The Candlestick Trading Bible
Uncredited (no author name appears anywhere in the text, and the PDF has no copyright page) · 2018 · 168 pages
This is a candlestick pattern glossary dressed up as a trading system. The anatomy lessons on pin bars, engulfing bars, and inside bars are clean and usable, but every chart shown is a winner, and the book never once proves the method makes money.
The one idea
The book's thesis is that candlestick patterns are a readable language: a pin bar, an engulfing bar, or an inside bar (the Harami) each show a specific fight between buyers and sellers, and if you learn to read that fight, you can predict what happens next. Reading the pattern alone is not enough, though. The author's real argument, buried past the halfway point of the book, is that a pattern only means something when it lines up with three things at once: the higher-timeframe trend, a real support or resistance level, and a clean signal candle sitting on top of it. That stacking of conditions is what the book calls confluence.
The second half of the book turns that idea into three named strategies (trading the pin bar with the trend, trading the engulfing bar with the trend or in a range, and trading the inside bar and its false breakout) plus a money management chapter. The money management chapter is where the book is most concrete: it argues that a trader can lose 7 out of 10 trades and still come out ahead if the reward-to-risk ratio is high enough, and it walks through the arithmetic to prove it.
What it actually teaches
The book's actual sequence, once you strip out the 36 pages of pattern anatomy, runs like this.
READ THE MARKET STRUCTURE
Decide, using the 1H, 4H, daily, or weekly chart only (never a smaller timeframe), whether the market is trending (a repeating pattern of higher highs and higher lows, or the reverse), ranging (bouncing between a horizontal support and resistance), or choppy (no identifiable boundaries, and the book says to just close the chart). The book cites a statistic that trends occur roughly 30% of the time, so most of what you will see is range or chop.
MAP THE LEVELS
Draw support and resistance from prior swing points, and draw trend lines by connecting at least two swing points on the 4H or daily chart. Add the 8 and 21 simple moving averages as dynamic support and resistance in a trending market, and mark the 50% and 61% Fibonacci retracement zones as the areas where the book says major pullbacks tend to end.
WAIT FOR A SIGNAL AT A LEVEL
Only act on a pin bar, engulfing bar, or inside bar that forms at one of the levels above and points in the direction of the higher-timeframe trend. The book offers two entry styles: the aggressive entry (enter immediately on the signal candle's close) and the conservative entry (wait for price to retrace 50% into the signal candle before entering), which it says can produce more than a 5:1 reward-to-risk ratio but will sometimes leave you out of the trade entirely.
CONFIRM AGAINST THE HIGHER TIMEFRAME
Before entering, check the next timeframe up (weekly before trading the 4H, daily before trading the 1H). The book's own worked example shows a clean bullish pin bar on the daily chart that failed because an unseen weekly resistance level was directly overhead; the top-down check is presented as the fix for that specific failure.
SIZE AND MANAGE THE TRADE
Take only setups with at least a 2:1 reward-to-risk ratio, put the stop loss beyond the tail (pin bar) or body (engulfing/inside bar) of the signal candle, and target the next support or resistance level. Risk no more than 2% of account equity per trade, or 1% if you are a beginner. The book's case study: ten trades at 3:1 reward to risk, seven losers at $200 each (-$1,400) and three winners at $600 each (+$1,800), nets +$400 despite losing most of the trades.
What it looks like Monday morning
A reader who has never looked at a candlestick chart before gets real value Monday morning: they will be able to name and recognize a pin bar, an engulfing bar, an inside bar, a doji, and the morning/evening star, and explain the buyer-seller psychology behind each one without having to cross-reference three other sources. That is a genuine, usable skill, and the book teaches it cleanly with side-by-side chart illustrations.
What they will not get is a system they can risk money on as written. The book gives no win rate, no sample size, no drawdown, and no losing trade shown from entry to exit; the only quantified example in the entire text is a hypothetical arithmetic case study, not a trade log. Before sizing a single position off this method, a reader needs to backtest the confluence rules (trend plus level plus signal) on their own market and timeframe rather than trusting that the pattern-recognition skill alone will translate into profit.
| Outcome | Trades | Per-trade P/L | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Losers | 7 | -$200 | -$1,400 |
| Winners | 3 | +$600 | +$1,800 |
| Net | 10 | +$400 |
This is the only quantified result in the book, and it is hypothetical arithmetic built to illustrate a 3:1 reward-to-risk ratio, not a record of real trades.
Trading is a game of probabilities, there is no certaintyThe Candlestick Trading Bible (author uncredited)
Where it fails
- No verifiable author or edition. The PDF has no copyright page, no ISBN, and no author name anywhere in the 168 pages; only the file's embedded metadata (created 2018-05-04) gives a date to work from. A reader cannot check what a later 'edition' changed, because there is no confirmed baseline to compare against.
- The method is asserted, never demonstrated. The pin bar chapter states outright that a signal can 'fail for unknown reasons' and that 'quality price action setups don't exist in the market' in any provable sense, then moves on. There is no win rate, no forward test, and no losing trade walked through start to finish anywhere in the book.
- Every chart example is a winner. All illustrated setups (pin bar, engulfing bar, inside bar, moving average confluence, Fibonacci confluence) resolve in the predicted direction. The only quantified loss scenario in the book is the hypothetical 7-loss/3-win arithmetic in the money management chapter, which is math, not a real trading record.
- Money management examples assume a retail forex account. Position sizing is taught entirely in pips, mini lots, and micro lots (page 162's example uses a $250 account trading 10-cent mini lots), so a stock, futures, or crypto trader has to redo the sizing logic from scratch; nothing in the book translates directly.
- Buried method, heavy padding. The tradable content (confluence, top-down analysis, money management) does not begin until page 79 of 168. The first 65 pages are candlestick anatomy and two self-test exercises, much of it repeated across near-identical chapter closings ('open your charts and practice').
- Pure price-action-on-liquid-pairs has gotten harder since 2018. The book's premise that a trader can manually draw support, resistance, and trend lines on 4H and daily forex charts and find a repeatable edge predates the scale of algorithmic execution now dominant in the most liquid retail-accessible pairs; nothing in the text engages with that shift.
Who it is for
Buy it if
You have never learned to read a candlestick chart and want a plain-English, well-illustrated glossary of the core reversal and continuation patterns, plus a basic introduction to trend, support/resistance, and position sizing by percentage risk.
Skip it if
You already know candlestick basics, or you are looking for a tested strategy with a quantified win rate, drawdown data, or a real (not hypothetical) trade log. Stock, futures, or options traders will also find the money management chapter written entirely around forex pip and lot mechanics that do not carry over.
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