Displacement: why speed is part of the signal

[Shadow Trader]

Two breaks of structure can look identical on a line chart but behave completely differently. One was a slow grind of small candles, the other was three large candles in a row with almost no overlap. The second is displacement, and it tells you something the first does not: there was aggressive participation, not just drift. I use a simple measure. A break counts as displacement if the candles that created it are larger than the average range of the last twenty candles and they leave an imbalance behind, often a fair value gap. Breaks without that tend to retrace deeply or fail. This matters for order blocks too, since the zone before a weak move is not worth trading. I also noticed displacement is more reliable during London and New York opens than during dead hours, where a single large candle can be nothing more than thin liquidity and a wide spread. Speed alone is not proof, but its absence is a good reason for caution.

[FXS HongKong Scalper]

Speed matters, agreed. A measure I like as an alternative to candle size is how long the break took in minutes compared with the average for that hour. A break that covers half an ATR in two M5 candles during Tokyo lunch is unusual and worth noting, while the same in the first minutes of London is ordinary. Comparing with the typical pace for the time of day stops the session itself from looking like displacement.