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Trading the Shark Pattern
Presenting and Trading the Shark Harmonic Pattern
Harmonic Patterns are one of the powerful advanced price action techniques that are used to detect reactions. The thing that works about Harmonic Patterns is that they use the confluence method, meaning that they expect reactions from clusters of certain levels defined by Fibonacci retracements.
The reason they work has nothing to do with mystic or magic whatsoever, it is simply the fact that Fibonacci retracements are used by many traders and their visibility makes reactions more likely, thus increasing the predictive power of the patterns. However, only using Harmonic Patterns on their own might not be sufficient as we will see below, they are best combined with contrarian indicators to increase the chances of a profitable trade.
Introduction to the Fibonacci Sequence
Leonardo Bonacci, known as Leonardo Fibonacci has developed a sequence out of rabbit mating which formed the basis for many mathematical observations. The sequence follows this distinct pattern:
The numbers are found by adding the previous two numbers behind them. In the case of 13, it is calculated as 8 + 5, hence the formula is:
The beauty of these numbers is a certain ratio, called the golden ratio. If we take any two successive numbers in the sequence, their ratio (Xn / Xn-1) gets closer to 1.618 which is what we call the golden ratio:
It is not important how we got to trading from these patterns as much as how important they are, therefore, we will discuss the ratios from a financial trading perspective. Let us keep the 1.618 in mind as for the moment it is one of the two most important ratios that we will use in trading. Our job now is to find the rest of the significant ratios useful to us in trading. They are all variations of 1.618 and its reciprocal 0.618. Notice how the reciprocal of 1.618 is simply 0.618. A reciprocal is when you divide 1 by the number. The below table summarizes the rest of the ratios and how we got them:
