Inside Bars & Compression: 1-1, 1-1-1, and 3-1-1
One inside bar is a pause. Two in a row is a coil. Three in a row is a market wound so tight it almost never happens — and the rarer the compression, the more energy the eventual break carries. Range contraction leads to range expansion; that cycle is as close to a law as charts offer.
Why compression matters
Each consecutive inside bar means both trigger levels tightened again: buyers and sellers agreeing on a narrower and narrower battlefield. Every coiled bar adds participants waiting on a break — and when it comes, all of that pent-up order flow resolves in one direction. The break of a triple inside carries three bars' worth of waiting crowd.
The 3-1-1: violence, then silence
The 3-1-1 starts with an outside bar — a two-sided stop run — then compresses twice inside it. Violence, then silence. The eventual break inherits the outside bar's energy, and its trigger levels are unusually clean because the whole sequence lives inside the mother bar's range.
Trading the break
Compression setups arm BOTH directions: the break of the final inside bar's high is the long trigger, its low the short trigger, and no opinion is required in advance. Stop at the 50% of the broken bar, first target at the compression's origin extreme. The canon names follow the sequence: a triple inside breaking up is a 1-1-1-2 up; a 3-1-1 breaking down is a 3-1-1-2 down.
See it live, right now
Every concept on this page is detected in real time across 190+ tickers — candle typing, trigger levels, and alerts the second a level breaks.
FAQ
How rare is a triple inside bar?
Rare enough to be notable whenever it prints — three consecutive range contractions. On daily charts and above, a scanned watchlist of 140 names may only produce a handful per year.
Is an inside bar bullish or bearish?
Neither. Compression is directionless by definition; the information arrives with the break. That is why both triggers are armed and the first level to go decides the trade.
What is a 1-1-2?
A double inside resolving: two inside bars, then a directional break of the second one. The triple-inside version (1-1-1-2) and the outside-bar version (3-1-1-2) are the deeper-compression variants.
Keep learning
Educational content, not financial advice. Patterns describe probabilities, not promises.