The order block, from spotting it to entering

An order block is the last opposite-direction candle before a decisive move. Three things must be true at once, and that is where most drawings fail.

One: the move that follows must be decisive. Not "price went up afterwards" — a clean displacement, usually leaving an imbalance behind it. If the market drifted up over ten candles, the starting candle is not an order block, it is a candle.

Two: that move must have broken something. A high, a low, a point that was holding the previous structure. A displacement that broke nothing proves nothing about the intent behind it.

Three: the zone must not have been worked already. An order block touched once has done its job. The second visit does not mean the same thing, and it is the most frequent error among people who replay the same zone all day.

From the candle body to its extreme: for a bullish order block, from the candle’s low to the top of its body. That is the most common and most defensible convention — the wick belongs to the zone because that is where price actually traded.

There is no single canonical version, and it does not matter. What matters is picking one and sticking to it: a zone drawn differently depending on your mood will never teach you whether it works, because you will never be measuring the same thing twice.

The practical test: if you have to zoom in to decide where the zone ends, it is too small to be usable on your timeframe.

Plenty of people put a limit order at the edge of the zone and get run over by the next pass. The edge is not special: it is your drawing, not the market’s. What matters is what price does on returning to it.

A more defensible entry waits for a reaction inside the zone — a visible rejection, a candle refusing to go lower — and enters on that confirmation, with invalidation beyond the zone’s extreme. You give up a few points of entry, you gain not being in the trades where the zone does not hold at all.

And if price cuts through the zone without reacting, nothing abnormal happened: the zone was wrong, or the liquidity was elsewhere. There is nothing to fix, only a reason not to insist.

It is not proof that an institution bought there. Nobody sees institutional order books, and an indicator sees them less. What you observe is a place where price left decisively after hesitating — the explanation given for it is a story, useful for remembering the pattern, but it is not data.

Nor is it a level that works better than another because it is "stronger". Level strength has been measured over thousands of cases within this method, and it does not separate good setups from bad. Treating an order block as one level among others, with a clean invalidation, beats crediting it with powers.