Harami
A small candle whose body sits entirely inside the previous candle's body — the mirror of engulfing, read as momentum stalling.
Also called: inside bar · bullish harami · bearish harami · harami cross
What it means
Harami is Japanese for pregnant, which describes the shape: a large candle followed by a small one contained within it. Where engulfing says the prior period was overturned, harami says it was not followed through on. Momentum paused.
How small the inside candle must be is the whole question. Too permissive and almost every quiet bar after a big one qualifies, which floods the signal; too strict and the pattern almost never fires.
A Harami Cross is the stricter version where the inside candle is a Doji — a stall with no directional resolution at all.
How OptionLab Pro’s engine uses it
In the live engine
Our body-ratio threshold is 0.30: the inside candle's body must be no more than 30% of the preceding candle's body. It is documented as do-not-raise, because loosening it is the obvious-looking fix when the pattern seems rare and it floods the engine with quiet-bar matches that carry no information.
go/internal/engine/candles.go (harami body ratio 0.30)The common mistake
Where traders get this wrong
Treating any inside bar as a harami. An inside bar is a RANGE relationship; harami is a BODY relationship with a size requirement. Without the size test you are detecting "the next candle was smaller", which happens constantly and predicts nothing.
Go deeper
There is a full lesson on this in the Academy, with an interactive widget and a Hindi translation.
Related terms
Educational and analytical content only. OptionLab Pro is not a SEBI-registered investment adviser or research analyst and does not give buy or sell recommendations. Derivatives trading carries a high risk of loss.