Sweep or break?

Same wick, opposite meaning

Price trades through a level you marked. Now what? At that moment you have not learned much, because levels are taken constantly and most of the time price simply keeps going. What happened is decided at the close.

A sweep: price trades through the level and closes back inside it, on the same candle or within a few. The orders beyond the level were filled, and price did not stay there. A break: price closes beyond the level and holds. That is acceptance. The level went and stayed gone.

The two can look identical while the candle is open, which is the whole reason to wait for the close. Entering on the wick feels early and clever. It is neither. During the sweep you cannot tell a rejection from the start of a real breakout, and entering there puts your stop in the middle of the noise you are trying to trade.

The C2: a sweep in two candles

The cleanest version of a sweep uses two candles, and we call it a C2. Take a candle, C1, and note which way it closed. If C1 closed down, its low is the level. If it closed up, its high is the level. The next candle, C2, trades through that level and then closes back on the original side of it.

The colour condition is the part most descriptions leave out. For an upside turn, C1 must close down, and it is C1's low that gets swept and reclaimed. For a downside turn, C1 must close up, and it is its high. Drop the condition and you are describing a candle that dipped and recovered, which is a shape rather than a failed attempt.

You can find one by hand with four questions. Which candle is C1? Which way did it close, and so which level is in play? Did the next candle trade through that level, not just to it? Where did that candle close? Back through the level is a C2. At or beyond it is not.

When the reclaim comes a candle late

Sometimes the candle that sweeps the level closes beyond it: no reclaim, no C2. The turn can still arrive on the very next candle, but it has to clear a much higher bar. We call that a C2X. For an upside turn, the next candle must close above the high of the whole sweeping candle, wick included, not merely back above the level. Downside is the mirror.

That higher bar is what keeps the pattern honest. A loose version of the rule, where any later close back through the level counts, turns almost every dip into a pattern. The C2X is confirmed later than a C2, and being later is its cost.

A higher-timeframe candle can be a C2 too. When a 1-hour candle sweeps the previous hour's low and closes back above it, the level it swept is one that everyone on the hourly chart can see, and you can watch it from the 5 or 15-minute chart. Several of the SIRC examples later in the course start with exactly that.

What a sweep does not tell you

Be honest about what you have after a sweep. It reports that an attempt on a level failed inside a candle. It does not tell you what comes next, how far anything travels, or whether a turn is beginning rather than pausing. Measured, an entry on the close back through did no better than an entry on a random candle with the same stop, and entries like these reach a 2R target about 1 time in 3, roughly what chance gives.

So the sweep is where a read starts, not where it ends. The rest of this module builds what has to follow before a sweep becomes a setup: a change in delivery, a break of structure, and a place to get in.