Swing highs and swing lows
A bar that stands above or below its immediate neighbours — the smallest unit of structure, and the raw material for everything else in this taxonomy.
- Assumes:
- No other page
- Markets:
- Crypto · Equities · Indices
- Timeframes:
- 1h · 4h · 1d · 1w
What it means
A swing high is a bar whose high is greater than the bars immediately around it; a swing low is the same idea downward. They are the turning points a chart is made of, and almost every other structural term is defined in terms of them.
A swing is only ever confirmed after the fact. Deciding that a bar was a turning point requires seeing what came after it, which means the most recent bars can never be swings yet.
How we detect it
The engine uses a fractal test with a lookback of two: a bar is a swing high when its high is strictly greater than the highs of the two bars before it and the two bars after it, and a swing low when its low is strictly lower than the four surrounding lows.
Strictly is doing work there. A tie disqualifies the bar, so a flat stretch of equal highs produces no swing at all rather than several overlapping ones.
Two bars either side means the last two bars of any series can never be labelled. Everything downstream — zones, structure labels, trend — is therefore reading a chart that stops slightly short of the present.
When the read carries information
- Bars carry a meaningful range, so highs and lows differ enough for the comparison to mean something.
- The timeframe is one where a two-bar neighbourhood is a real neighbourhood rather than a few seconds of noise.
- The series is continuous — a gap between sessions can manufacture a swing that no trading produced.
When it misleads
- In a very quiet market, tiny fluctuations satisfy the test and produce swings that describe nothing a reader would call a turn.
- A two-bar lookback is small. A major turn that takes six bars to complete produces several swings rather than one, and the labels that follow are noisier for it.
- Bars with identical highs — common on illiquid instruments and on some index feeds — silently produce no swings, so a chart can look structured and yield nothing.
How it reaches you
Swings are rarely named on our surfaces directly. They are visible in what depends on them: the zones, the structure labels, and the trend read.
A swing is a description of the past. It says where the market turned, and nothing at all about where it will turn next.
A worked example
Constructed example — not market data
Six advances, each with a pullback that stops above the previous one. Run over this series the engine labels the swing sequence higher highs and higher lows, and reads the trend from those labels rather than from the direction of the last bar.
Worked example
A worked example for this concept has cleared review and is shown with it.