Staring at daily charts for years before someone pointed this out.
Every candle you see is a summary.
That's it. That's the whole problem.
The daily closes green. Bullish, right?
You go long the next morning.
Stopped out by noon. Price ends up hitting your target anyway, just without you on board.
Sound familiar?
Here's what actually happened inside that green candle you trusted:
Price opened. Swept below the prior low. Triggered every stop sitting at "obvious support." Accumulated all those liquidated positions. Then displaced upward into the close.
The summary said bullish.
The actual sequence was hunt, accumulate, then move.
You read the headline. Institutions wrote the article.
This is Candle Range Theory. Not my term - it's been spreading through trading circles for the past few months. And once you see it, it's hard to miss.
The concept is stupid simple:
Every higher timeframe candle is a range. That range will be manipulated on lower timeframes before it closes. Always sweep one side, accumulate, displace to the other.
The 4-hour candle isn't showing you what happened. It's showing you what survived.
Drop to the 15-minute inside that same 4-hour window and you'll see the war that produced the summary. The fake move that trapped breakout traders. The accumulation phase where smart money loaded. The displacement that left retail watching from the sidelines.
Same candle. Completely different story depending on what resolution you're viewing.
Most traders operate one timeframe too high.
They see the result of the manipulation. They don't see the manipulation itself.
So they buy the green candle.
Sell the red candle.
React to the summary like it's the story.
And institutions keep farming them because the game only works if retail stays at the wrong zoom level.
This is why your "perfect" setup keeps stopping you out before working. You're not wrong about direction. You're early to a phase that hasn't completed yet.
The sweep still needs to happen. Your stop is what satisfies it.
Quick aside - this is where FluxCharts changed the game for me.
Manually mapping where liquidity sits on both sides of a range takes time. The indicator does it automatically. Shows me exactly where stops are clustering before the sweep happens.
I know which side of the candle gets hunted first because I can literally see the liquidity pools building in real-time.
{{first_name}} let me be direct for a second.
Once I started mapping candles as ranges instead of signals, everything changed.
I stopped asking…
"what did this candle tell me" and started asking "what phase of the range are we in."
Pre-sweep. Post-sweep. Displacement.
Three phases. Every candle. Every timeframe.
There's a way to see which phase you're in before the candle closes. Took me a while to map it cleanly - but once it clicked, I stopped getting swept and started entering after the sweep completed.
Same charts you're already looking at.
Different resolution.
Talk soon,
Atif
