Is stop hunting illegal?

Trading toward a price where stops rest is not illegal — it is ordinary execution against available liquidity. [Spoofing](/glossary/spoofing/) is a separate act, banned under the Dodd-Frank Act: entering orders with the intent to cancel them before execution. The line is intent to trade.

Is someone targeting my personal stop?

No. An individual retail order is invisible and too small to be worth anything. What has value is the cluster: hundreds of stops at one obvious price, together forming a fill large enough to matter. You are collateral, not a target.

How do I tell a sweep from a real breakout?

By what happens immediately after. Acceptance beyond the level — continued aggression, wide range, trade holding on the far side — reads as a breakout. A quick return inside the prior range reads as a sweep. Both look identical at the moment of the break.

Glossary

Liquidity sweep / stop run

Also called: stop run · stop hunt · liquidity grab

A liquidity sweep is a brief push through a level where stop orders rest, filling them, then reversing. The triggered stops are the liquidity: each one becomes a market order that hands a larger participant the fill size it needs. Mechanically real, but routinely oversold as a personal hunt.

Why stops are the liquidity

A stop is a market order with a trigger, so a cluster of stops is a pocket of forced flow that appears the instant one specific price trades. Anyone needing to buy size without pushing the market away has an obvious place to look. That premise is the subject of trapped traders; what matters here is where the pockets sit.

Stops cluster where charts tell everyone to put them: under the prior session’s low, at the edges of the initial balance, beyond a naked point of control, at the extreme of a range that has already held twice. The obviousness is the point — a level nobody watches holds nobody’s stop.

Sweep then reversal, or sweep then displacement

Two things can follow a level being cleared. Price snaps back inside the range and stays there — the classic sweep, with the trapped traders on the wrong side supplying fuel for the move back. Or price keeps going on a wide bar with continued aggression, and the stops were simply the first liquidity a genuine move consumed.

The distinction only appears in the bars that follow, and it inverts the trade: a sweep with displacement is followed, not faded. Let the market say which one it is instead of guessing at the wick.

The number you will hear

Retest rates for swept levels get quoted confidently and rarely twice the same way. What no version supplies is the instrument, the sample, the window, or what counts as a retest, and no public replication exists for any of them. The honest response is not to pick the most flattering figure but to measure it yourself, with the definitions written down before you count.

A worked example

In a synthetic ES sequence, a swing low at 5 288.25 holds twice on light volume. On the third approach price trades 5 287.75, two ticks lower, and 1 240 contracts print at the bid inside forty seconds against a rolling average near 180 for a comparable window.

Price is back above 5 290.00 within two minutes and the low is not revisited that session. The longs stopped out at 5 288.00, plus the breakout sellers who joined them below, supplied the size the move up needed. The stops were not a side effect of the move. They were the fill.

The trap

Labelling every wick a sweep after the fact. Every reversal has an extreme, so every reversal can be re-described as a stop run once the outcome is known. The story is always available and explains nothing in advance.

The costlier version is the conclusion drawn from it. They hunted my stop leads to put the stop further away, which enlarges the loss on every trade that fails and leaves the placement logic untouched. If your stop sits where everyone else's sits, fix the entry location, not the distance.

Frequently asked

Is stop hunting illegal?: Trading toward a price where stops rest is not illegal — it is ordinary execution against available liquidity. Spoofing is a separate act, banned under the Dodd-Frank Act: entering orders with the intent to cancel them before execution. The line is intent to trade.
Is someone targeting my personal stop?: No. An individual retail order is invisible and too small to be worth anything. What has value is the cluster: hundreds of stops at one obvious price, together forming a fill large enough to matter. You are collateral, not a target.
How do I tell a sweep from a real breakout?: By what happens immediately after. Acceptance beyond the level — continued aggression, wide range, trade holding on the far side — reads as a breakout. A quick return inside the prior range reads as a sweep. Both look identical at the moment of the break.