Reading Liquidity Sweeps: Where Stops Actually Live

What a liquidity sweep is

A liquidity sweep is a fast, often violent move beyond an obvious swing high or low that immediately reverses. Institutions need counterparty volume to fill large orders — and the cheapest counterparty volume sits just past where retail traders place their stops.

Where stops cluster

• Just below the prior swing low (long stops)
• Just above the prior swing high (short stops)
• At round numbers (50,000 / 100,000 / 4,000)
• At the daily / weekly open
• Under obvious trendlines drawn by everyone watching the same chart

If you can see the level on the 1H without zooming in, so can every algo in the market.

The anatomy of a clean sweep

1. Price approaches the level slowly, building anticipation.
2. A sharp impulsive wick pierces the level, often on a single 1m candle.
3. Volume spikes — this is the fill.
4. Price reverses within 1–3 candles and closes back inside the prior range.
5. The reversal continues with sustained delta in the opposite direction.

A wick without volume is not a sweep — it's a probe. A wick with volume that *fails* to reverse is not a sweep — it's a breakout. Both fields must be true.

Trading the reversal

Entry: limit order at the level that was swept, with a stop just beyond the wick high/low. Target: the opposite side of the range, or the next liquidity pool above/below. Risk: typically 0.5–1R because the invalidation is tight and the R:R is asymmetric (3–5R targets are common).

How Trade Feeld flags sweeps

Our scanner watches for the four-condition stack — proximity, wick, volume, reversal — across every market on the platform. When it fires, you get an alert tagged "Sweep" with the level, the side, and a pre-built entry/stop/target. From signal to chart is under 300ms.