How to Use BananaPatterns: A Field Guide to the Whole Site

BananaPatterns does one thing, on repeat: after every market close, it reads every liquid Indian stock and surfaces the few that are building a base, breaking out, or climbing. No tips, no targets, no hot takes — a chart process, run nightly, shown in plain English.

This guide walks the whole site in the order a person would actually use it: the screens, a stock's chart, your watchlist, the market's health, and the method behind all of it. Ten minutes here and nothing on the site will be a mystery again.

Education, not advice. BananaPatterns is a learning tool. Nothing on the site — and nothing in this guide — is a recommendation to buy or sell anything.

The evening rhythm: what happens after each close

Everything starts with the nightly rebuild. After each trading close, the engine takes the day's official NSE and BSE data, reads roughly 4,500 listed stocks, and keeps the ones that clear a liquidity floor — about ₹500 crore of market value and ₹5 crore of daily trading. Below that floor a chart is too thin to trust; above it, every stock gets the same treatment: bases found, pivots marked, breakouts checked, relative strength ranked.

By evening, the site reflects the new close. Open it once a day, after the close, and you're never behind. The feed on the Screens page even tells you what changed since yesterday — who broke out, who's newly forming, who left the list and why.

Start at the Screens

The Screens page is the heart of the site — tonight's list. Four house screens, each hunting a different setup:

• VCP — a tight, quiet coil under a ceiling: the classic Volatility Contraction Pattern, a leader pausing before its next push.
• Blue sky — basing at its all-time high, where no trapped holder is waiting to sell into the rally.
• Multi-year breakouts — clearing a base it spent a year or more building, the long coil finally releasing.
• IPO base — a young listing's first proper base, the first time a new stock sets up.

Each screen's list shows the stage each stock is in — forming, breakout, climbing — so the page reads as a pipeline, not a jumble. Two things power users should know: you can combine screens (tick several and see the union), and signed-in members can create their own screen from the full dial panel — every threshold the house screens use, exposed as sliders — and save it with a name. Your saved screens appear right in the Screens menu, next to the house ones.

Open a stock — the chart does the talking

Click any name, anywhere, and its drawer opens: the price chart with its bases drawn directly on it — the coil, the pivot line, the breakout ▲ if it came — plus a plain-English read of where the stock stands: how long the base is, how deep, how far the price sits from the pivot, its relative strength rank.

A few things worth knowing as you read:

• Relative strength (RS) is a rank from 1 to 99 against every other liquid stock — explained properly here. Leaders live in the 80s and 90s.
• The pivot is the base's ceiling — the line that turns a pause into a breakout when price clears it on volume.
• Peers show the stock's industry neighbours, because leaders rarely move alone — sector context is half the story.

Signed-in members also get the X-ray: every base the stock has ever built, not just this year's — the stock's full pattern history on one chart. It's the single most-used feature on the site, and it's free behind a sign-in.

Want any specific stock? The search bar in the header reaches all of them — type a name, get the chart.

Keep a watchlist

Found a base you want to follow? Add it to your Watchlist — your private list, one click from every chart. The point of the whole method is waiting well: most of the job is watching a handful of coiling stocks and doing nothing until a pivot breaks. The watchlist is where that waiting happens.

Zoom out: the Market page

Individual setups live inside a market, and fighting the market is how good setups die. The Market page answers the zoomed-out question — is this a market that rewards breakouts right now? — in four sections:

• Breadth — how broad the advance is: how many stocks are participating, making highs, holding their trends.
• Rotation — where money is moving between sectors.
• Sector strength — which industries are strong, weak, heating, cooling.
• The map — every industry at a glance, drillable down to its stocks.

There's also All breakouts today — the ledger of every stock that cleared its pivot at the last close, market-wide. When that list is long, the environment is confirming; when it's empty for days, the market is telling you something too.

Learn the method — then check its record

Two pages exist so you never have to take the site's word for anything.

The Learn page teaches the pattern interactively — an annotated anatomy of the base-and-breakout shape, plus a step-by-step walkthrough of each screen on a live example, so you see the rules land on a real chart, not a diagram.

The Backtest page replays the same rules across years of past data — every trade the rules would have taken, wins and losses together, with the assumptions in the open. Patterns fail often; the backtest is where you see how often, and what the discipline of small losses does to the arithmetic. A site that shows its work beats a site that asks for trust.

And under Reading — in the Learn menu — live the Guides (evergreen explainers like this one) and the case studies: documented, dated walk-throughs of real setups, like Rashi Peripherals' 13-week base and what followed.

What's free, and what needs an account

Almost everything is open: the screens, every chart, the market page, the learn pages, the backtest, all the reading. A free account — email link or Google, no card, nothing else — adds the member layer: the X-ray, your watchlist, and saving your own screens. That's the entire difference.

A sensible first week

1. Read the VCP guide — fifteen minutes, and every screen on the site makes sense.
2. Open the Screens page after a close and walk tonight's list — read each chart's plain-English summary.
3. Put two or three forming bases on your watchlist and just watch them for days. Watching bases resolve teaches more than any article.
4. Check the Market page alongside — connect what individual stocks do to what the market allows.
5. Run the backtest once, slowly. Look at the losing trades as long as the winners.

Risk first, always.

Frequently asked questions

What is BananaPatterns?

An educational stock-charting site for Indian equities. After every close it scans every liquid NSE and BSE stock for one family of setups — the base-and-breakout pattern — and presents the results as screens, annotated charts, market health pages and backtests, all in plain English.

Is BananaPatterns free?

The screens, charts, market pages, learn pages, backtest and all articles are free to use. A free account (email link or Google) adds the X-ray, a private watchlist, and the ability to create and save your own screens.

Does BananaPatterns give buy or sell recommendations?

No. It surfaces stocks whose charts match defined patterns, teaches how the patterns work, and shows the historical record of the rules. What to do with that is entirely yours. We are not SEBI-registered advisers.

Which stocks does it cover?

Roughly 4,500 listed Indian stocks are read nightly; those clearing a liquidity floor — about ₹500 crore market value and ₹5 crore daily trading — make it into the screens and rankings. Thinner stocks are excluded because their charts are too erratic to read honestly.

How current is the data?

The site rebuilds after each trading close from official exchange data, so each evening reflects that day's session. It is an end-of-day tool by design — the patterns it tracks live on daily charts and take weeks to form.

Where should a complete beginner start?

The VCP guide first, then the interactive Learn page, then tonight's Screens with the guide fresh in mind. The pattern only truly clicks when you watch it live on real stocks.

BananaPatterns is an educational resource. We are not SEBI-registered advisers, and nothing here is investment advice. Historical figures are backtests, not a live record. Trade your own decisions.