Morning Star and Evening Star
A three-candle reversal — a strong candle, a small-bodied star gapping away from it, then a strong candle the other way.
Also called: morning star pattern · evening star pattern · abandoned baby · star formation
What it means
A Morning Star is a long down-candle, a small-bodied candle that gaps below it, then a long up-candle closing well into the first candle's range. The star is the hinge: selling ran out of force, and the third candle confirms the handover. An Evening Star is the mirror at a top.
The gap is the requirement people drop. Without it the pattern is just three candles that happen to go down, pause and go up — which describes a large fraction of all price action and predicts nothing.
An Abandoned Baby is the strict form where the star gaps away on BOTH sides and its wicks do not overlap the neighbours at all. Rare, and far stronger.
How OptionLab Pro’s engine uses it
In the live engine
The star's body must genuinely gap away from the prior close — for a Morning Star the body top must sit at or below the prior close times 1.002, so a tiny tolerance for tick noise is allowed and an overlapping body is not. Abandoned Baby is checked BEFORE Morning and Evening Star, so the stronger formation is reported when it qualifies rather than being absorbed into the looser one.
go/internal/engine/candles.go (star gap requirement, Abandoned Baby priority)The common mistake
Where traders get this wrong
Calling any down-pause-up sequence a Morning Star. The gap is what distinguishes exhaustion from an ordinary pullback, and Indian index charts gap less often intraday than the textbook examples do — so a detector with no gap test fires constantly on 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.