Order blocks and the problem of hindsight

[Shadow Trader]

Order blocks, in the popular telling, are the last opposite-coloured candle before a strong move, thought to mark where large players placed orders. Charts full of neatly boxed examples look compelling, and each one was drawn after the move happened.

That's the core problem. On a live chart, dozens of candidates exist at any moment. Only after price moves does it become obvious which one was the real block. The ones that didn't work quietly disappear from the screenshots.

A rigorous version needs rules that can be applied in real time: which candle qualifies, how strong the following move must be, how long the zone remains valid, and what counts as a retest. With rules, the pattern can be coded and counted across thousands of instances.

Without them, the method is an art form, and art forms are hard to evaluate. Some traders do make money with discretionary skill, but the evidence takes the form of a long, honest track record, not neat screenshots.

The same skeptical lens applies to any pattern that comes with beautiful historical examples. A useful trick is to ask for the pattern's failures: show ten recent cases where the pattern appeared and nothing happened. If those can't be produced, the pattern hasn't been examined, only admired.

What would a testable definition of an order block look like, and has any version survived testing?