Strategy
Reading liquidity: a desk primer
Price tells you where the market is. Liquidity tells you whether it can stay there. Here is how desks read the second chart.
A clean breakout into thin liquidity is not a breakout. It is a setup for the move back. Before you trust a level, you have to know who is standing behind it.
Depth before direction
Resting orders are the floor. When the book is deep, a large print barely moves price; when it is thin, the same size walks the tape three levels. The same headline produces a different chart depending on what was waiting underneath.
Backtest the fills, not just the rules
Most strategies die in the gap between the price a backtest assumes and the price a real book delivers. Model slippage as a function of depth and your edge survives contact with the market, or it tells you early that it never existed.
Not investment advice. Educational content for traders building their own systems.
