concept

Liquidity raid

Price reaches past a visible high or low to trigger resting stop orders, then reverses. The core ICT microstructure primitive. Every sweep-based model on this site is a liquidity-raid trade at some level.

updated 2026-04-23

ictliquiditysweepstops

The idea

Resting stop orders cluster just past obvious reference levels:

Prior day high / low
Session high / low (Asia, London, RTH)
Overnight high / low
Recent swing high / low
Round numbers

When price pushes through one of those levels, those stops trigger. The stops are market orders — sell-stops above a low become market sells when the low breaks; buy-stops above a high become market buys. Both deliver instant fills against whoever is positioned on the other side.

A liquidity raid is the move that goes through the level specifically to trigger that order flow, then reverses. It’s not a failed breakout. It’s a successful inventory collection, after which price rotates back toward the opposite pool.

Why raids happen

To fill a large resting order you need counter-flow. If you want to buy 1,000 contracts and the visible book has 100, you can either:

Walk the price up, buying what’s offered, and move the market against yourself — paying slippage every step.
Wait for a move to a level where sell-stops are clustered, let those get triggered, and buy from the stops at the price that triggered them.

Option 2 is what the raid pattern is modeling. The mechanic explains why raids tend to cluster at the “obvious” highs and lows — that’s exactly where retail stops sit.

The signature

A raid looks different from a breakout:

	Raid	Breakout
Close relative to level	Back through	Past
Wick vs body	Big wick past, small body	Body past
Volume on the breach	Spike	Elevated but continuous
Next few candles	Rotate back	Continue
Prior-bar context	Tight range into the level	Momentum into the level

On a chart, the classic signature is a long wick that pokes past a high or low and then a strong opposite-direction candle. On a 1-minute chart during a London sweep, it often resolves in 3–5 bars.

Where raids show up on this site

Basically everywhere:

AMD / Power of Three — London raids Asia’s extreme, NY reverses toward the opposite Asia extreme. Session-level raid.
1H CRT — candle-level raid of the prior 1H extreme.
LON MOMENTUM BULL — raid of Asia high followed by continuation, not reversion. Counterintuitive: not every raid reverses.
PRELON SWEEP CONTINUATION — Pre-London raids Asia, London extends past. Continuation-side raid.
PRELON IB — confluence-score predicts which IB extreme gets raided during London.

The recurring pattern: different times of day have different raid resolution behavior. Some raids reverse (classic AMD), some continue (PRELON SWEEP). The model pages quantify which is which.

The two critical mistakes

Mistake 1: “Every sweep is a reversal.” Not true. At least on NQ, continuation after a sweep is roughly as common as reversion — the split depends on session and range context. Our AMD Early Pull walk-away covers a case where the reversal thesis was catastrophically wrong (13σ against) and the continuation side was the actual edge.

Mistake 2: “The wick size doesn’t matter.” It does. Depth past the level correlates with conviction — too shallow is noise, too deep can overshoot the reversion. Our CRT model applies an explicit depth adjustment.