⚡️ Understanding Breakout Traps ⚡️If we see a pattern form that retail likes to trade,
It is highly likely that this pattern may get manipulated.
The reason these common patterns get manipulated is
because of liquidity forming.
Banks want to make sure they can create enough liquidity
for themselves to get positioned nicely in the market.
They do this by driving the price up/down into stop loss areas.
To avoid being caught out we need to sit on our hands,
wait for the stop loss hunt to occur before we go-ahead
with our initial position bias.
Liquiditypool
The Liquidity GrabI'm going to do my best here at explaining the basics around a liquidity grab (some times called a stop hunt), why it happens and how it works (ignore the chart I'm using, I'm not saying this is a manipulated move just showing you an example of how it works)
I often refer to this in my playbook as an STL "Sweep The Legs" coupled with a picture of Johnny Lawrence from the karate kid lol
First you need to understand that Big money plays a different game to retail.
When you want to place a buy order at a specific price point, lets say your buying a thousands dollars worth of BTC @ $30,000, you can put an order in and boom it gets hit your filled and your ready to go to the moon.
Now imagine some bigger traders who play with a lot more money than you, lets say there order is more like a billion dollars.
Well in order for them to fill there position, there needs to be a large amount of selling at that level other wise they may only get a small piece filled...... theeeeeen of course the price moves away and your priced out of the market (imagine putting your $1000 order in, only getting $10 of it filled and then having the price moon....yeah it would suck)
They do not want to chase candles or buy up the order book, thats just not good business, and if you have to do that in order to get your orders filled thats a good indication that there is already liquidity issues within this market and you may have a similar problem trying to cover of your position later on.
So these players some times need to hunt down and find or even artificially create liquidity pools for them to take a big bite at like pigs at the trough.
One of the easiest ways to do that is to look for the most obvious levels of support with in a trend of sideways channel and look at the buying thats happening on that level.
If we dont get an instant recovery or bounce at that level it can normally indicate price being trapped or held down in order to encourage more retail to "buy the dip" or buy on support as these are some of the most basic tools and strategies taught to retail traders.
Now one thing to remember when all of these traders/investors are in there positions from this level, there will be a large number of these traders protecting capital with stop losses, normally under the level they where buying at.
This now created a liquidity pool...... You see every stop loss on a BUY order, becomes a SELL order, and with so many BUY orders created and entered at a specific level that means the stop loss orders are stacking more and more on top.
Think about it like this, if we hit 30k and someone buys $1m worth, that means there is possibly a SELL order (via a stop loss) of roughly 1m under that level.... now we hit that 30k level again, and someone buys some more, maybe another $1m worth... well now there is roughly $2m worth of SELL orders in that stop loss zone. Hit that 30k super sweet safe support level 5 or 6 times and all the sudden you could have 8-10m worth of SELL orders at a single price point below support.
Now if I wanted to enter this market long and I had 10m order to fill, it would make sense for me to run the price down to clip these stop losses creating a large amount of selling straight into my pig of a buy order.
Once my orders filled I can stop holding the price down and let the price begin to organically rise again, this often creates fomo for all the retailers who just got knocked out of there trades from "tight stop losses" to chase the market back in only adding to the momentum and mark up of my position.
The same thing can happen in vice versa when they are covering or exiting a position as well, and its often followed by a square up to reduce or remove the risk taken on to manipulate the price during there accumulation or distribution of there order, more specially into a short position as they take on more exposure to the underlying asset to manipulate the price, in a long there exposure is fiat and there isnt any need to cover. (ill explain square up in detail next time)
This is often what is referred to as a liquidity grab and its how big players enter the market, they do not chuck a limit order in on Binance and hope for the best...
I hope that made sense and added some value, but if you have any questions please chuck them below
UNDERSTANDING LIQUIDITYIn this quick and easy lesson, I will break down the concept of liquidity.
If you retain the thought that liquidity stands for an area where stop losses are you will grasp this concept quickly.
We often see spikes into areas of liquidity before true moves continue, this is so that banks can capture as many orders as possible before they depart from the area.
Navigating The Market : Simplifed = Friday/Monday relationshipThis is not a trading strategy nor claiming this concept happens 100% of the time, but this is a repetitive pattern and I personally believe it could help you to navigate the market (particularly if you are an intraday trader) more efficiently.
I generally would see this in 1-Hour timeframe but for the sake of being able to show you with more examples in one post, I choose D1 timeframe for this post. When price breaks and close above Friday high on a Monday, more often than not, the price would eventually reverse downwards within 18-24 hours. Vice versa for a close below Friday low (on a Monday)
Why I believe this phenomenon is real and tangible is because Friday or Monday normally a day where the Banks (NY session) attempt to clear their books. In order to do this, sometimes they need liquidity to offload their position, they would do stop hunts if there is a need to do so.
Hence I've conceptualised this Friday/Monday relationship into my way of analyzing the intraday moves especially on a Mondays. By default, any breakout from the Friday high or low, I would consider it as a stop hunt/fake breakout. Of course, there be a week where a breakout from the Friday started a huge trend that lasts weeks, but that is an outlier. I do not care about outliers, as a trader I will try to profit from what is repetitive, and this concept is very repetitive.
This is just one of three "day-to-day relationships" that I have conceptualised to make me reading the market a lot easier. The other two are Mon - Tue/Wed relationship,andTue/Wed to Thu/Fri relationships that I have conceptualised. Tell me what you all think,
Liquidity Pool / Stop Loss Explanation POE SignalA group member had a question about why the stop loss was "so low" being 23% under the buy price. The reasoning is you need to avoid the liquidity zone, where price could easily be pushed.
The purpose of our stop is to exit the trade if its no longer valid (not get stopped out only to see a pump happen afterwards). This could be another accumulation cycle, so we want to ride out the potential for a dip.
As normal traders we normally dont have to deal with extremely large positions. But the whales/institutions who do have to think about liquidity very differently than you or I. Order flow intersections are what they look for. They have to go TO the liquidity - which is many times where people end up placing their stops. They cannot simply accumulate or distribute a large position whenever and wherever they wish. Rather, they must look to those levels where liquidity is aggregating, and stops are helping them in an indirect way.
Without a Support/Resistance Finder (SRF) to help you, you can also/alternately use a volume profile as shown. SRF auto plots the S/R lines for the current range (all the horizontal dashed red and green lines are done by SRF). You want to place your stop BELOW where the liquidity is likely located - and also where your trade idea is invalidated.
In the opposite sense there is a liquidity zone above as well. Many times you will see price probe the same levels over a few days. This is testing the resistance and seller appetite. You can see this here in the 210+ area as price has been probing the upper resistance.