Pullback

A counter move inside a larger one. The word sits in a family of near synonyms that are used loosely and mean slightly different things: a retracement usually refers to the same event measured as a proportion of the prior swing, a correction is a scale convention borrowed from equity index commentary, and a reversal is a counter move that does not resume. All four describe price falling back. Only the last claims the trend is over.

It is gauged rather than defined. Depth is read as a proportion of the prior swing, frequently against the Fibonacci proportions or against a moving average that the move has run above; duration is read in periods; and structure is read from whether the sequence of higher lows, or lower highs, survives the pause. None of these is a threshold anybody agrees on, and the same pause is described as shallow or deep depending on which swing it is measured against.

The problem is the same one that attaches to the word correction, and it is unavoidable: a pullback and the first leg of a reversal are indistinguishable while either is happening. The name contains a claim about what comes next, and that claim is only verifiable afterwards. The convention of treating a pause in an established trend as an entry area is widely described and remains a convention rather than a finding, since the published tests encode different definitions of the pause and disagree with each other accordingly. Careful writing describes the move by its depth and its dates and leaves the label off.