Counterattack lines: matching closes after a strong move

Counterattack lines, also called meeting lines, are two long candles of opposite color that close at the same price. In the bullish version a long red candle is followed by a long green candle that opens far below and claws its way back exactly to the previous close. In the bearish version a long green candle is followed by a long red one that opens far above and falls back to the same close.

The name describes the action well. The second session opens as a continuation of the trend, with a large gap in its favor, and the other side launches a counterattack that erases the whole gap by the close. The two closes "meet" at one price. Nothing beyond the prior close is retaken, which is why traditional sources treat counterattack lines as weaker than a Piercing line pattern: how it forms, TA-Lib rules and track record line or an Engulfing candlestick pattern: bullish and bearish rules and data pattern.

This page covers the shape, the tolerance TA-Lib uses to decide that two closes are "equal", two real cases from March 2025, and an honest report on a pattern that appeared only 47 times in 29,760 daily bars.

What counterattack lines look like

The bullish form has three parts. A decline delivers a long red candle that closes near its low. The next session gaps much lower, extending the slide, and that is where the sellers peak. From the open, buyers lift price all session long, producing a long green body that ends at the prior close. On the chart the two bodies sit side by side, joined at the top of the green body and the bottom of the red body.

The bearish form flips it: a long green candle at the end of an advance, then a gap up, then a long red body that sells all the way back to the green close.

Both bodies should be long. A counterattack built from small candles is just two quiet days with matching closes, and it carries none of the sense of a reversal in force.

The exact rules Finabase uses

Finabase's markers, scanner and gauge call TA-Lib's CDLCOUNTERATTACK:

How tight is "equal"?

The tolerance scales with the stock's recent volatility. If the five sessions before the first candle averaged a $4.00 range, the closes must be within 20 cents of each other. On a stock averaging a $0.50 range, the tolerance is under 3 cents. That makes the test consistent across prices: closes must be practically identical relative to how much the stock normally moves in a day.

What TA-Lib leaves out

No explicit gap. Textbooks describe the second candle opening with a large gap in the trend's direction. TA-Lib does not test it. In practice the gap is nearly implied: a long green body that ends at the prior red close must have opened well below that close. It need not have opened below the prior low, though, and that is a looser condition than the piercing line's.

No trend. The pattern reports +100 or −100 wherever it appears. In our sample 70.8% of bullish cases followed a ten-session decline, but only 38.1% of bearish cases followed a ten-session advance, so most bearish counterattacks were not in the textbook spot.

Direction from the second candle. Unlike the Harami candlestick pattern: the inside body and what it signals or Doji star candlestick: a gapping doji after a long candle, whose sign comes from the first candle, the counterattack takes its sign from the candle that counterattacks.

The battle inside the second session

The bullish version is a story of a failed breakdown that is reversed, but only so far. After a long red day, sellers open the next session with a large gap down. It is the most bearish open of the move. Then buyers spend the entire session taking that gap back. By the close the market is exactly where it ended the previous day, as if the gap never happened.

What makes the pattern interesting is the precision. The market did not merely bounce. It returned to a specific price, yesterday's close, and stopped there. Some traders read that as a market finding equilibrium: the level where the previous session's sellers were content becomes the level where today's buyers stop pushing.

What makes the pattern weak is the same thing. The counterattack only cancels the gap. It does not reach into the prior body, as a piercing line does, or cover it, as an engulfing does. The bears' gain from the first candle stays intact.

Confirming a counterattack

• Next-session follow-through: for the bullish version, a close above the green candle's high; for the bearish one, a close below the red candle's low. This is the rule our study uses.
• Size of the gap. The larger the opening gap that was reclaimed, the more effort the counterattack represents.
• Location. A counterattack at known support or resistance, or at a prior swing point, has more to work with.
• Momentum. An Relative Strength Index (RSI): how to read and use it that turns with the pattern adds weight.

Given how few counterattacks occur, confirmation and context carry nearly all of the judgment.

Two counterattacks from March 2025

Intel, March 24, 2025 (bearish, worked, unconfirmed). Intel had risen 21.5% in ten sessions. On March 21 it closed at $24.26 after opening at $23.60, a long green body. On March 24 it opened at $24.72, well above that close, and slid to $24.22, four cents from the prior close. TA-Lib scored it −100. The next session closed at $24.20, just above the red candle's $24.13 low, so the close-below-the-low rule was not met. Over the next ten sessions, which included the early-April 2025 market sell-off, Intel fell 19.2% and traded as low as $18.56.

Caterpillar, March 31, 2025 (bullish, failed). On March 28 CAT fell from $337.00 to $329.69. On March 31 it opened at $325.63, dropped to $322.00, then rallied to close at $329.80, eleven cents from the prior close. It was one of three bullish counterattacks on that date in our sample, alongside META and QQQ, a sign of a market-wide intraday recovery. The next close, $330.57, stayed under the green candle's $331.98 high, so the pattern never confirmed. Five sessions later, after the April 2025 tariff announcements, CAT was 15.1% lower and had traded at $267.30. A stop below the counterattack's $322.00 low would have limited the damage.

What the data says (very little)

We ran CDLCOUNTERATTACK over 60 large US stocks and ETFs from October 30, 2024 to October 29, 2026, and measured each signal against every day in the sample.

Percentages cover the cases with five sessions of data after them (24 bullish, 21 bearish). Returns are price changes, so positive averages after bearish signals mean the stocks rose.

On these numbers, both versions went the wrong way more often than the right way. But look at the case counts. With 25 and 22 signals, a single market event can swing the whole table. The bullish group includes three signals on March 31, 2025, all of which ran straight into the April sell-off. The bearish group includes four on April 8, 2025, the day before the market's large rebound. Leave out just those two dates and, by our recount, both hit rates rise by roughly five to eight points, most of the way back to their baselines.

Counterattack lines among the two-candle reversals

One more relative is worth knowing: separating lines, in which the second candle opens at the first candle's open and runs in the trend's direction. Meeting lines share a close and suggest reversal, separating lines share an open and suggest continuation.

An educational outline for counterattack lines

This shows how the pattern is commonly framed. It is not a recommendation.

1. Check both bodies. Two genuinely long candles after a clear move.
2. Require follow-through. A close beyond the second candle's range in its direction.
3. Invalidation at the second candle's extreme. For a bullish counterattack, below its low, the deepest point of the failed gap.
4. Size from that distance, and use prior support or resistance for a target.

How Finabase shows counterattack lines

• On charts. Add Counterattack to a chart (the CAT chart link has it on). In two years, 28 of our 60 symbols showed none and only 12 showed more than one.
• In the scanner. A green second candle (+100) puts the stock on the Bullish list, a red one (−100) on the Bearish list. On most days both lists are empty.
• In the signals gauge. On a symbol's Signals tab (CAT, for instance) the counterattack votes Buy or Sell in the Candlestick gauge if it fired within the last eight bars, and Neutral the rest of the time, which is almost always.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between counterattack lines and a piercing line?

How far the second candle gets. Counterattack lines stop at the prior close. A piercing line goes past the midpoint of the prior body. The piercing line is considered stronger.

Are counterattack lines and meeting lines the same pattern?

Yes. Both names describe two opposite-colored candles with the same close. TA-Lib calls the function CDLCOUNTERATTACK.

How equal do the closes have to be?

In TA-Lib, within 5% of the average daily range of the five sessions before the pattern. On most large stocks that means a difference of a few cents to a few tens of cents.

Is the counterattack a reliable signal?

There is not enough data to say. In our two-year test of 60 large names it appeared 47 times, and the results were dominated by a few clustered market days.

Summary

Counterattack lines are two long, opposite-colored candles with the same close: a gap in the trend's favor that the other side erases exactly, and no further. TA-Lib checks the two body lengths and an equal-close tolerance of 5% of the recent average range, takes its sign from the second candle, and ignores both the gap and the prior trend. The pattern is rare, and in our sample its 47 cases were too few and too clustered to judge. If you see one, treat it as the least committed of the two-candle reversals and look for the next session to show which side really won.