Falling wedge

Reversal shape66 completed examples in the record

What the shape is

Two converging downward-sloping boundaries, the mirror of a rising wedge. Its rate decays with time here — 57.6% at five bars, 47.0% at twenty — which suggests a short-lived effect rather than a durable one.

What followed it

HorizonExamplesTextbook directionMedian changeMiddle half
5 bars6657.6%+0.85%-0.68% … +2.76%
10 bars6653.0%+1.58%-0.06% … +4.15%
20 bars6647.0% at or below a coin flip+1.72%-1.39% … +7.25%
60 bars6645.5% at or below a coin flip-1.87%-7.71% … +5.86%

10 instruments, 1d / 4h, 2017-08-17 to 2026-07-25 — 182,341 bars and 661 completed formations.

engine v1.0.0 · Record generated 2026-07-25

  • These figures describe past occurrences of the same shape. They are not a projection of this chart.
  • 661 formations is not a large sample, and the instruments are correlated USDT pairs, so the effective sample is smaller still.
  • Below 30 examples no rate is printed at all.
  • Changes are close-to-close and exclude fees, funding and slippage.
  • Medians and quartiles pooled across instruments are sample-weighted approximations, not exact pooled quantiles.
  • A formation is timed from the bar its break became observable, and every change is measured strictly after that bar.
  • Pooled across every instrument and both backtest timeframes.

The same shape, split by interval

Interval 1d

HorizonExamplesTextbook directionMedian changeMiddle half
5 bars16too few examples+3.14%+0.59% … +5.68%
10 bars16too few examples+6.29%+3.34% … +8.86%
20 bars16too few examples+9.75%+4.75% … +16.49%
60 bars16too few examples-7.34%-14.41% … +11.94%

Interval 4h

HorizonExamplesTextbook directionMedian changeMiddle half
5 bars5054.0%+0.11%-1.09% … +1.83%
10 bars5050.0% at or below a coin flip+0.07%-1.15% … +2.64%
20 bars5044.0% at or below a coin flip-0.85%-3.36% … +4.30%
60 bars5048.0% at or below a coin flip-0.12%-5.56% … +3.91%

The backtest covered the daily and 4-hour intervals only. Only one shape reaches the publication floor on the daily, against eight on the 4-hour — so every pooled rate above is in practice a 4-hour statistic. The console scans five intervals; the three not listed here have no historical record at all.

How it is detected

Formations are matched against swing pivots rather than raw bars, so a single spiky candle cannot create one. A pivot is committed only once price reverses by more than 2.5 times ATR(14), floored at 0.8% of price. A detection is reported only at confidence 0.72 or above — the library default, unmodified.

Falling wedge in crypto: the measured record | Chart Intel