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The London open produces some dramatic pin bars on M5 and M15. Long wick, small body, price rejected from a level. It looks like a textbook reversal.

The catch is that the opening minutes are also when stop runs are common. A long wick might mean rejection, or it might just mean liquidity was grabbed before the real move. Trading the pin bar immediately often means entering right as the market does something else.

Some traders wait for confirmation, such as a close beyond the pin bar's body. Others require the pin to form at a level that matters from the prior session. Both reduce the number of signals and, in theory, increase quality.

The point is that a pattern is only as good as the context and the measured results.

Some traders define the filter very tightly: the pin bar must form within 3 pips of the previous day high or low, must have a wick at least twice the body size, and must occur within the first 30 minutes of the session. That might leave only a couple of signals per week. Few signals, but each one has been defined well enough to be tested properly.

Do open-session pin bars hold up in the data, and what confirmation, if any, made a real difference?

Waiting for a close beyond the body helps, but in our logs the time of the pin bar mattered more. Pins in the first 10 minutes of London on EURUSD were close to random. The same shape after 08:30 London, once the initial stops had been taken, worked noticeably better.

Another filter we use: the wick has to reach a level that existed before the open, like the Asian high or low. A pin bar that rejects an arbitrary price is just a candle with a long wick.