Larry Williams' Smash Day Pattern

Decoded Smash Day reversal pattern strategy applied to daily forex charts across 25 major and cross pairs, converted to Pine Script for TradingView.

Published · Updated · Methodology: Price Action

Part of: Pullback & Retest

  • Methodology: Price Action
  • Content type: strategy
  • Timeframes: Daily (1440 minute chart)
  • Markets: Forex (Euro Dollar, AUDCHF, AUDJPY, AUDNZD, AUDUSD, CADCHF, CADJPY, CHFJPY, EURAUD, EURCAD, EURCHF, EURGBP, EURJPY, EURNZD, GBPCHF, GBPJPY, GBPNZD, GBPUSD, NZDCAD, NZDCHF, NZDJPY, NZDUSD, USDCAD, USDCHF, USDJPY)

Indicators used

  • Bar Pattern (Smash Day)

Source video

Decoded from: I Retested Larry Williams’ Legendary Pattern - Here’s the Update by The Transparent Trader — watch the original

Key timestamps:

  • 0:50 - Rules for smash day setup
  • 1:54 - Long trade entry rule
  • 2:18 - Short trade entry rule
  • 2:37 - Filter rule
  • 3:06 - Trade exits
  • 3:29 - Stop and reverse exit
  • 4:00 - Example of short entry
  • 5:00 - Example of long entry
  • 6:00 - Example of short entry with profit exit
  • 7:30 - Stop-loss mentioned
  • 7:45 - Strategy variations for testing

Strategy overview

The Smash Day is a daily-bar reversal pattern popularized by trader Larry Williams: a bar that closes beyond the previous day's extreme and then fails, with the next session pushing back the other way. It belongs to the family of failed-breakout setups — the ones that treat a violated level not as the start of a move but as the trap that sets up the opposite one. Everything here happens on the daily chart, with no indicators involved: the pattern is read from the bars themselves.

What makes this entry different from a textbook description is the framing of the source. The Transparent Trader's video, "I Retested Larry Williams' Legendary Pattern - Here's the Update", is not an introduction to the pattern — it is a revisit, checking how a setup published decades ago behaves on more recent data. The walkthrough separates the base setup from the long and short entry variants, adds a filter condition, and then spends real time on the exit side, including a stop-and-reverse exit. That distribution of attention is itself informative: for a pattern this simple to define, the filter and the exit are where the differences between versions actually live.

This page catalogs the strategy and its source rather than reproducing a full rule-by-rule breakdown, so treat it as a map: the Smash Day concept, the daily price-action context it operates in, and where in the original video each piece of the logic is discussed. If you want to work with the pattern, the honest starting point is the source material plus your own testing on the instruments and daily data you actually trade.

Topics

larry williams smash day · price action strategy · forex strategy · daily timeframe strategy · bar pattern · trading strategy · pine script · tradingview strategy · eurusd strategy · audchf trading · gbpjpy strategy · swing trading

Frequently asked questions

What is Larry Williams' Smash Day pattern?

It is a daily-bar reversal pattern in which price closes beyond the prior day's high or low and then fails to follow through, with the following session reversing back in the opposite direction. It is read purely from the bars — no indicators are required.

What timeframe does the Smash Day pattern use?

The daily chart (1440-minute bars). The pattern is defined by the relationship between consecutive daily closes and the previous day's extremes, so it is a swing-trading setup rather than an intraday one.

What does 'retested' mean in the source video's title?

The video by The Transparent Trader revisits a long-published pattern to see how it holds up on more recent data, rather than teaching it for the first time. It covers the setup rules, the long and short entry variants, a filter condition, and the exits, including a stop-and-reverse exit.

How can I evaluate a price-action pattern like this one?

Test it on daily historical data for the markets you intend to trade, and pay particular attention to the filter and exit choices, since those tend to separate one version of a classic pattern from another. Strategy Decoder catalogs strategies like this one from video sources so you can trace them back to the original material.

About this strategy page

This trading strategy was decoded by Strategy Decoder's AI from a public YouTube trading video and turned into a structured, reviewable specification. In the interactive app this page shows the full entry and exit logic, risk management settings, the indicators involved with their parameters, AlgoWizard-compatible logic and a Pine Script export ready for TradingView backtesting — plus an automated backtest verdict when one has been computed for this strategy.

Strategy Decoder catalogs 2,229 decoded strategies. Each one is extracted with confidence scoring, cross-linked to the indicators it uses, and kept up to date as new videos are processed daily. Load this page with JavaScript enabled to use the interactive tools, or start from the strategy explorer to filter by methodology, market and timeframe.

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