Deviations to Avoid - CHEAT SHEET
Not every range deviation is a signal. Most of the ones that lose money look almost right. 5 ways to tell you're looking at a trap instead of a trade:
1. THE RANGE ISN'T EVEN A RANGE YET. One touch on each side isn't a range, it's noise pretending to be structure. If you can't draw both boundaries in 5 seconds, there's nothing here to deviate from yet.
2. THE SWEEP HAD NO WEIGHT BEHIND IT. Price poked past the boundary on thin air, no volume, no reaction into a higher timeframe level. A real sweep takes liquidity. A fake one just drifts past the line and drifts back.
3. THE RECLAIM IS ONLY A WICK. The candle body never closed back inside, just the wick touched it and reversed. No reclaim, no trade.
4. NO STRUCTURE BREAK ON THE LOWER TIMEFRAME. The reclaim is the signal, not the trigger. If price comes back inside and just chops without breaking LTF structure, the setup never actually confirmed.
5. CALLING IT A SPRING OR UPTHRUST WITHOUT THE CONTEXT. Those only count at the real end of accumulation or distribution, with volume drying up or climaxing to match. Without that context, it's just a deviation.
The trap isn't the deviation. It's trading one that never had the weight, the reclaim, or the structure to back it up.
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