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What Is a Liquidity Sweep

A liquidity sweep is a wick that reaches beyond an obvious high or low and a close that comes back on the near side. This paper shows you a real one drawn from the September sweep of an August high, what the word liquidity means — the orders waiting just beyond a level — the sweep on the daily chart and opened into its hours, and where the platform draws a stop loss on the chart.

Difficulty
Intermediate
Reading time
5 min
Pages
8
Reviewed by
Saman Rahbar

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The sweep

A liquidity sweep is a wick beyond an obvious high or low, and a close back on the near side of it. The euro against the dollar made a high of 1.17427 on 22 August 2025. On 5 September the price rose to 1.17595, 17 pips over that high — a pip being the fourth decimal place, the smallest step most people count in — and closed at 1.17156, 27 pips under it. The wick, the thin line beyond the body, went past the old high; the close did not. That is the whole shape.

What sits beyond a high

The word liquidity in the name means orders waiting at a price. Just above an obvious high sit two kinds: the stop losses of people who sold — a stop loss being the order that closes a losing trade — and the buy orders of people waiting to buy the breakout. Both are orders to buy, and both are filled as the price rises through the high. A sweep is the price reaching up to those orders, filling them, and turning back down, which is why the wick goes over the line and the close does not.

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