Wicks, sweeps & trap candles
Advanced candle reading: when a wick is the whole trade.
At the advanced level, candles merge with the liquidity map. The most informative candles are the ones that interact with known stop clusters — because their wicks show you whose orders just got used.
The sweep candle
A sweep candle wicks decisively through a prior swing high or low — the obvious stop shelf — and closes back inside the old range. Read it literally: the stops were triggered, someone absorbed them, and price refused to accept the breakout. The traders stopped out plus the breakout chasers now trapped are the fuel; the sweep candle's extreme becomes a high-confidence stop for the reversal trade.
Acceptance vs rejection — the deciding question
| Rejection (trap) | Acceptance (real break) | |
|---|---|---|
| Close | back inside the old range | beyond the level, near the extreme |
| Next candles | build away from the level | hold the level as new support/resistance |
| Volume | spikes on the poke, dies after | stays elevated through the break |
| Read | stops harvested, fade the move | new auction underway, trade with it |
Wicks into exhaustion
Serial long wicks against a trend — three pushes higher, each closing further off its high — are exhaustion written in candle form: demand probing and failing repeatedly. The candles show the sputter before structure ever breaks.