What Is the Price Action Concepts Indicator?

Michael Whitman · Trading since 2017, full-time since 2020 · YouTube creator, 137K subscribers · Published 2026-09-15 · Updated 2026-10-25

▶ Watch: Ultimate Price Action Concepts Indicator by LuxAlgo (Full Strategy 2026)

Covered on this page: LuxAlgo and TradingView.

Price Action Concepts automates the marking of structure on a chart. It is a capable tool with a name that contains a small contradiction worth noticing.

How it works

It is one indicator within the LuxAlgo suite, added to a TradingView chart like any other study, with its own settings panel.

It detects and draws a defined list of features — swing highs and lows, breaks of structure, changes of character, order blocks, fair value gaps, equal highs and lows.

Each has a rule behind it. A swing high is a high with lower highs either side; an order block is the last opposing candle before a move that broke structure. The rules are mechanical, which is what makes automating them possible.

The contradiction in the name

Price action, as a term, meant trading without indicators. The original argument was that the bars contain the information and everything layered on top is a derived, delayed version of it.

An indicator that draws price action concepts is therefore an odd object. Useful, certainly — and it reintroduces exactly the layer the approach was defined in opposition to.

That is not an argument against using it. It is an argument for knowing what you are using, because the name suggests you are doing one thing while the tool does another.

A worked example

Take a hypothetical daily chart with swing sensitivity set to 2, so a high counts only once it has two lower highs on each side of it.

A swing point needs bars either side to exist. So the indicator cannot mark a swing high until at least one bar has closed beyond it — the mark is always at least one bar late, by definition.

An order block is later still. It is identified retrospectively as the candle before a move that broke structure, which means it cannot be known until that break has happened.

None of that is a defect. It is what the definitions require. The important consequence is that a chart covered in these marks is a chart describing the past with more precision than it describes the right-hand edge.

What the settings actually change

Swing sensitivity sets how many bars either side define a pivot. A low number marks every wobble; a high one marks only major turns, later.

Order block filtering decides which qualifying candles are shown — all of them, or only those meeting additional volume or size conditions.

Gap detection thresholds set how large an imbalance must be before it counts as a fair value gap.

Each is a trade between quantity and lateness, and there is no setting that escapes it. At the sensitive end you get many marks, early and mostly meaningless; at the other, few marks, late and mostly real. Where you sit should follow your holding period rather than the default.

Swing width alone changes the count a lot: on SPY daily bars since 1993, two-bar swings gave 12.9 changes of character a year and ten-bar swings 3.0, as the market structure page shows.

The original data

On the S&P 500 from 1950 to 2026, 53.1% of trading days closed up and the rest did not, which puts day-to-day direction close to a coin toss — and a coin with even odds lands the same way only about twice in a row on average.

Runs that short are the reason sensitive settings produce clutter. A structure detector tuned to catch two-bar moves will mark nearly every bar, because nearly every bar is part of one.

And every mark acted on costs the spread. At a hypothetical $8 a round trip, thirty zones traded in a session cost $240 on a $10,000 account, and a chart producing dozens of zones is producing dozens of chances to pay it before any of them resolves.

Using it well

Set it deliberately rather than leaving the defaults. The defaults suit nobody in particular and were chosen to look reasonable on a screenshot.

Turn most of it off. Running every feature at once covers the chart; picking the two or three you actually use makes what remains readable.

Mark your own levels first, then compare. If the indicator agrees, you have confirmation of your reading; if it disagrees, you have a question worth examining. Reversing that order lets the tool do your thinking.

And treat it as a drawing aid. It renders a framework consistently and quickly. Whether that framework describes anything real is a separate question, answered by testing it — not by how convincing the finished chart looks.

How this connects

This is an indicator named after the approach that rejected indicators. Price action meant reading the bars themselves; a script that marks those readings for you reintroduces exactly the layer the idea was defined against.

What it marks is the smart money concepts vocabulary. Market structure, break of structure, change of character, order blocks, fair value gaps - each with a mechanical rule underneath.

It belongs to the LuxAlgo suite, which runs inside TradingView, so the platform’s data, timeframes and alerts all apply unchanged.

Every mark is retrospective by construction. A swing high needs bars either side; an order block is identified only once a later move has broken structure. Neither can exist at the right-hand edge.

And none of it sets a stop-loss or a position size. A marked zone is a location, not a decision, and the distance from entry to invalidation is still yours to choose.

Marking structure by hand first

The reason to learn the manual version is not purity. It is that a script applies its rule to noise exactly as confidently as it applies it to a real turn.

A reader who has marked swings by hand knows which turns mattered. They have the judgment the rule is standing in for, so when the indicator marks something absurd they notice.

A reader who has not cannot tell those outputs apart. Every zone looks equally official because they are drawn identically, and the confidence is supplied by the rendering rather than the market.

The cheap version of this practice is one chart a week. Mark the structure yourself, then turn the indicator on and compare. Agreement is confirmation of your reading; disagreement is a question worth sitting with.

Doing it in that order matters. Turning the tool on first and reasoning afterwards means the tool did the thinking, and you will never find out whether you could have.

When it fails

The characteristic failure is the chart that explains everything. Every feature is enabled, the screen carries dozens of labeled zones, and whatever price does next happens near one of them — so the tool appears to have called it. With enough marks on a chart, any outcome lands somewhere marked. That is not prediction, it is coverage, and it is very hard to notice from inside because each individual zone was correctly identified according to its own rule.

A second failure is treating a marked zone as a reason. The mark says a rule was satisfied, not that a trade is there.

A third is running it at maximum sensitivity, which produces marks faster than they can mean anything.

A fourth is believing the name. This is an indicator, with the lag every indicator has.

And a fifth is skipping the manual stage entirely. Somebody who has never marked structure by hand cannot tell when the automatic version is marking nonsense. The rules are mechanical, so the indicator applies them to noise exactly as confidently as it applies them to a real turn, and only a reader who knows what the concept is for can tell those two outputs apart.

Related

LuxAlgo covers the suite this belongs to. Price action trading covers the approach it is named after. And order block covers the feature it marks most often.

This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money. Some links on this page earn a commission if you buy through them. It costs you nothing and it does not decide what appears here or in what order — how these pages are made is set out in our methodology.