Liquidity sweep

What it means

A sweep is a brief excursion past a level followed by a full recovery within the same bar. The idea behind the name is that resting orders below an obvious low are taken before price turns; the idea is a story about intent, and intent is not visible in open-high-low-close data.

What IS visible is the shape: price went below a band that had held before, and finished above the whole of it. This publication reports the shape and does not assert the story.

How we detect it

The engine records a sweep at a support zone when a bar's low is below the bottom of the band and that same bar's close is above the TOP of it. Not merely back inside the band — above it entirely, which is a stricter test than a rejection.

The note the engine writes ends with the word heuristic, and that word is in the output on purpose. Without order-book or trade-level data there is no way to distinguish a sweep from an ordinary volatile bar, and the label says so rather than implying a certainty the data cannot support.

This runs at SUPPORT only; there is no upside equivalent in the engine today.

When the read carries information

• The support band was well established, so the low that was taken out was one many participants could see.
• The bar's range is large relative to recent bars, which the volume and volatility reads describe separately.
• The timeframe is slow enough that a full round trip inside one bar is a notable event rather than the norm.

When it misleads

• Any high-volatility bar around a scheduled release can satisfy the shape without anything resembling a sweep having occurred.
• On instruments with wide spreads, the low of a bar may not be a price anyone traded meaningfully at.
• The engine has no view of resting orders whatsoever, so it can never confirm the mechanism the name refers to — only the footprint that mechanism would leave.

How it reaches you

This is the one event kind in the engine whose public note calls itself a heuristic. That is the standard applied elsewhere in this product: where a term implies a mechanism we cannot observe, the term is reported with its uncertainty attached.

It carries no implication about direction from here, and no suggestion of any action.