The candles of the pattern are ringed. An invented chart, drawn to show the shape. Not market data.
Also searched astweezer top · tweezer bottom · tweezers candlestick · matching highs · matching lows
How to recognise a tweezer tops and bottoms
- Two adjacent candles with the same low (a bottom) or the same high (a top), or very nearly.
- A fall before a bottom; a rise before a top.
- Often the second candle is the opposite colour to the first.
What it is taken to mean
It is read as the price trying the same place twice in a row and being turned back both times. Traders take the shared high or low as a small level of its own.
What traders check next
- Whether the shared price is one that mattered before. Two candles agreeing in open space is thin evidence.
- The time frame. On a daily chart the price was refused there on two separate days; on a one-minute chart it is two ticks.
- What the next candle does at that level.
Where people go wrong
- Finding tweezers everywhere. On short time frames, and wherever prices are quoted in few decimals, neighbouring candles share a high or low all the time.
- Treating ‘very nearly’ as generously as the eye would like.
- Giving two candles the weight of a tested level. A level touched twice in two periods has barely been tested.
Questions people ask
- Do the two highs or lows have to match exactly?
- The definition says equal. In practice traders allow a very small difference, and the looser the allowance the less the pattern says.
- Is a tweezer bottom a reversal signal?
- No. It describes what buyers and sellers did during those candles. Studies of candlestick patterns find that, taken alone, they predict the next move only a little better than chance, if at all. It is one observation to weigh with others.
The words on this page
An explanation for study. It is not advice, a recommendation or a forecast, and a pattern or a situation described here says nothing certain about what a price will do next.