A single inside bar on M15 appears many times a day and carries little information. A chain of two or three nested inside bars inside the same mother bar is less common and often marks a real pause before a larger move.
How to define a chain:
Mother bar: the bar whose range contains the next bars.
Each following bar inside the mother bar's high and low (not necessarily inside each other).
Two or more such bars in a row.
Why chains can be more useful:
Volatility compresses over 30–45 minutes, not just one candle.
Breakouts from chains tend to travel further than from single inside bars, although this needs testing per pair.
The mother bar range gives a natural stop and a first target equal to its height.
Filters worth testing: chains forming at a higher-timeframe level, chains in the first two hours of London, and avoiding chains that end just before scheduled data.
Have you compared single inside bars with chains, and did the chains break more cleanly?
I need at least two nested M15 insides inside the same mother bar before I care. A single inside prints all day and I treat it as decoration.
My filter is chains that form into the first two London hours and sit on a prior day high or low. Without that higher timeframe hook, breakouts from the mother range have been coin flips in my log.
Stop at the mother extreme and first target equal to the mother height keeps the math simple. On EURUSD that often means a 6 to 10 pip mother and a target that still clears costs.
I skip chains that finish inside fifteen minutes of a scheduled release. Compression into data looks tidy and then becomes a slippage event.
Do you require the insides to nest inside each other as well as inside the mother? Mother containment alone is enough for my definition.
