Retail traders often confuse three market patterns that look alike on charts: stop runs, absorption, and exhaustion. Each comes from different market dynamics and signals different directional moves. Telling them apart sharpens entry timing and win rates.
most retail traders don't know. If it's a stop run, a real stop run that I'm going to show you now how it works, or an absorption or an exhaustion, the pattern can be exactly the same one. But the reason why it happens, it's completely different. And the directional potential is completely different because a stop run, a real stop run doesn't have this potential. An absorption probably does. An exhaustion probably somewhere in the middle. So understanding the nuances will help you even as an ICT traders to get rid of the myths, to maybe stay with the structure you started with, but with adding that extra layer of precision, of win rate, of risk to reward that will improve your edge. All we have is our edge. Just having a 5% win rate more, just being able to see that you can not evaluate that setup because you don't see the absorption, it's going to be a game changer for you, I promise.
