Back Issues Archive Traders' Glossary Novice Traders' Notebook Products Store. The mirror image of a double top, the double bottom is a more profitable longer-term play. Find out why. With double tops and many reversal patterns appearing near the top of a price series, the approach leading to the pattern is usually steep.
Prices rise rapidly, execute a reversal pattern, then drop just as quickly.
However, it is also possible that you could witness a quick decline, then a slower, torturous downtrend as prices continue to drop even further, spread out over many months. To detect double bottoms automatically, I couldn't just flip around the computer code to detect tops. I had to change the algorithm to accommodate the possibility of a meandering decline. Once that was accomplished, the program I designed to search my database was correctly detecting double bottoms in many of the stocks I follow. Both charts show double bottoms, but on different time scales.