirds of the candle's whole range, with the body in the opposite third. In our test we used that rule, plus a requirement that the pin forms at a 20-candle low or high, so that it marks a real extreme.

Is the pin bar a good strategy?

Not by itself in our data. On 4-hour candles, a bullish pin bar was followed by a higher price 24 hours later in 44% to 70% of cases, but with only 33 to 45 cases per market. That sample is too small to separate a real edge from luck, so a pin bar should be a location to study, not a signal.

Where should the stop go on a pin bar trade?

Most traders put the stop just beyond the tip of the wick, plus a small buffer for spread and slippage. Because the wick is long, the stop is often wide, so the position size must be small enough that a stop-out costs only the planned percentage of your account.

What is the difference between a pin bar and a hammer?

They describe nearly the same shape. Hammer, shooting star and hanging man are traditional candlestick names that depend on the preceding trend, while pin bar is the price action name that focuses on the long wick and its location. Both need context and a stop plan.

Pin Bar: How to Spot, Trade and Test a Pin Bar Candle

Q: What is a pin bar in forex?

A pin bar is a single candle with a long wick and a small body, where the wick points into an area that price tried to reach and was pushed away from. A bullish pin bar has a long lower wick, a bearish one a long upper wick. It shows rejection of a price, not a guaranteed reversal.

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A pin bar is a single candle with a long wick and a small body, where the long wick points into a price that the market tried to reach and was pushed away from. A bullish pin bar has a long lower wick, usually at a low; a bearish pin bar has a long upper wick, usually at a high. In our 4-hour data on four markets the bare pin bar landed close to coin-flip results with very few cases, so treat it as a location worth studying, not as a signal.

Disclosure: OnForex may earn a referral commission from Exness links on this page. This is general education, not investment advice.

This guide explains what makes a good pin bar, how to read the wick, where traders look for them, a worked example (including one that failed), what our own statistics say, and how to test the idea yourself.

What is a pin bar?

The name comes from the shape: a long thin "nose" (the wick) sticking out of a small body, like a pin. Each candle records four prices: open, high, low and close. The wick (shadow) is the line beyond the body, and it records how far price travelled and then returned within that period.

GBPUSD 4-hour chart with a bullish pin bar highlighted at a 20-candle low — GBPUSD 4-hour, 24 September - 5 October 2026. The highlighted candle (1 October, 08:00 UTC) has a long lower wick at a 20-candle low and closed near its top. The following candle was a large red one that closed near the pin bar's low, so a stop placed just under the wick would have been hit. Source: OnForex chart from Yahoo Finance hourly prices.

A bullish pin bar says: sellers pushed price down, then buyers took it back up before the candle closed. A bearish pin bar says the opposite at a high. The rejection of a price is the whole message.

Rules we use in testing

There is no official definition. These are the rules in our test and a good starting point for yours:

Part	Rule
Size	Candle range at least 0.5 ATR(14), so tiny candles are ignored
Wick	Long wick at least two thirds of the candle's range
Location	Bullish: the low is the lowest of the last 20 candles. Bearish: the high is the highest of the last 20
Close	Near the opposite end from the wick (follows from the wick rule)

Note that the colour of the body does not matter much: a pin bar with a small red body and a long lower wick still shows rejection of the low.

Pin bar, hammer and shooting star

Traditional Japanese candlestick names are close cousins. A hammer is a small body with a long lower wick after a decline; a shooting star is the mirror at a high. Pin bar is the price action term that puts the weight on the wick and where it sits. If you want a list of named patterns, see candlestick patterns.

What the wick is telling you

The usual reading is that the wick marks a price at which the market refused to stay. If a lot of stop orders sit under an old low, price may spike through them, trigger them, and then reverse as soon as that selling is exhausted. That is the logic of a liquidity sweep: a wick beyond a swing point that closes back inside the range. Many of the best-looking pin bars on charts are sweeps.

This reading is a story about order flow that we cannot see directly. What we can see is price. So the practical question is not "does this pin bar prove a reversal?" but "is this a place where I would want to buy anyway, and where would my idea be wrong?"

Where pin bars matter

A pin bar floating in the middle of a range is noise. Traders usually require at least one of these:

A level. A prior swing low or high, a daily high or low, or a round number (support and resistance).
A sweep. A wick that goes beyond an obvious swing and closes back inside.
A zone from a bigger picture. An order block, or the discount side of a larger range (premium and discount).
A trend that agrees. A bullish pin bar in a higher-time-frame uptrend is a pullback idea (pullback trading); against the trend it is a riskier counter-trend idea.

How traders trade a pin bar

This is a skeleton plan to test, not advice.

Wait for the close. A long wick can still be reversed by a final spike before the candle closes.
Entry options: at the close of the pin bar; a buy stop a few pips above its high (confirmation that price moves away from the wick); or a limit order near 50% of the wick (smaller stop, but it may not fill).
Stop: beyond the tip of the wick plus a buffer for spread and slippage (a stop is executed as a market order and can fill worse in a fast move).
Target: decide in R, your risk unit, before entering (risk-reward ratio).
Size from the stop (position sizing).

A worked example, including a loss

The numbers are read approximately from the GBPUSD chart above and are illustrative.

Pin bar close (entry): about 1.3241.
Tip of the lower wick: about 1.3195.
Stop: 5 pips below the wick, at about 1.3190. Distance: about 51 pips.
Account: USD 3,000. Risk per trade: 1% = USD 30.
Pip value for one standard lot on GBPUSD: roughly USD 10 per pip.
Position size: 30 / (51 x USD 10) = 0.059 lots, rounded down to 0.05 lots.
Target at 2R: 102 pips above, about 1.3343.

What happened next on that chart: the following 4-hour candle was a large red one that closed near the low of the pin bar, and a later candle's wick reached about 1.3186, below the stop. So this trade would have lost 1R, or about USD 30 (a little more if the stop slipped).

This is the point of showing it. A pin bar is a good-looking candle on a chart, but after it appears it only tells you where to put the stop. A trader who risks 1% per trade can take this loss many times, which is why risk per trade is more important than the pattern.

Our data: how did pin bars perform?

We tested pin bars with hourly prices from Yahoo Finance, January 2024 to October 2026 (gold: June 2024 to October 2026, COMEX gold futures), building 4-hour candles from the hourly data. This is the OnForex analysis of those prices. The outcome is the direction of price 6 candles (24 hours) after the pin bar. The baseline is the share of all candles after which price was higher (or lower) over the same period. USDJPY and gold rose over the period, so their "higher" baselines are above 50%.

4-hour, 24 hours later	EURUSD	GBPUSD	USDJPY	XAUUSD
Bullish pin bar: price higher (cases)	44.4% (45)	50.0% (40)	70.0% (40)	51.5% (33)
Baseline: price higher	47.6%	51.4%	55.9%	54.0%
Bearish pin bar: price lower (cases)	64.0% (51)	47.8% (46)	63.6% (22)	44.4% (27)
Baseline: price lower	52.4%	48.6%	44.1%	46.0%

On 1-hour candles there were more cases and no clear edge. Bullish pin bars were followed by a higher price 58.4% (161 cases), 50.6% (166), 49.7% (179) and 49.3% (136) of the time.

Bar chart comparing indicator and candlestick signal outcomes with the baseline on EURUSD — Signal results next to the baseline on EURUSD 4-hour, January 2024 - October 2026. Most signals sit within a few points of the baseline. Source: OnForex analysis of hourly prices from Yahoo Finance.

How to read it

Sample sizes are small. With 22 to 51 cases per cell, the uncertainty in any percentage is large: roughly plus or minus 14 to 20 points at 95% confidence. A 70% result on 40 cases (USDJPY bullish) is entirely consistent with luck.
USDJPY rose in this period, so bullish results there start from a high baseline (55.9%).
The result is not consistent. EURUSD bearish pin bars looked good (64%), while EURUSD bullish pin bars looked worse than the baseline (44%). A real effect would not usually flip like that.
We did not test context such as pin bars at a sweep of a prior high or low on a higher-time-frame trend. That is how many traders use the pattern, and we cannot say if it works.

Conclusion: the bare pin bar is a way to describe rejection, not a signal. Combine it with a plan that you have tested yourself (backtesting).

Common mistakes

Trading every long wick. Without a level, a long wick is just a candle that moved and returned.
Ignoring the stop distance. A long wick means a wide stop. If your size at 1% risk becomes too small to trade, skip the setup rather than shrinking the stop.
Stop exactly at the tip. Price often touches the wick's tip again before moving. Use a buffer based on ATR (ATR indicator).
Counting the winners only. The winning pin bars are easy to find on a chart and the losing ones are quietly forgotten. Record all of them.
Using it as a prediction. A pin bar changes where you place a trade; it does not change the 50/50 nature of the next candle much.
Looking only at the pin bar. Check the bigger market structure first.

Pin bar and its neighbours

Pattern	Idea	Page
Pin bar	One candle shows rejection	This page
Engulfing	A body covers the previous body	Engulfing pattern
Inside bar	Range contracts inside the previous candle	Inside bar
Price action	Reading price without indicators	Price action

How to practise

Pick one time frame and one market. Mark every pin bar that meets your written rule across at least 50 past examples. For each, note the entry, the stop and whether 1R, 2R or the stop came first. Then add one context rule at a time (for example "only at a sweep of the previous day's low") and see whether the results actually change. Only after that, go forward on a demo account. Remember that spreads widen around news releases and at the daily open, which affects tight stops the most.

Practise on a demo account first

Mark structure, FVGs and stops on a free Exness demo account before you risk money. Forex and CFD trading carries a high risk of loss.

Continue to Exness

Forex and CFD trading involves significant risk. You may lose your invested capital.

Risk warning: Forex and CFD trading carries a high risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. You can lose more than your deposit in some cases. Past price behaviour, including the results in this article, does not predict future results. This page is general education and not investment advice.