Rejection
A bar that reached into a zone and closed back outside it, leaving the wick as the record of how far price got.
- Assumes:
- The basics of this family
- Markets:
- Crypto · Equities · Indices
- Timeframes:
- 1h · 4h · 1d
What it means
A rejection is a bar whose extreme entered a zone while its close did not stay there. What remains on the chart is a wick: evidence that price traded at those levels and did not finish there.
The size of the wick relative to the body is the point. A bar with a long wick and a small body spent its range going somewhere and coming back, which is a different event from a bar that simply closed lower.
How we detect it
At a resistance zone, the engine records a rejection when a bar's high reaches at least the bottom of the band, the bar closes below that bottom edge, and the upper wick — the distance from the high to the top of the body — is longer than the body itself.
That third condition is what separates a rejection from an ordinary down bar. Without it, any bar that dipped after touching a zone would qualify, and the term would describe nothing.
This detection runs at RESISTANCE only. A long lower wick into support — the same event upside down — is not recorded as a rejection today; the closest thing the engine has for the downside is the liquidity sweep, which is a stricter test.
When the read carries information
- The timeframe is slow enough that a wick represents a genuine excursion rather than one thin print.
- The zone is one of the engine's real zones, drawn from clustered touches.
- The market is in continuous trading, so the high and the close describe one session's behaviour.
When it misleads
- In a fast market a wick can be a single trade at a bad price rather than a rejection by many participants, and the test cannot tell the difference.
- A bar that closes just inside the band rather than below it does not qualify, even when the wick above is dramatic — the rule is written on the close, deliberately.
- Because only resistance is scanned, a chart can show a textbook rejection at support and produce no event at all.
How it reaches you
Our answers describe this as an upper wick into the resistance zone with a close back below it. That sentence is the observation in full.
A rejection is not a forecast of a turn. It is a description of one bar, and this publication draws no instruction from it.
A worked example
Constructed example — not market data
Four separate advances stall in the same price band, which is what the zone builder clusters into a single resistance zone — a band, never one price. The series ends below that band, and within the bars the engine scans it finds one rejection: a wick into the zone with the close back underneath.
Worked example
A worked example for this concept has cleared review and is shown with it.