Range

Strip a chart back to just its highs and lows and you’re left with the market’s own record of who’s winning, buyers pushing price into new territory or sellers dragging it into old territory, and reading that record is what market structure means. Everything else in this section, order blocks, fair value gaps, supply and demand, is a zone found within that larger structure, so it’s best to get this part right before layering anything else on top. ...

A market rarely goes straight from one trend into the next. Most of the time it pauses first, spending a stretch going nowhere in particular, and that pause is where the next move gets built. This idea traces back to Richard Wyckoff, an early twentieth-century trader who framed the market as cycling through four phases, and the two ranging phases, accumulation and distribution, are the ones to learn to spot while they’re happening, not only after the fact. ...