What qualifies
- Left rim: a swing high (the highest high of 5 days on each side) 30 to 250 days ago.
- Cup: its lowest low is 12% to 50% below the left rim (up to 60% for crypto, which swings more), sits between 25% and 75% of the way across the cup, and nothing inside the cup trades above the rims. The cup is at least 30 days wide.
- Right rim: the highest high after the bottom, within 8% below (or 5% above) the left rim.
- Handle: 3 to 25 days after the right rim, staying in the upper half of the cup and dipping no more than a third of the cup’s depth (15% at most). Today’s close is within that same distance of the right rim.
- Cup, no handle yet: the same cup, with the right rim 0–2 days ago.
- Breakout level: the right rim. Quality rewards a round cup (time spent in its lower half), level rims, a longer cup and a shallow handle.
About the cup and handle
William O’Neil popularised the cup and handle as a base that strong stocks build before a new advance: a rounded correction that shakes out weak holders, then a small, quiet pullback (the handle) just below the old high. The classic entry is a move through the handle’s high on strong volume. Deep, V-shaped cups and handles that sag into the lower half of the cup are weaker, so the rules leave them out.
Patterns are found mechanically on daily candles from the data provider. Not investment advice.
Frequently asked questions
Why are there no results right now?
Cups take months to form, so at any time only a handful of markets have one, and in a falling market there may be none at all. Try another market, or the Cup, no handle yet preset.
What does the quality score mean?
It’s a 0–100 score of how cleanly the pattern fits the rules above (for example, how tight the flag is, how round the cup is, or how closely the two lows match). It isn’t a probability and says nothing about what price does next. Use it to sort the list, then look at the chart: click a symbol to open it on FreeCharting.
Are these patterns reliable?
Chart patterns are a way to describe price action, not a prediction. Many fail, and they work differently in different markets. The detection is mechanical: a pattern can qualify on the numbers and still look wrong to your eye, and a pattern you’d draw by hand may miss one rule. Nothing here is investment advice.
Which markets can it scan?
Four, picked with the Market buttons above the table. Crypto (the default) scans the 250 busiest USDT pairs on Binance. Crypto perps scans the 200 busiest USDT perpetual futures on OKX. Both are free public data and need no key. US stocks scans about 600 US stocks and ETFs with your own free Alpaca key, and CME futures scans about 25 front-month CME Group contracts (stock indexes, Treasuries, oil, gas, metals, grains, livestock, currencies and CME bitcoin) with your own free Massive key.
Why do stocks and futures need a key?
Stock and futures prices are licensed data, so a website can’t hand them out for free. Alpaca (for stocks) and Massive (for futures) give anyone a free data key. Your key is saved only in your browser and sent only to that provider. See how to get a free Alpaca key and how to get a free Massive key for futures.
Is the data real-time?
Crypto and crypto perps are live from Binance and OKX, on daily candles that start at 00:00 UTC (today’s candle is still forming). Alpaca’s free stock data is 15 minutes behind the market, and Massive’s free futures plan is 8 hours delayed. Turn on auto-refresh next to the results to update the table in place every 30 seconds, minute or 5 minutes.