Every trader hits the same wall eventually: a chart full of indicators that all say something different, a signals group that tells you what to enter but never why, or a strategy that worked last week and stops working this week. SharmaFX doesn’t teach indicators, chart patterns, or signals. We teach how price actually moves: where liquidity sits, where larger participants build positions, and how session flow shapes the trading day. This glossary covers five concepts that make up the foundation of that framework. Read it once, then pull up a session and try to spot each one live; that’s how a framework actually sticks.
The Framework at a Glance
Market Structure
Read HH/HL and LH/LL to see whose control the trend is in.
Liquidity Sweep
Spot where resting stops were taken before the real move.
Order Block
Find the candle where larger participants built positions.
Session Volume
Know which hours actually move price before you trade them.
Market Structure
Market structure is the shape price leaves behind as it moves: the sequence of highs and lows that tells you, objectively, whether a market is trending, ranging, or turning. It’s the closest thing to an “indicator” in the SharmaFX framework, and even then it isn’t really one: it isn’t lagging, it isn’t derived from a formula, and it doesn’t repaint. It’s just price, plotted honestly.
Reading structure is the first skill we teach, because every other concept in this glossary is defined relative to it. A liquidity sweep only means something once you know what structure it’s sweeping. An order block only matters if it produced a structural shift.
HH/HL and LH/LL
An uptrend is a series of higher highs and higher lows (HH/HL): each swing high clears the last one, and each pullback holds above the prior low. A downtrend is the mirror image: lower highs and lower lows (LH/LL), each rally failing below the last high, each low undercutting the one before it.
The moment that sequence breaks (a higher-low market prints a lower low, or a lower-high market prints a higher high) is called a break of structure (BOS), and it’s the first objective signal that control of the market may be shifting from one side to the other. We don’t trade the break itself. We use it to re-frame what we’re looking for next.
Liquidity Sweep
Retail stop-losses cluster in predictable places: just above a recent swing high, just below a recent swing low, just outside an obvious range. Those clusters are liquidity: resting orders that larger participants need to fill their own positions.
A liquidity sweep is a move that pushes price through one of those clusters, triggers the resting stops, and then reverses. It looks like a fakeout or a stop hunt because, functionally, it is one; it’s just not random. It’s the market doing what it structurally needs to do to find willing counterparties for a large order. Spotting a swept level, rather than reacting to the sweep itself, is the skill.
Order Block
An order block is the last candle (or small cluster of candles) in the opposing direction before a strong, structural move away from that area. If price grinds sideways, then explodes upward, the last down-candle before that explosion is the bullish order block, which marks where a concentration of orders was likely absorbed before price could move freely.
Order blocks matter because price often returns to retest them before continuing in the original direction, though not every time, and not on a fixed schedule, but often enough that they’re one of the more reliable areas of interest once market structure and liquidity already agree on a directional bias.
Session Volume
Not all hours of the trading day carry the same information. The Asian session is typically lower-volume and range-building; the London open often produces the day’s first real directional push and frequently sweeps the Asian session’s high or low on the way; the New York session brings the heaviest volume and the most reliable continuation or reversal moves, especially around the New York open and the London/New York overlap.
Trading the same setup at 3am Eastern and 9am Eastern is not the same trade, even if the chart pattern looks identical: the participants, the volume, and the likelihood of follow-through are different. Session awareness is what turns a technically correct setup into a well-timed one.
Why This, and Not Indicators or Signals
Every concept above describes something that actually happened in the market: an area where stops were resting, a candle where orders were absorbed, an hour where volume behaves differently. None of it is derived from a moving average, an oscillator, or someone else’s call in a chat group. That’s the point. Structure, liquidity, order flow, and session timing are how institutions actually think about price. This glossary is the vocabulary for it. The next step is watching it happen, and that’s what the rest of the SharmaFX curriculum is built around.
This same framework is taught in full depth across the SharmaFX programs, and applied live every session in the Trading Insights hub, where you can see the current session recaps and macro notes.
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the difference between market structure and a chart pattern?
Market structure is the objective sequence of swing highs and lows: it exists whether or not anyone draws it. Chart patterns (head and shoulders, triangles, flags) are subjective shapes overlaid onto that structure after the fact, and two traders can disagree on where a pattern starts and ends. SharmaFX teaches structure specifically because HH/HL and LH/LL are testable in real time: either the last swing high got cleared, or it didn’t.
How many candles does it take to confirm a break of structure?
There’s no fixed candle count. A break of structure is confirmed the moment price closes beyond the prior swing point on the timeframe you’re trading, whether that’s one candle or ten. What matters is using a closing price, not just a wick, since a wick that pierces a level and closes back inside it is frequently a liquidity sweep, not a genuine break.
Can a liquidity sweep happen without a change in market structure?
Yes, and it’s one of the more common mistakes new traders make: assuming every sweep is a reversal signal. A sweep that doesn’t also produce a break of structure is often just a stop run within the existing trend, and price frequently continues in the original direction afterward. The sweep only becomes meaningful once it’s read alongside structure, not instead of it.
Do order blocks work the same way on every timeframe?
The concept holds on any timeframe, but reliability generally improves on higher timeframes such as the 4-hour and daily, where each candle represents more aggregated volume and is harder to manufacture. An order block on a 1-minute chart forms constantly and means comparatively little on its own; the same concept on a daily chart, aligned with a higher-timeframe bias, carries far more weight.
Which trading session should a new trader focus on first?
For most retail traders working around a 9-to-5, the New York session, particularly the New York open and the London/New York overlap, offers the most volume and the clearest continuation moves, which makes structure and liquidity easier to read. The Asian session’s lower volatility is useful for observing range-building, but it isn’t where most of this framework shows up most clearly.