Liquidity sweep
A liquidity sweep is a move that pushes briefly beyond an obvious high or low — triggering stop orders resting there — before reversing back in the opposite direction.
Stop orders cluster in predictable places: just above recent highs, just below recent lows, and around round numbers. Those clusters represent available liquidity. A sweep is price reaching into one of those pools and then reversing, which is often interpreted as larger participants filling orders against the stops of smaller ones.
The mechanism is real — resting stop orders genuinely do provide liquidity, and price genuinely does gravitate toward them. The framing sometimes attached to it, that the market is personally targeting individual retail traders, is not. Your stop is not being hunted; it is simply sitting in the same obvious place as thousands of others.
The practical lesson is unglamorous: if your stop is at the most obvious level on the chart, you are providing liquidity at the most obvious price. That is a placement problem, not a conspiracy.
Related terms
Maintained by Jared Sinclair, Founder · Syrax Global FZCO · Definitions are educational, not financial advice.
Knowing the vocabulary is the easy part.
Every term here can be learned in an afternoon. Applying them consistently under pressure is the part that decides outcomes — and the part we measure.