ArdenAlgoAnatomy of a liquidity sweep — the exact definition
Ask five traders what a "liquidity sweep" is and you'll get five drawings and zero definitions. Here is ours, in full: on a closed 15-minute bar, the wick trades beyond a mapped liquidity level while the body closes back on the original side. Every word is load-bearing.
"Mapped" — the level must exist first
The engine maintains an inventory of prior-day and prior-week extremes plus equal-level clusters (grouped within 0.25 × ATR14). A sweep is only a sweep against one of these pre-existing, untapped pools. A wick through a random price is volatility, not information.
"Wick beyond, body back" — rejection, not breakout
If the body closes beyond the level, stops didn't just get hunted — the level genuinely broke. The engine classifies that as a run and ignores it. Only the combination of penetration and rejection suggests the move's purpose was collecting resting orders.
"Closed bar" — the part everyone skips
Mid-bar, a forming candle flips between "sweep" and "breakout" with every tick. The distinction literally does not exist until the close. Tools that mark sweeps intrabar are making a guess they'll silently revise — which is how repaint enters the picture. Waiting fifteen minutes is the price of a label that never changes.
What happens next
A sweep alone triggers nothing. It arms the confirmation clock: within 16 bars the last opposing swing must break by body close with displacement — the market structure shift. No MSS in the window, and the whole sequence resets. The sweep is the question; the MSS is the answer.