HH/HL vs LL/LH
The vocabulary for describing a bullish (HH/HL) or bearish (LL/LH) trend, point by point.
HH (Higher High) and HL (Higher Low) describe a bullish structure: each new high exceeds the previous one, and each new low stays above the prior low.
LL (Lower Low) and LH (Lower High) describe the opposite in a bearish structure: each new low sits below the previous one, and each new high stays under the prior high.
This vocabulary lets you annotate a chart quickly and communicate a market read without ambiguity — it’s the common base of all price-action methods, not just ICT.
How to annotate in practice: start from the leftmost swing point of the area you care about, then move right, qualifying each new pivot against the previous pivot of the same kind. A high compares to a high, a low to a low — never a high to a low. That is the most frequent reading error among beginners, and it produces incoherent annotations.
The full sequence of a healthy uptrend reads HL → HH → HL → HH. The first crack appears when a low can no longer hold above the previous one: the sequence becomes HH → LL, and that is precisely what a CHoCH is. So the vocabulary is not decorative: it is what makes a regime change visible before it becomes obvious.
How to use it in a trade? These four labels decide which direction is allowed. In HH/HL, you only look for buys on pullbacks. In LL/LH, only sells on rallies. A properly annotated chart makes that decision mechanical and takes intuition out of the equation — which is exactly the point.
The classic mistake: forcing the label. When the market is ranging, highs and lows form at nearly identical levels and it becomes impossible to choose between HH and LH without fudging a few points. If you are hesitating, it is not that you are reading badly: it is that the market is neither bullish nor bearish. The correct annotation there is "range", and the right trade is often no trade.
Second trap: mixing timeframes in one annotation. Marking HH/HL taken from a 15-minute chart onto an H4 chart produces an incoherent read. A sequence is annotated on one timeframe at a time, then compared with the others.