Market Structure (ICT)
Liquidity Sweep / Stop Hunt Reversal
Price wicks just beyond a prior swing high or low, then snaps back inside the range, the wick likely cleared out resting stop orders before reversing.
Set the window, watch the rail
The dashed line marks a recent swing high or low, a level with real stop and order flow sitting behind it. Set how many bars price gets to reclaim that level after a wick pierces it, then watch the tape print bar by bar. A close back inside the level within your window logs a Confirmed Sweep, no reclaim in time logs a Failed Sweep / Continuation. Drag the slider anytime, even mid-run, and the stat table below recomputes off the same logged sweeps instead of needing a fresh run.
How it works
- The sweep is the wick, not the close. Price has to trade beyond the marked prior high or low intrabar. The close is what determines whether it counts as reclaimed.
- A tight reclaim window is a stricter, more honest test. Requiring price back inside the level within one bar catches only the sharpest reversals. Loosening it to five bars lets in slower, less convincing reclaims too.
- The level being swept has to have real resting interest behind it. A recent, obvious swing high or low is where breakout traders' stops and range traders' orders cluster.
- A sweep that doesn't reclaim isn't a failed pattern, it's a different pattern. Price piercing a level and continuing, rather than snapping back, is often just a genuine breakout, which is exactly what the Failed Sweep / Continuation tally tracks separately.
- This is a reaction to price doing something, not a prediction of it. Nothing about a marked rail says in advance whether a wick is coming.
Where this breaks
Every wick through a level reads as an intentional hunt when most are just volatility
Every wick through a level gets read as an intentional hunt when most of them are just volatility, since the term implies someone deliberately pushed price through a level to trigger orders but mechanically this page, and any real chart, can't tell a deliberate sweep from an ordinary volatile bar that happened to pierce a nearby level and reclaim it by chance. In a high-volatility stretch, wicks pierce recent swing points constantly simply because the range each bar covers is wide, not because of any hunting behavior. Treating every reclaimed wick as a high-probability reversal signal, instead of checking whether the level actually had real structure and resting interest behind it, is how this setup turns into pattern-matching noise dressed up in sharper language.