11 June 2026
A pause is not a turn until location agrees
In the first week of the Reversal Structure Clinic we put two prints on the board that look almost the same: a three-bar pause after a run, and a three-bar stall at a prior high. The bars are similar. The location is not.
Continuation asks whether the pause is orderly, whether it sits in the middle of a measured move, and whether the prior trend still has unused space. Reversal asks whether the move has arrived at a place that previously rejected price, and whether the close through a trigger is actually there.
We ask students to write one sentence before they draw: “This is a rest because…” or “This is a turn because…”. If the sentence only describes candle shape, we send them back to the swing map. Shape without location is decoration.
None of this is a promise about the next session’s open. It is a way to keep the notebook honest when two families of setup share the same ink.