When a hammer is only furniture
Lower wicks look persuasive until you measure them against the prior impulse and the session’s location.
A hammer prints. The lower wick is long, the body sits near the high, and the chat channel fills with green emojis. Then price drifts sideways for two hours and your stop is tagged on a routine pullback.
The silhouette was never the problem. Location was. A hammer that appears after a shallow three-bar dip inside a quiet range is decorative — furniture on the chart. The same geometry after a decisive sell impulse into a prior demand zone asks a different question: did sellers exhaust, and is the next bar willing to defend the low?
In our drills we force a two-line note before any label: (1) what happened in the bars that built the move into this candle, and (2) where this bar sits relative to structure you already respect. If either answer is vague, the hammer stays unnamed until the following close.
Try this on your next Taiwan morning session: ignore the first hammer you see unless you can point to the impulse that preceded it with your finger on the screen. The habit feels slow. It also cuts the furniture from the furniture store.