Price builds a range. It puts in two highs at roughly the same level. Everyone who can see those two highs puts a stop just above them, and then price runs straight through, collects the lot, and falls back inside.
That run is not a breakout. It is the fuel. The trade is what happens next: price returns to the level it just swept, and that return is the entry.
This draws the whole sequence with the Wyckoff names on it, marks the swept level, and waits.
The sequence
Left to right, for a sell. The buy model is the mirror.
| Label | What it is | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| BC | Buying climax — the end of a sharp up move | A leg that ran fast and far is what leaves trapped orders behind. A slow drift does not |
| AR | Automatic reaction | Marks the range floor, and later becomes the target |
| TEST | The retest of BC, equal highs within a tolerance | BC to TEST is the zone. Its top is the level that will be swept |
| PURGE | Price runs beyond the level | The stops above the equal highs are the fuel, not the destination |
| RTO | Price falls back inside and returns to the zone | This is the entry, taken at the near edge |
| SOW | Sign of weakness — the range floor breaks | Confirmation after the fact |
| LP | Last point of supply, the final pullback | The second chance, if you missed the first |
On the buy side BC becomes SC, the selling climax, and AR is the automatic rally that marks the range ceiling. SOW and LP keep their names on both sides for symmetry; strict Wyckoff would call the buy-side pair SOS and LPS.
The point of naming them is that you can argue with each one. If you think the leg into BC was not sharp enough to trap anybody, you can see exactly which bar the model disagreed with you about.
What "sharp" means, measured three ways
A climax is not just a high. The model tests the move into it against ATR, and all three tests are yours to set or switch off:
- the size of the leg into it, default 3.0 × ATR
- the speed of it — ground covered per bar, default 0.15 × ATR
- the range of the climax bar itself, off by default
Set all three to zero and every swing high becomes a candidate, which is roughly what a tool that only looks for equal highs is doing. The defaults are deliberately strict. Fewer setups, and the ones left have a reason to have trapped somebody.
Two ways to find the structure
| Pivot mode | BOS chain mode (default) | |
|---|---|---|
| A swing is | a bar higher than the N bars each side | a point price retraced from by at least n × ATR |
| Scale measured in | bars | volatility |
| The purge is | a wick beyond the level | a close beyond the level |
| Same setting across symbols and timeframes | no | yes |
The purge definition is the interesting difference. In pivot mode a wick through the equal highs counts, which is the liquidity sweep in its purest form and also the noisiest. In BOS chain mode the hunt has to close beyond the level, so a single spike poking through and closing back does not qualify.
Everything else — the range floor breaking, the return inside, the death of the zone — is measured on the close in both modes, never on a wick.
Both ship. It is one dropdown, so you can put the same chart through both.
Three definitions of the zone
BAND (default) is the band between the two highs of BC and TEST. Equal highs are never exactly equal, and that small band is the zone. It gets widened to a minimum thickness when the two are too close to touch.
BLOCK uses the order block instead: the last up candle before the drop away from TEST for a sell. A deeper zone — better fill, fewer fills.
LIQUIDITY keeps everything the purge itself left behind: the fair value gaps torn open on the way back inside, the candle that turned the extreme around, and the swept band. All of them are places the return can happen, so all of them are drawn. Whichever price reaches first gets the trade and the rest stay on the chart as what they are — zones still waiting.
A zone dies on a close beyond its far edge, and only after price has come back inside the range. The purge itself never kills the zone, because the purge is the entire point of the model.
Stop and target
SELL: SL = purge high + n × ATR TP = AR + n × ATR
BUY : SL = purge low - n × ATR TP = AR - n × ATR
The offsets point in opposite directions on purpose. The stop is pushed outside the extreme of the hunt, away from the entry — that high has already collected its stops and price should not need to go back for them. The target is pulled inside the range floor, towards the entry, so you are paid before price has to break the prior extreme.
If that leaves the target on the wrong side of the entry, the setup has no room and is dropped rather than drawn with a negative reward.
The stop is also configurable to sit at the zone's far edge instead of the purge extreme, if you would rather trade it tighter and accept being taken out more often.
How the model appears on the chart
- The purge starts. The labels, the swept level, the zone and the range floor are drawn at once. No entry, and none implied.
- Price closes back inside and returns to the zone. Now the RTO label appears with the stop and target boxes.
- SOW and LP are added once the move away has shaped them.
If price never returns, the model stops at step 1 and stays there — a marked-up range with no trade on it, which is the honest picture. If the zone dies before any entry, the whole pattern is dropped.
Non-repainting
Every label is anchored to a closed bar and does not move afterwards. The purge is confirmed on a close in the default mode. The zone's death is a close. The stop and target come from the ATR of the entry bar.
The exception, deliberately, is the TOUCH alert, which watches the current bar tick by tick because that is what a touch is.
The cost of this is lag: TEST is only a test once price has come back off it, and the model appears after that, not at the high itself. A tool that marks the high the moment it prints is a tool that will unmark it later.
The panel
SMC RTO BOS 1.2/0.4 xATR
Buy T/W/L 19 / 14 / 5
Buy win % 73.7%
Sell T/W/L 17 / 11 / 6
Sell win % 64.7%
Total, won, lost, per direction, over the bars it scanned — counted against the levels the model itself drew.
Read it as a gauge of whether this symbol and timeframe are producing the pattern at all, not as a track record. It knows nothing about spread, slippage, or the fact that you would not have taken all nineteen. You won't find a win rate table in this listing, and I'd treat any indicator listing that has one with some care.
Alerts
TOUCH fires the moment price trades into the zone, checked every tick. CLOSE fires on bar close, when the bar reached into the zone but did not close beyond it. At most one alert per bar per direction, following the most recent waiting pattern on each side.
The first pass runs silently, so loading the indicator never replays historical alerts.
What it can't do
It trades one model. No sessions, no killzones, no higher-timeframe zone import, no fair value gap engine of its own beyond the ones the purge creates. If you want the full points-of-interest tool, that is ICT Pro and your subscription covers it.
The climax filters are strict by default, and on a symbol that is trending cleanly without ranging first you can go a long time with nothing drawn. That is the filter doing its job, but if you want a tool with an opinion every day, this will frustrate you.
The panel's win column is arithmetic, not a backtest and not a forecast.
The MT4 build has no Telegram alerts. Terminal alert, mobile push and email work on both platforms; the Telegram path exists only in the MT5 build, because the shared MT4 library this is built on does not carry it. That is the one real difference between the two files.
Questions you'll have
How is this different from SMC Continuation? Different model. Continuation reads a trend that pulls back into an order block. This reads a range whose edge gets swept. They fire in different market conditions, and both are covered by the same subscription, so run whichever matches what the chart is doing.
Which zone mode? BAND to start. Move to BLOCK if you find yourself being filled and then run over; move to LIQUIDITY if you would rather see every candidate the purge left and pick by eye.
Which detection mode? BOS chain. Pivot mode is there so you can see what wick-based sweep detection does differently on your own chart.
What timeframe? H1 and H4. M15 produces plenty and is busier; below M15 the range structure churns.
MT4 or MT5? Both, and your subscription covers both — see the note above about Telegram.
Support
Message me through the site with a screenshot that includes the panel, plus the symbol and timeframe. Updates are included for as long as your subscription is running.
Analysis tool. It places no trades and makes no profitability claim. Past price behaviour is not a guide to future price behaviour.