🏦 Stop Hunts, Liquidity, and Pivot Detection: Understanding Institutional Levels

Smart Money Concepts explained for real market behavior

Every trader has experienced this:
Price hits your stop… and then immediately moves in the direction you expected.

Is it bad luck? No.
It’s liquidity engineering.

In this article we cover:

• Why stop hunts happen

• How obvious pivots attract liquidity

• The limitations of the NinjaTrader Swing indicator

• And how TIS_LiquidityLevels gives you a real institutional view of the market

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🎯 Why obvious pivots trigger stop hunts

Traders often place limit orders on previous highs or lows when trading double tops/bottoms.
But these pivots attract massive clusters of stop-loss orders.

When the price reaches that area:

• Stops get triggered

• Each stop becomes a market order

• Price accelerates beyond the level

• And only after clearing liquidity… the real move begins

This is why waiting for the bar close is often safer than using a blind limit order.

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📉 How pivots are detected (and why traditional tools fail)

A pivot forms when a bar is the highest/lowest relative to n bars on each side.
NinjaTrader’s Swing indicator uses this logic.

But:

❌ It repaints

Pivots appear only after future bars confirm them.
Not reliable for live liquidity analysis.

❌ Symmetric strength requirement

You cannot set different strengths for left/right sides.

❌ It forgets old pivots

Only the most recent pivot remains, hiding historical liquidity levels.

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🧭 The manual workaround

Some traders draw horizontal lines on each pivot recognized by the Swing indicator.

This works but is:

• Slow

• Subjective

• Impossible to automate

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🚀 TIS_LiquidityLevels: A modern institutional approach

This tool fixes all limitations of the Swing indicator.

✔ No repainting

Pivots never change once confirmed.

✔ Independent left/right strength

Example: 25 bars left, 2 bars right — ideal for fast detection.

✔ Retains all unbroken pivots

Creating a real liquidity map.

✔ Groups nearby pivots

If pivots are within a few ticks, they become a single institutional level.

✔ Automatic signals

When liquidity is taken and a pivot breaks:

• ❌ Short signal

• 🟢 Long signal

Fully compatible with Markers , Strategy Builder, and NinjaScript.

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📌 Final thoughts

Stop hunts are not randomness — they are part of liquidity mechanics.
Understanding pivots and unbroken levels is essential for Smart Money trading.

TIS_LiquidityLevels gives traders clear insight into:

• where liquidity sits,

• where stop hunts are likely,

• and where valid entries appear.