Guides

Trading Guides: Order Flow, Liquidity and Market Structure

Free guides to reading a TradingView chart the way price actually moves: through structure, pressure, inefficiency and resting liquidity. Each guide explains the idea in plain terms, shows how to mark it by hand, and says where it fails.

New to these ideas? Start with market structure. The other guides build on it.

All guides

In reading order, from the structure map to automation.

TradingView chart with IIF: an Exhaust label at the high, a decline into a range, and a bullish Shift line at the top of the range that price breaks with large candles

Market structure

How to Identify a Market Structure Shift

Find the protected level, wait for a close with displacement, and confirm the shift on the retest.

Updated · 10 min read
TradingView chart with the IIF CVMI pressure oscillator in the pane below price

Order flow

Order Flow Analysis on TradingView

Read displacement, absorption and acceptance at a level, and know what a TradingView chart can and cannot show.

Updated · 10 min read
TradingView candlestick chart with fair value gaps drawn as boxes: filled gaps end where price traded through them, open gaps run to the right edge

Fair value gaps

Fair Value Gap Indicator for TradingView

Find gaps with the three-candle rule, read the 50% midpoint, and add an FVG indicator on TradingView.

Updated · 9 min read
TradingView chart with IIF: a 12-hour bearish order block above price, tapped and 94.8% mitigated, and a 12-hour bullish order block below, pending at 0%

Order blocks

Order Block Indicator for TradingView

Treat a block as a changing state: origin, mitigation, sweep and reclaim, or failure.

Updated · 10 min read
The IIF Liquidity Matrix: active and filled liquidity rows by price level, with sizes in USDT

Liquidity

What Is Liquidity Engineering?

Where stop orders cluster, how price sweeps them, and what happens after the sweep.

Updated · 9 min read
A TradingView alert message written as JSON with placeholders, sent as a POST request to a webhook URL

Alerts and automation

TradingView Webhook JSON

The payload format, every placeholder, strategy fields, alert() messages in Pine, and a receiver that answers within three seconds.

Updated · 8 min read

Three rules that run through every guide

Location before signal

A fair value gap, order block, sweep or pressure reading means something different depending on where it sits in the structure.

Reaction before conclusion

A sweep, tap or displacement is only the event. What price does next, reclaim, acceptance, mitigation or failure, decides the read.

State before clutter

More boxes on the chart do not help. Knowing which levels are still active, which are filled and which have failed does.

See these ideas tracked on a live chart

The Institutional Imbalance Framework marks structure, fair value gaps, order blocks and liquidity on TradingView and keeps track of which ones are still active.

See the Institutional Imbalance Framework