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What Is an Inside Bar

An inside bar is a candle whose high and low both sit inside the previous candle's range: a period that stayed inside the one before it. This paper shows you one drawn from two real days, the rule from highs and lows alone, the inside day as a path that never touched the walls of the day before, the widest day of the year with a large inside bar tucked into it, and how to draw the two walls on your platform.

Difficulty
Beginner
Reading time
5 min
Pages
8
Reviewed by
Saman Rahbar

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The mother bar and the inside bar

An inside bar is a candle whose whole range fits inside the candle before it: its high is at or below the previous high and its low at or above the previous low. The previous candle is called the mother bar. On 11 March 2025 the euro against the dollar ranged 114 pips — a pip being the fourth decimal place, the smallest step most people count in — and on 12 March it ranged 56, every one of them inside the day before. The shape records a period that did not leave the room the last period built.

The rule

The rule uses the high and the low and nothing else. The bodies and the colours are ignored, which makes this the easiest shape on the shelf to spot: a green mother with a red inside bar, a red mother with a green one, an inside bar whose body is bigger than the mother's — all of them count, so long as the high and the low stay within the mother's. A candle whose high pokes even a pip above the mother's high is not one, however small the rest of it is.

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