Breakaway candlestick pattern: five candles that close a gap

The breakaway is a five-candle reversal pattern about a gap that fails. A trend produces one more long candle, then the next session gaps further in the same direction. For two or three more sessions price keeps edging that way, but with less conviction. On the fifth day a candle of the opposite color pushes all the way back into the gap that started the move.

The name describes the second candle, which "breaks away" from the first with a gap. The point of the pattern is that the breakaway does not last. By the time the fifth candle closes inside the gap, the market has rejected the acceleration that the gap seemed to promise.

This page explains how the five candles fit together, the precise test Finabase runs, the trading logic, two real cases from 2025 and 2026, and an honest look at the seven breakaways that appeared in two years of data on 60 large US names.

Anatomy of the pattern

Take the bullish version, which appears after a decline:

1. Candle 1: a long black candle, in keeping with the decline.
2. Candle 2: another black candle whose body opens below candle 1's body, leaving a gap between the two bodies.
3. Candle 3: any color, with a lower high and a lower low than candle 2.
4. Candle 4: black, again with a lower high and a lower low.
5. Candle 5: a white candle that closes inside the gap, above candle 2's open but below candle 1's close.

Candles 2 to 4 are the breakaway leg. They move in the trend's direction but in small steps. Candle 5 erases them and stops in the hole left by the gap, without filling it completely.

The bearish version reverses every color and direction: a long white candle, a gap higher, two sessions with higher highs and higher lows, and a black fifth candle that closes inside the gap.

The exact rules Finabase uses

Finabase's breakaway markers come from TA-Lib's CDLBREAKAWAY, applied to daily bars:

Compared with the books, three choices stand out.

Body gaps only. TA-Lib asks whether the second body sits wholly beyond the first body. Shadows may overlap. A breakaway can therefore appear on a chart where the high–low bars show no visible gap at all.

Only candle 1 has a size test. The fifth candle does not need to be long, though most descriptions picture it as a strong candle. It only has to close in the right zone.

No trend context. The source comment notes that the pattern is significant against a trend opposite to the last candle, and that the function does not check this. In our data all four bearish detections did follow a ten-session rise, and two of the three bullish ones followed a decline, but that came from the market, not from the detector.

The psychology behind the gap and the snap-back

Gaps feel decisive. When a falling stock opens below the previous day's entire body, sellers read it as acceleration and late buyers give up. The pattern's middle candles show what happened next: the trend continued, but each session made only a little more progress than the one before, with smaller ranges and no new burst. Momentum was fading even though the direction had not changed.

The fifth candle is the response from the other side. In one session it recovers the ground lost since the gap and closes in the gap itself. Traders who sold on the gap are now holding a losing short or have sold below the current price, and the open space in the gap becomes a target for the reversal. The excitement that produced the gap has worn off, and the fifth candle is the evidence.

Confirmation

The fifth candle stops inside the gap, so the obvious test is whether the next sessions finish the job:

• Gap fill. For a bullish breakaway, a close above candle 1's close fills the gap completely and shows buyers have taken back the whole breakaway leg.
• Follow-through beyond the fifth candle. A close above candle 5's high (bullish) or below its low (bearish) is the simple rule our study uses. None of the seven detections met it on the next session.
• Location. A breakaway that ends at a prior support or resistance level, or after a stretched move far from a moving average, carries more weight than one in the middle of a range.

Two real breakaways

AMD, October 30, 2025. AMD had climbed 8.6% in ten sessions. On October 24 it printed a long white candle from $243.36 to $252.92. On October 27 it opened at $257.88, a gap above that body. October 28 and October 29 both set higher highs and higher lows, and then October 30 opened at $259.92 and closed at $254.84, inside the gap between $252.92 and $257.88. Five sessions later AMD was 6.7% lower. The textbook case, with one caveat: ten sessions out, the stock had recovered to 2.7% below the breakaway close.

Cisco, May 6, 2026. Cisco drew the same shape on a smaller scale. A long white candle on April 30 closed at $91.50, the May 1 body opened at $91.75, and two more sessions pushed slightly higher. On May 6 a black candle closed at $91.64, right inside the narrow $0.25 gap. Cisco then rose for five straight sessions and gapped up about 15% on May 14. Ten sessions after the breakaway it was 24.8% higher. A pattern built on a quarter-dollar gap carried little information, and the trend it seemed to reverse simply continued.

What the data says

CDLBREAKAWAY found only seven breakaways across 60 US large caps and ETFs between October 30, 2024 and October 29, 2026.

Two of three bullish breakaways rose over five sessions, yet the average return was negative because the one failure was large. One of four bearish cases fell; the average bearish breakaway rose 6.1% over ten sessions, driven mostly by Cisco.

Patterns that resemble it

The breakaway's signature is the slow middle: two or three sessions that keep going in the trend's direction with shrinking enthusiasm before the reversal candle arrives.

An educational outline

The pattern is rare enough that most traders meet it a few times a year across a large watchlist. A practitioner's approach might look like this. It isn't a recommendation to trade.

1. Check the gap is meaningful. Measure it against the stock's typical daily range. A gap of a few cents, like Cisco's, says little.
2. Look for the gap fill. Treat a close beyond candle 1's close as the trigger, not the fifth candle itself.
3. Set risk at the breakaway extreme. For a bullish breakaway, the lowest low of candles 2–4 is where the reversal would be proven wrong.
4. Expect volatility. The fifth candle is often long, and the distance to the stop can be large; size the position from that distance.

How Finabase shows breakaways

• On a chart: the Breakaway study marks the fifth candle of each pattern on daily bars. Scroll back through a few years of a stock's history and you will usually find only a handful.
• In the candlestick scanner: detections are split by the sign of TA-Lib's result, so +100 cases appear under bullish and −100 cases under bearish. On most days both lists are empty for this pattern.
• On the Signals tab: the Candlestick gauge on a page like AAPL's signals gives each of the 61 patterns one vote, taken from its latest non-zero output in the last eight bars. A breakaway therefore counts as Buy or Sell for eight sessions after the fifth candle, then drops back to Neutral.

Frequently asked questions

Does the breakaway have to start with a gap?

Yes. The gap between the first and second bodies is the defining feature, and the fifth candle must close inside it. TA-Lib checks body gaps only, so overlapping shadows are allowed.

Can the third candle be either color?

In TA-Lib, yes. Only candles 1, 2 and 4 must share a color, and candle 5 must be the opposite. Candle 3 only needs the lower high and lower low (or higher high and higher low).

Is a bigger fifth candle better?

Practitioners prefer it, because a long reversal candle shows more force, but TA-Lib does not require it. You can judge the fifth candle's size yourself against recent candles.

How often does a breakaway appear?

Rarely. Seven times in two years across 60 heavily traded US stocks and ETFs, or about once every 17 stock-years.

Summary

The breakaway tells a story of a gap that promised acceleration, a few sessions of fading follow-through, and a reversal candle that returns into the gap. Finabase detects it with TA-Lib's five-candle test, which looks at body gaps, ignores the size of the final candle and leaves the prior trend to you. The pattern is so rare that our two-year sample holds only seven, split between clean wins like AMD in October 2025 and sharp failures like Cisco in May 2026. Measure the gap, wait for it to fill, and keep your risk at the far end of the breakaway leg.