In the previous chapter, we treated the head and shoulders pat­tern at some length and described it as the best known and most trustworthy of all reversal patterns. The head and shoulders pat­tern can sometimes appear as a continuation instead of a reversal pattern.
In the continuation head and shoulders variety, prices trace out a pattern that looks very similar to a sideways rectangu­lar pattern except that the middle trough in an uptrend (see Figure 6.11 a) tends to be lower than either of the two shoulders. In a downtrend (see Figure 6.11b), the middle peak in the consol­idation exceeds the other two peaks. The result in both cases is a head and shoulders pattern turned upside down. Because it is turned upside down, there is no chance of confusing it with the reversal pattern.