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Repeated ticks at one price are a message

Watch the tick feed on a quiet pair. Occasionally the price touches the same level over and over: 1.0850, 1.0851, 1.0850, 1.0851, 1.0850, without breaking through. The tick count rises while the range stays flat.

What this suggests is absorption. Someone is selling into every uptick, or buying into every downtick, with enough size to hold the level. The orders are being filled, which is why the tick count is high, but the price cannot move beyond.

Absorption usually precedes one of two things. Either the large participant finishes, and price moves away fast in the opposite direction, or the opposing flow gets exhausted and the level gives way with momentum.

Retail platforms do not show real volume, but tick behaviour offers a rough proxy. A scalper who watches the repeated testing of a level, rather than just the candle, sometimes gets a few seconds of notice.

The reading is not reliable enough to bet the account on. As a filter, it adds a sliver of information that candle charts hide completely.

Has repeated testing of a level ever preceded a sharp move in a way that could be counted and verified?

Tick data sometimes shows many consecutive ticks at the same bid and ask, with only the timestamp changing. These can come from the broker's feed sending updates even when the price has not changed, perhaps because volume or another field updated, or because the feed sends periodic heartbeat quotes. In other cases, repeated ticks can indicate that the feed has stalled and is resending the last price. Distinguishing between these possibilities matters for analysis. If repeated ticks are counted as activity, they can inflate tick volume and make quiet periods look busier than they really are, which can distort strategies based on activity levels.

I've watched that kind of level-hugging on EURUSD during the dead hour after New York closes, and it did sometimes lead somewhere, though not as often as the story suggests. When I went back through about sixty screenshots where price poked the same level at least five times in a few minutes, roughly two thirds broke away in the direction opposite to the pushes, usually within a minute.

The catch was that the other third ran straight through with a spread jump, and those cost me more than the winners paid. So I stopped treating it as a signal and started using it only as a reason to stay out of trades pointing into the level. That alone cleaned up several entries that used to get chopped.

If you want to count it, log the touch count and the time of day for each case, then mark what happened in the next two minutes. After a month the pattern, or the lack of one, shows up quickly. For me it only held on quiet pairs, never around data releases.