Upside gap two crows: the bearish pattern that leaves its gap open

The upside gap two crows is a rally that gaps higher and then prints two black candles that refuse to go further, while the gap underneath them stays open. The first crow is a small black body sitting above the gap. The second crow opens even higher, then sells off hard enough to swallow the first crow's body, yet still closes above the last white candle.

That final detail is what makes the pattern unusual. Most bearish formations finish by breaking something. This one ends with the gap intact, so the evidence is subtler: two attempts to extend the advance were both sold, and the second sell-off was bigger. Nison lists it among the gap patterns that warn of a top after a strong advance.

This page sets out the anatomy, the rules TA-Lib applies, the exact differences from Two crows candlestick pattern: how it forms and how often it fails, a winning and a losing case, and statistics on 18 detections, which is too few to judge reliability but enough to show how varied the pattern is in practice.

Anatomy of the upside gap two crows

Read it from left to right:

1. The white candle. A long up day inside a rally.
2. The gap and the first crow. The next session opens above the white close, trades around, and closes slightly lower. Its small black body sits wholly above the white body, leaving a gap.
3. The second crow. The third session opens above the first crow's open, a last push higher, and then falls through the first crow's close. Its black body engulfs the first crow's body. It closes above the white candle's close.

In the classic telling, the market has now failed twice above the gap, with a larger failure on the second try, and it sits just above an unfilled gap that the next leg down would close.

The exact rules Finabase uses

Finabase runs TA-Lib's CDLUPSIDEGAP2CROWS on daily bars:

What to notice:

"Engulfs" means the body only. The third open must be above the second open and the third close below the second close. Shadows are ignored, both here and in the gap test.

The third body has no minimum size. It only has to be larger than the first crow's, which follows from engulfing it. A $1 black candle can qualify when the first crow is a few cents tall.

There is no trend filter. In our sample only 55.6% of detections followed a ten-session rise. The rest came in flat or falling markets, where a small gap up and two black candles say little about a top.

Why two crows above a gap worry traders

Gaps up are where impatient buyers pay up. A small black candle right after the gap shows those buyers getting no follow-through: the session closes below its own open. That alone is mild.

The second crow sharpens it. The open is higher again, which brings in a second wave of buyers, and then the session reverses through the first crow's whole body. Two groups of buyers who paid above the white close are now holding losses, and the most recent group is losing the most. The only thing propping up the picture is the open gap; if it fills, those holders tend to sell.

That is why the textbook reading is bearish even though the pattern itself closes higher than the white candle. The pattern is about trapped buyers, not about how far price has already fallen.

Confirmation

• The gap fills. A close below the white candle's close is the classic follow-up.
• A close below the second crow's low, which is the confirmation rule our statistics use; 7 of the 18 cases met it.
• Resistance or a stretched trend. The pattern carries more weight after a large run, as in the Intel case below.
• Momentum fading, such as a lower high on the Relative Strength Index (RSI): how to read and use it while price makes a higher high.

A case that worked and one that did not

Intel, January 15, 2026. INTC had climbed 30.9% in ten sessions. On January 13 it closed at $47.29 on a $1.40 white body. On January 14 it gapped to $48.95 and closed at $48.72, a 23-cent black body well above the white close. On January 15 it opened higher still at $49.35, touched $50.39 and closed at $48.32, engulfing the first crow while staying above $47.29. The next close was $46.96: the gap filled, and the close sat below the pattern's low, confirming it. Five sessions after the pattern the stock was 6.7% lower; after ten sessions, 3.8% lower. A steep run, two failed pushes and a filled gap is about as close to the textbook as real data gets.

Alphabet, November 18, 2025. GOOGL printed the same three-candle shape with a $5.00 white body on November 14, a small black body on November 17 that sat $8.61 above the white close, and a larger black candle on November 18 that closed at $284.28, above the white close. The difference was context. The stock had risen only 2.4% over the previous ten sessions, so there was no extended rally to exhaust. The next session closed at $292.81, above the whole pattern, and ten sessions later Alphabet was up 12.4%. The gap never filled.

What the data says

CDLUPSIDEGAP2CROWS fired 18 times on 16 of the 60 symbols over two years of daily bars (October 30, 2024 to October 29, 2026).

The hit rate is above the baseline, ten cases out of eighteen, but the average five-session return is still positive because the misses included sharp rallies such as Alphabet's (+13.8% in five sessions) and AMD's in June 2025 (+13.3%). After ten sessions the average was flat. Confirmed cases averaged a 0.98% decline from the confirmation close, with 4 of 7 lower.

How it differs from two crows and other look-alikes

The two crows siblings share the white candle and the black body above it. They part company on day three: two crows opens inside the first crow and falls into the white body; the upside gap version opens above the first crow and stops short of the white body. One closes the gap, the other only threatens to.

An educational outline

How practitioners typically use the pattern. It isn't a recommendation to trade.

1. Demand a real advance first. Intel's 30.9% run made the pattern meaningful; Alphabet's 2.4% did not.
2. Watch the gap. A close below the white candle's close fills it and is the natural trigger. Until then, the pattern is only a warning.
3. Invalidate above the second crow's high. A close there means buyers absorbed both attempts to sell.
4. Expect a small sample of signals. At roughly nine detections a year across 60 large stocks, this is a pattern you will see rarely, which is all the more reason not to lean on it alone.

How Finabase shows the upside gap two crows

• Chart markers. The Upside Gap Two Crows study marks the second crow on every daily bar where TA-Lib finds the pattern.
• Scanner. TA-Lib always returns −100, so stocks completing it appear on the bearish list.
• Signals tab. In the Candlestick gauge on a symbol page, for example AAPL's signals, a detection in the last eight bars counts as one Sell vote out of 61 patterns. The gauge computes (buy − sell) / (buy + sell + min(neutral, max(buy, sell))) and reads Strong Sell below −0.6, Sell below −0.2, Neutral below 0.2, Buy below 0.6 and Strong Buy otherwise.

Frequently asked questions

Why is a pattern that closes above the white candle considered bearish?

Because of who is trapped. Two waves of buyers paid above the white close, and both sessions closed lower than they opened. The open gap below is where those buyers would start to give up.

Does the gap have to stay open?

Yes, in TA-Lib's definition the third close must be above the white close. If it closes inside the white body, the formation is a different pattern, Two crows candlestick pattern: how it forms and how often it fails.

How rare is it?

Very. It appeared 18 times in 29,760 daily bars of 60 large US stocks and ETFs, less than once per symbol in two years.

What invalidates the pattern?

A close above the second crow's high. At that point the selling on both crow days has been absorbed and the advance has resumed.

Summary

The upside gap two crows shows buyers paying up above a gap twice and losing both times, while the gap itself stays open as a last line of support. Intel's January 2026 example shows the pattern at its best, after a steep run and with the gap filling the next day. Alphabet's November 2025 example shows the same shape without the context, and it led nowhere. With only 18 occurrences in two years on 60 large US names, the data cannot rank the pattern; context, the gap fill and a defined invalidation level carry the weight.