Pin bars are a simple price action candlestick pattern that can indicate a strong imbalance of supply and demand that can be used on any currency pair or other instrument.
Used in conjunction with support and resistance or other technical analysis tool to give you trading context, pin bars can give excellent trade entries with an obvious stop loss position.
Any trading strategy that uses a pin bar would be well served to use a pin bar indicator for ease of scanning for trades. You can download a MT4 pin bar scanner below but let’s take a look at what a pin bar candlestick looks like.
Some will call a pin bar a “fakey setup”.
Silly name and quite frankly it’s not a fake whatsoever. Price looks for areas of liquidity as a matter of course and the pin bar just indicates when liquidity was found.
What Is A Pin Bar Candlestick?
Just as the name says, we are looking for a candlestick that has the shape of a “pin”. Specifically, the shadow is a pin and the body is small.
Don’t be too concerned with the color of the candlestick body. It is the long shadow or tail we are looking for. The pin bar tail tells us a story.
Using a bullish pin bar as an example, price opens and bears take control and drop price lower. Once price reaches a certain area such as a support area, the bulls take over and drive price back up towards the opening price. This has the effect of wiping out the bears that shorted.
We call this a pin bar reversal.
This is a simple illustration. Price may have taken a few different roads to end at the close where it did.
It is possible for:
- Bulls take over at the open driving price higher
- Bears step in and drive price lower
- Bulls regain control and close the pin bar above its close
Take note of #1. This is one pin bar strategy you can use where price drops to a support area and is then rejected forming a pin bar.
This trading strategy may have you entering at the market upon close and placing your stop below the low of the pin bar candlestick
Installing The MT4 Pin Bar Indicator
Installing the pin bar indicator is straight forward:
- File
- Open Data Folder
- Open MQL4
- Open the indicators folder
- Drop in the file contained in the zip file
The new versions of Metatrader make it very easy to install any custom indicator into the indicators folder.
Once the install has been completed, open up any chart and click “View” from the menu bar and click “Navigator” which will open on the left side of Metatrader.
Simply drag and drop the file “pin” into the folder.
Pin Bar Indicator On Your Chart
Here’s what it will look like when you place this Pin Bar indicator on your charts:
- A bearish pin bar will be a red arrow otherwise known as an inverted hammer which is a bearish pattern
- A bullish pin bar will be a green arrow otherwise known as a hammer which is a bullish pattern
Why Use A Pin Bar Reversal Trading Strategy?
Pin bars, show a drastic change in market sentiment and when you see pin bars forming in areas of support or resistance levels, or Fibonacci levels or pivot levels, you should take note.
The key to trading the pin bar is also understanding how and why it forms.
Take for example a bullish pin bar…it has a very long tail…do you know what caused it to have such a long tail?
If you were sitting and watching the full time how this pin bar was forming then this is what you may have seen occur:
- Pin bar opened up and possibly would have moved up and formed a high just above its opening price
- Bears (Sellers) came in with such ferocity and took the price down to form a low way below the opening price.
- Bulls (Buyers) came in also with such ferocity and took the price up from it low all the way up to close a few pips below its opening price or close a few pips above its opening price.
So, the greatest advantage of trading with pin bars is the fact that you see who is in control by using the price action of the pin bar.
Would You Trade All Pin Bar Candlesticks?
No. As shown in this graphic again, we want to only trade pin bar reversals in certain locations on the chart as we do at the number 1 below which indicates a support area. Pin bars are just as valid at resistance which makes them great for a support and resistance trading strategy.
We also want to look at a higher time frame chart like a 60 minutes, four hour, daily charts to spot a pin bar in the Forex market. There is a lot of noise trading on lower time frames and any bar formation is much more reliable on a higher time frame chart.
Where else can your trade pin bars?
- Fibonacci levels
- Trend line touches
- Pivot levels
In fact, you can use a pin bar in many of the swing trading strategies featured on this website as a means of a trading entry.
Download Your Metatrader Pin Bar Indicator
There are a few pin bar indicators you can download but the best one I think is the one you can download here. It’s very simple as opposed to the other ones where there are inputs that you can change.
Keep it simple! We are using this indicator as a scanning tool only. Your pin bar trading strategy is what is important.
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