Inside Bar

An inside bar is a candlestick whose entire range — both its high and its low — sits within the range of the previous candle, known as the mother bar. It tells you the market traded in a narrower band than before, which usually means volatility has contracted and buyers and sellers are temporarily balanced. Price-action traders treat the pattern as a coiled spring: a break above the mother bar's high or below its low is used as an entry trigger, with the opposite side of the mother bar as a natural stop reference. Inside bars, also called inside days on daily charts, appear very often on lower timeframes and many lead nowhere, so traders filter them by trend context and by where the pattern forms.