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Market Structure

Swing highs & lows

4 min read

Before you can say where price is going, you need to mark where it turned. Those turns are swing points.

A swing high is a candle whose high is higher than the candles on either side — a local peak. A swing low is a local trough. String them together and the market's structure appears: a sequence of highs and lows you can actually read.

Internal vs. external. External structure is the big, obvious swings that define the trend. Internal structure is the smaller swings inside a leg. Confusing the two is the classic beginner error — reacting to a tiny internal wiggle as if the whole trend just changed.

Clean vs. choppy. Some charts have obvious, readable swings; others are noise. When the structure isn't clean, the honest read is "no trade here." A "clean swing points" confluence exists for exactly this reason — you want structure you can trust, not structure you're forcing.

Mark your swings first. Every concept that follows — BOS, CHoCH, liquidity — is defined relative to them.

Put this to work — the ICT / SMC confluence list.Open lists →