Market Structure (ICT)
Order Block Retest
The last opposing candle before a strong impulse move often marks the zone where orders were still filling, price frequently returns to retest it before continuing.
Pick the order block, then watch the retest
The chart below has a run of ordinary bars followed by a clear impulse leg, several candles in a row whose average size clearly outpaces the bars before them. One candidate is the actual order block. The others are placed to catch the common mistakes: picking a candle the wrong color, picking one that's a bar or two too early, or picking something from well before the move even started. Click the one you think is correct, the rule gets applied to your pick right away, then price plays forward so you can see whether the zone actually holds on the retest.
Pick the candle you think is the order block.
How it works
- The order block is defined relative to the impulse, not by looking good on its own. It has to be the last candle of the opposite color immediately before a move that clearly outpaces the recent average bar size.
- "Last opposing candle" means immediately before, with no gap. An opposing candle sitting a few bars earlier with a same-direction candle in between is not the block.
- The zone is a range, not a line. This page shades the full candle from wick to wick because a genuine retest does not require touching one exact price.
- A retest holding and a retest failing are both common outcomes worth tracking separately. Zones get sliced straight through often enough that treating every one as guaranteed support or resistance is the mistake, not the concept itself.
- Picking the wrong candle breaks everything downstream. A zone drawn around the wrong candle is testing a level the setup never actually claimed was significant.
Where this breaks
A mechanically large impulse can still be a thin, low-participation spike
The entire premise of an order block is that real size moved through that opposing candle right before the market took off, leaving unfilled orders behind. A mechanically qualifying impulse, one that's simply large relative to the recent bars, can still be a thin, low-participation move that reverses hard on its own before price ever gets back to retest anything. The zone shading on this page draws off the impulse's size alone, since that's what's mechanically measurable from price data. It has no way to see the actual volume or participation behind the move, which is exactly the piece of context a real order block call needs and a pure price chart can't fully supply.