How to people feel about candlestick patterns as a standalone trading signal? Sample Results inside

I am somewhat familiar with the more common candlestick patterns but have never actually used them other than to confirm a potential trade.

I have been fascinated with some of the websites that track candlestick patterns across various assets (stocks, etfs, forex, etc.) and report their performance. For example, according to this site if you traded Shopify (long and short) based on candlestick patterns alone you would have made 164% return over the past 12 months: http://ift.tt/2u8xRKT

Trading the EURUSD using candlesticks would have netted roughly 100% return: http://ift.tt/2vxeqix

Other instruments such as SPY under-performed mostly because its been in a solid uptrend for the past 12 months so each move to a short position would be a drain on profits.

There are other sites too such as https://scan.alpaca.ai/ which are very interesting to me.

What's the catch? Does this only work for assets that are not trending up?

Submitted August 04, 2017 at 12:08PM by Pennysboat http://ift.tt/2v5L0pn