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.