Learn Liquidity Liquidity Sweep / Stop Hunt / Turtle Soup
Liquidity Sweep / Stop Hunt / Turtle Soup
Price pokes beyond an obvious level, triggers the stops, then snaps back — fuel for the opposite move.
A sweep is a raid: price trades through a reference level — a swing high, equal highs, PDH, a session extreme — but closes back on the original side, leaving a wick where the stops were collected.
ICT’s "turtle soup" is the classic version, a failed breakout of a prominent multi-day high or low that reverses straight back inside the range.
The read is counterintuitive but central: the failed poke is not weakness of the level, it is the completion of a stop-collection program, and it often marks the exact turn.
How to trade it
- Do not chase breakouts of obvious levels; wait to see whether the break holds (body closes beyond) or fails (wick and snap-back).
- Grade a sweep highest when it happens inside a kill zone and is followed within a few bars by a market structure shift.
- Use the sweep extreme as the logical stop location for reversal entries.
Pitfalls
- Front-running the reversal without the MSS confirmation — some sweeps are real breakouts.
- Treating every wick as a sweep; the level swept must actually hold resting liquidity (obvious, old, or equal).
See Liquidity Sweep / Stop Hunt / Turtle Soup detected live.
The workstation marks it on the chart the moment it prints.