Shooting star and hanging man

Same shapes, different neighborhood

If you already understand the hammer and inverted hammer from lesson one, you mostly understand the shooting star and hanging man. The shapes are the same. What changes is where they show up. A shooting star looks like an inverted hammer: small body at the bottom of the range and a long upper wick at least twice the body, with little or no lower wick. The difference is that a shooting star appears after an uptrend, not after a drop. That location is what gives it bearish meaning. Price tried to push higher, sellers pushed it back down, and the candle closed near the low of its range.

A hanging man flips that pairing. It has the same shape as a hammer — small body at the top, long lower wick at least twice the body, minimal upper wick — but it also appears after an uptrend. Visually it looks like a bullish rejection candle. Structurally, in the context of an uptrend, it can be a warning. Sellers were able to drag price meaningfully lower during the bar before buyers pulled it back. The fact that sellers had any presence at all near the top of a run is what makes the candle worth noticing.

Both patterns share the same honest limit: on their own, they are weak signals. The base-rate edge of any single candle is small. What gives them value is confluence — an obvious uptrend, a previous resistance level being tagged, declining momentum nearby, and a confirming next candle that closes lower. Without those, you are looking at one candle making a shape. With them, you have a working hypothesis that the trend may be tiring.

A practical reading habit: when you spot any of these single-candle rejection patterns, take three seconds to label the context out loud. Is there a clear trend? Where is price relative to nearby structure? What is the next candle doing? If you cannot answer those quickly, the shape is not telling you anything actionable yet.

Recap: shooting star = inverted-hammer shape after an uptrend. Hanging man = hammer shape after an uptrend. Same geometry, different neighborhood, different meaning.