Crypto Liquidity Sweeps: Stop Hunts and Liquidation Wicks on USDT Pairs

• Sell-side sweep - today's low goes below an untaken low and the close comes back above it. Read as bullish.
• Buy-side sweep - today's high goes above an untaken high and the close comes back below it. Read as bearish.
• Untaken - no candle since the level was set has traded past it.
• Levels - swing highs and lows (five candles each side, within 120 days); last week's high or low (Monday to Sunday IST), the first time it is taken this week; last month's, the first time this month; and the previous day's, on its own tab.
• A close beyond the level is a breakout, not a sweep, and is not listed.

Sweeps and liquidations

A trader who buys a perpetual future with leverage has a liquidation price: if the market falls to it, the exchange closes the position by selling. Many traders put stops, and end up with liquidation prices, just under the same visible lows. When price reaches them, the forced selling pushes price lower, which reaches the next group, and so on. When the selling runs out, price often snaps back, and the daily candle shows a long lower wick through the old low and a close back above it: the page's sell-side sweep.

The page reads spot candles only; it has no liquidation feed. Whether a sweep was a liquidation cascade is a question for the futures data: a sharp fall in open interest on the day (see the OI Buildup guide) is the usual sign that positions were closed rather than opened.

30 October: one fall, fifteen sweeps

The 30 October sell-off was the busiest day on the lists from 1 October to 8 November: 32 of the 33 scanned pairs passed the liquidity filter, and 15 swept a swing, weekly or monthly level (13 sell-side, 2 buy-side; 3 more only took the previous day's high or low). Six of the 13 lows had been set on 16 or 17 September, the last time the market fell hard, and four on 24 October. Visible lows collect the same stops on every pair, so one fast fall runs them together.

• LINKUSDT, sell-side: its 16 September swing low of 10.62 had been untaken for six weeks. The low reached 10.273, the close was 11.145: through 0.49 ATR, back in 0.76 ATR, on 4.54 times its average volume. The swing and the September monthly low were taken together.
• TRXUSDT, buy-side: the same day, TRX ran the other way. Its high of 0.3654 went 2.68 ATR above the 0.3502 swing high of 22 August, and it closed at 0.3306, 3.46 ATR back below: swing, weekly, monthly and previous-day highs all swept at once, on 8.52 times its usual volume. The next day it fell 6.9% to 0.3077, and by 8 November it had not closed above 0.3306 again.

BTCUSDT, 4 November: a strong sweep that gave it all back

• October's low, and the previous week's, was 76,325.98, set on 31 October.
• On 4 November the low reached 75,736.38 and the close was 80,600.01: a sell-side sweep of the weekly, monthly and previous-day lows, back in 1.92 ATR, the strongest close on that day's list.
• The next candle (6 November; 5 November is missing) closed at 75,856.01, below the level again and below 4 November's open: the whole gain was gone. The sweep wick of 75,736.38 had still not been closed below by 8 November.

A strong Back In value describes the day. It does not say what the next day will do.

1. Count the sweeps first. One or two on a quiet day are pair stories. A dozen sell-side sweeps on one day, as on 30 October, is a market flush; read BTCUSDT and ETHUSDT before any single altcoin.
2. Prefer major levels. A swing or monthly level carries more orders than yesterday's low. Start with the Swing, Weekly and Monthly tabs; Previous Day is for short-term research.
3. Read Through and Back In. Through (ATR) is how far the wick went; Back In (ATR) how decisively the close returned. A deep wick with a weak close (NEARUSDT on 30 October: back in 0.02 ATR) says little.
4. Check the futures side. Open interest falling sharply on the sweep day means positions were forced out: fuel used up rather than new sellers.
5. Wait for structure. A sweep followed by a daily close above the newest swing high is the full SMC sequence. Until then the sweep is a hint, as BTCUSDT's 4 November candle shows.

Risk per trade - risk a small, fixed share of capital on any one idea. Crypto never closes, so a stop is the only exit while you sleep; with leverage, keep the liquidation price well beyond the stop. When selling options, prefer defined-risk structures (spreads, iron condors) over naked positions.

These are ideas to study, paper-trade and backtest, not recommendations or signals, and not a promise of any result. Every condition below can fail. Crypto trades around the clock and can move sharply at any hour; leverage and options can lose more than you expect, and past behaviour says nothing certain about the next session. Size, entries, exits and risk are your own decisions.

1. The patient way: sweep, then structure

• Setup: a sell-side sweep of a swing or monthly level with a large Back In value.
• Trigger idea: a daily close above the newest swing high within ten days.
• Invalidation: a daily close below the sweep's wick.

2. Fade the buy-side spike

• Setup: a buy-side sweep on very high volume that closes near or below the open, like TRXUSDT on 30 October.
• Idea: treat the wick's high as the level that failed; a later rally that stalls below it is the setup to study for a short.
• Invalidation: a daily close above the wick.

3. Flush day, majors first

• Setup: many sell-side sweeps on one day, with open interest falling.
• Idea: watch BTCUSDT and ETHUSDT for a close back above the flush day's midpoint; size any altcoin idea smaller, since altcoins swing harder both ways.

Test before you trade - write the rules down exactly, test them on past data (see how to backtest an options strategy and the Option Simulator, which supports crypto), then paper-trade at least 20 occurrences before committing real money. Keep a journal of every trade, including the ones you skipped.

Every Smart Money page has a Candles setting: Daily (the default) or Weekly. Weekly runs exactly the same rules on weekly candles built from the same IST daily bars. On crypto:

• A week is Monday 00:00 to Sunday 23:59 IST, seven daily candles: Monday's open, the week's high and low, Sunday's close, the volume added up.
• The current week is the week so far. Its candle is dated the newest day, so on a Monday it is a one-day candle; a weekly row seen mid-week can change, or drop off, by Sunday's close.
• Dates in a weekly row are the week's last day: a Sunday, or the newest day for the current week.
• Counts become weeks: a swing needs five weeks on each side, ATR 14 is fourteen weeks, and every look-back counts weeks.
• What stays daily: the liquidity filter (the newest day's turnover and volume), LTP and change, and the Vol Ratio column.
• History: the scan pages build weeks from about 400 days of daily bars, so a weekly swing or zone there is at most about a year old. The SMC Overview reads up to about three years where the archive has them (158 weeks for BTCUSDT).

A weekly idea for sweeps: on weekly candles the Previous Day tab means the previous week, and Monthly the previous calendar month; swing levels are weekly swings. A weekly sweep of a multi-month low that closes back above it by Sunday is a far bigger stop run than a daily one. Because the current week is the week so far, a mid-week sweep can still become a close through by Sunday: judge it on that close.

The tabs

• All - sweeps of a swing, weekly or monthly level.
• Sell-side (Bullish) / Buy-side (Bearish) - by direction.
• Swing / Weekly / Monthly - by the kind of level taken.
• Previous Day - yesterday's high or low swept (an IST day).

The columns

• Side, Level Swept (the most significant one: swing, then month, week, day) and Level (its kind) with Level Date.
• Wick - today's low (sell-side) or high (buy-side).
• Through (ATR) and Back In (ATR) - the wick's depth past the level and the close's distance back inside, in ATR units. The list is sorted by Back In.
• Chart - the swept level drawn from where it was set, with today's candle marked.

Which pairs are scanned

• The live USDT pairs in Unfluke's crypto archive, from BTCUSDT and ETHUSDT to mid-caps such as GRTUSDT and THETAUSDT: 33 were scanned on 8 November 2026.
• Stablecoins are left out by behaviour: a pair whose average daily range over 20 days is under 0.25% (USDCUSDT's is a few hundredths of a percent) is not scanned. A day with under US$100,000 traded is skipped as untraded.
• The liquidity filter: a 20-day average turnover above US$500,000, and the day's volume above 0.8 times its 20-day average. Crypto has no price bands, so there is no circuit check.
• The universe box: All, Futures or Options (pairs that also have a perpetual future, or options, in the archive).

Three things that are different on crypto

• A day is an IST day. Each daily candle runs from 00:00 to 23:59 IST, rolled up from the one-minute spot archive (Binance data). Another chart that closes its days at 00:00 UTC (05:30 IST) will show different candles, and so different swings and zones.
• Weekends thin the lists. The 0.8 × volume test is the same as on NSE, but crypto trades every day and volume falls away at weekends. From 10 August to 8 November 2026 an average of 21.2 pairs passed on a weekday and 10.8 on a Saturday or Sunday; BTCUSDT itself was off the lists on 27 of 89 days, 21 of them weekends. On Sunday 8 November no pair passed and every list was empty. The SMC Overview has no liquidity filter, so a pair's zones are always there.
• Missing days. The archive has no candle for 5 August, 11 September or 5 November 2026, when the feed stopped. The candles on either side sit next to each other, and a swing count of "five days" can span six calendar days there.

The newest day can also be unfinished: the feed runs about a day behind, and the newest stored day is topped up until it is complete, so its volume, and with it the liquidity test, can change during the day.

Smart Money Concepts are a way of reading a chart, popularised by the trader known as ICT. There is no official rulebook and no published evidence that they work better than other methods, on crypto or anywhere else; the pages apply one fixed reading so a row can be checked by hand. They describe what price did, not what it will do.

Open the page at Smart Money → Liquidity Sweeps (switch the market to Crypto), or sign up free to open the Market Terminal.

The other crypto Smart Money guides: SMC Overview, Fair Value Gaps, Order Blocks, Breaker Blocks. The NSE version of this page, with its own worked examples, is explained in the Liquidity Sweeps guide. For what traders were doing in the futures market on the same days, see the OI Buildup guide and the Binance Futures guide.