Dark Cloud Cover: the bearish mirror of the piercing line
An up bar followed by a partial reversal down bar — the same partial-recovery logic as the piercing line, applied at a top.
Dark Cloud Cover is free on Basis — the button opens a live crypto chart with it already applied. No account, no trial and no limit on how many indicators you add.
Open the chartWhat it measures
Dark cloud cover is an up bar followed by a down bar that opens above the first bar’s high and closes below the midpoint of its body, without closing below its open.
Sellers appeared at a fresh extreme and took back more than half of it before the close — a visible shift from the buying that produced the first bar, without going as far as fully erasing it.
How it is calculated
These are the steps Basis performs, verified against the published definition.
- 1
Bar one closes up.
- 2
Bar two opens at or above bar one’s high.
- 3
Bar two closes below the midpoint of bar one’s body but above bar one’s open.
How to read it
- A deeper close below the midpoint reads as a stronger reversal attempt; a close just past the midpoint is marginal.
- Weaker than a bearish engulfing pattern by construction, for the same reason the piercing line is weaker than a bullish engulfing pattern.
- At a level that already carried some significance — resistance, a prior high — the pattern says more than the identical shape appearing with no structure behind it.
- Compare the size of the second bar’s decline against the first bar’s advance — a shallow give-back after a large up bar reads as hesitation, while a proportionally deep one starts to look like real distribution.
- Two dark cloud covers within a few bars of each other, at roughly the same price, describe sellers repeatedly defending a level rather than one bar that happened to fit the shape.
Where it misleads
The same gap dependence as the piercing line applies here — crypto rarely opens meaningfully above the prior high, so most real-world matches use a looser overlap condition. Reading a marginal midpoint close as a confirmed reversal overstates how much ground the pattern actually gave back.
Plot Dark Cloud Cover on a live chart
Basis core charting is free: every indicator and chart type, plus order flow, derivatives, screening and backtesting. No account is needed to open a chart; Founders is an optional membership for additional research tools.
Open a chart with Dark CloudRelated indicators
Updated 2026-08-27 · Educational reference, not financial advice.