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Abandoned Baby

Patterns candlestick reversal rare

A rare and high-confidence three-candle reversal pattern. A long candle is followed by a Doji that gaps away from it ("abandoned"), which is itself gapped away from a strong reversal candle in the opposite direction. The isolated Doji visually demonstrates a complete vacuum of conviction.

Visual Example

Abandoned Baby (bullish): long bear candle, gapped-down Doji (abandoned), then gapped-up strong bull candle that closes well into the first candle's body. Annotations highlight both gaps.

Synthetic ideal satisfying TA-Lib CDLABANDONEDBABY gap + Doji isolation rules. Generated 2026-05-31 IST via docs/gen_candle_previews.py.

Description

The Abandoned Baby is the candlestick equivalent of a "blow-off" or capitulation followed by immediate rejection. Because two gaps are required, it is statistically rare but carries significant weight when it appears.

Practitioners treat confirmed Abandoned Baby events as high-conviction regime-shift signals suitable for larger position sizing or as premium labels in ML datasets. It pairs exceptionally well with Market Structure BOS flips.

Formula / Specification

Recognition Rules (exact implementation in QuantWave / TA-Lib CDLABANDONEDBABY):

  1. Candle 1: long body in the direction of the prior trend.
  2. Candle 2: Doji that gaps away from Candle 1 (no overlap in ranges).
  3. Candle 3: strong opposite-color body that gaps away from the Doji.
  4. The Doji is "abandoned" on both sides.
  5. Pattern completes on bar 3; TA-Lib sign convention.

Parameters

Parameter Default Description
(none) — Pattern recognition only; no tunable parameters.

Usage Examples

Streaming (Rust/Python) and Polars examples follow the three-bar multi-input pattern (use CDLABANDONEDBABY / .ta.cdl_abandonedbaby(...)). Full parity across surfaces.

Edge Cases & Limitations

  • Warm-up: first 14 bars may return NaN or partial state per implementation.
  • Parameter sensitivity: smaller periods increase noise; larger periods increase lag.
  • Sudden gaps or bad ticks can distort rolling windows — consider pre-filtering.
  • Single-series indicators ignore volume unless otherwise documented.
  • Validated via proptests against gold-standard vectors where available.
  • No look-ahead bias; streaming and Polars batch paths are bit-identical.

Boundary Behavior

Condition Behavior
Warm-up Pattern functions emit 0 (no pattern) until enough bars exist.
period > len Short series returns all zeros (no pattern detected).
NaN inputs Bars with NaN OHLC are treated as no pattern (0).
Invalid params N/A for most candlestick patterns.
Empty data Empty input returns an empty integer series.

Sources & References

Primary Source: TA-Lib CDLABANDONEDBABY via quantwave-core/src/indicators/pattern.rs.

Visual: docs/gen_candle_previews.py, 2026-05-31 IST.

Context: Nison (1991) for "abandoned" psychology (no duplication). MQL5 PA series.

Provenance: Next + Polars parity.