Stop run

A description of a sequence visible on a chart. Protective orders accumulate just beyond the levels everyone can see: round numbers, recent swing highs and lows, session extremes, the edges of a range. Those orders are instructions to deal at the market once reached, so when price arrives they all convert at once, in the same direction. The result is a sharp extension beyond the level on volume that appeared from nowhere, followed in many cases by an equally quick return inside it.

The same sequence carries several names, among them stop hunt and liquidity grab, and it is closely related to a fakeout, which describes the failed break without making any claim about why it failed. The neutral explanation for all of them is structural: a cluster of resting orders is a pool of executable interest, participants wanting to deal in size are drawn to where that interest sits, and an area that is obvious to one reader is obvious to every other.

Where practitioners genuinely disagree is attribution. In a market dealt over the counter the accusation is that the counterparty moved price to trigger the cluster deliberately, and the counterargument is that the clustering alone makes the area fragile and no intent is required to explain the pattern. Evidence of deliberate targeting at retail scale is disputed and difficult to establish from price data alone, since the two explanations predict the same chart. What is not disputed is the practical consequence: this is exactly where a stop's fill and its level diverge most, because the fill happens inside the fastest part of the move.