Liquidity Pools: Where Orders Cluster and Why Price Visits Them
Traders often talk about liquidity, meaning the volume of orders available to trade against. Price tends to travel toward areas where many orders sit, because that is where large trades can be filled.
Orders cluster in predictable places. Stop losses sit just beyond swing highs and lows, trendlines, and round numbers. Breakout traders place entry orders beyond ranges. Take profits sit at obvious targets.
When price reaches a cluster, it can trigger many orders at once, producing a burst of activity. A large participant who needs to buy a lot can do so by pushing into sell stops, which provide the sellers needed to fill the order. That is one reason price sometimes sweeps above a high and then reverses.
This is a mechanism, not a guarantee. Not every sweep reverses, and not every swing level attracts a move.
Understanding it changes how you place orders. If you know stops cluster beyond a recent low, you might avoid placing yours exactly there, or you may wait for a sweep to occur before entering in the opposite direction, with a stop beyond the extreme.
You can also see why breakouts above obvious highs fail so often, since the orders triggered there may be the fuel for a reversal.
The concept is useful as a way of thinking about where orders probably are.
Practical step: mark three recent swing highs or lows, and note what price did when it later moved beyond each.
Liquidity Pools: Where Orders Cluster and Why Price Visits Them
Re: Liquidity Pools: Where Orders Cluster and Why Price Visits Them
Equal highs or lows are the clearest version of this. When price makes two or three tops at almost the same level, that's an obvious place for stops, and it often gets taken before the real move.
It’s Fairman 
Re: Liquidity Pools: Where Orders Cluster and Why Price Visits Them
Just be careful not to see a pool behind every swing. If you mark ten of them on one chart, you can explain any move afterwards and predict none of them. Two or three obvious ones per session is plenty.
It’s Fairman 