What Is a Stop Hunt?
A stop hunt is a move below an obvious low, or above an obvious high, that reverses shortly afterwards. The mechanism is that stop orders cluster at visible levels, so reaching them supplies the fills a large order needs — no intent is required for it to happen.
The most personally felt event in trading, and the one with the least personal explanation.
How it works
Everybody who bought that low put a stop under it, because that is what the stop loss placement page — and every other source — tells them to do.
A stop to sell is a sell order waiting at a price. So beneath an obvious low sits a pool of them, and the more obvious the level, the deeper the pool.
A sweep is price reaching that pool and then leaving.
Nobody has to intend it
This is the part worth getting right, because the alternative explanation is more exciting and less useful.
Anyone with a large buy order needs sellers. The place with the most sellers is where the stops are. So a large buyer working an order will find fills there, and price will move there — with no plan to do so and no awareness that you exist.
The Wyckoff method called this a spring in the 1930s and explained it exactly this way. The liquidity page reaches it from order flow. Three vocabularies, one mechanism, none of which requires anybody targeting you.
Your stop is one of several thousand at the same price, and that is the whole of your involvement.
How often it actually reverses
Pooled across all six price scenes on this site — a rising history, a falling one, a range, a reversal and two pattern scenes — 108 swing lows were traded below.
88 were back above the level within four bars. 20 were not.
Two honest caveats. These are synthetic series, and most of them drift upward, so the ratio reflects the construction as much as anything — it is not a market statistic and should not be traded on.
What it does establish is that both outcomes occur, which is the thing a page of pictures of successful sweeps never shows.
What to do about it
Move the stop beyond the obvious price by a measured amount. Half an ATR is 0.80 here — enough that an ordinary sweep does not reach it, small enough that the loss stays defined.
Then size the position for the wider stop, which the position sizing page turns into a number. The buffer is paid for in size, not in risk.
What you must not do is remove the stop. The failure this page describes is a stop being hit unnecessarily; the failure it can cause is a stop not existing, and the second is far worse.
Where deliberate does happen
The mechanism above needs no intent. That is not the same as saying intent never exists, and the honest position distinguishes the two.
Enforcement actions against price manipulation are a matter of public record in most major jurisdictions — spoofing, layering, marking the close. The behaviour is real, it is illegal, and regulators have prosecuted it.
What those cases are about is almost never a retail stop under a swing low. They concern order book manipulation at institutional scale, in specific instruments, over periods measured in milliseconds.
So both things are true, and the sizes are very different. Manipulation exists; your stop being hit is overwhelmingly the ordinary mechanism at the top of this page.
The practical test is whether the explanation changes what you do. “The orders were there” leads to a buffer and a smaller position. “I was targeted” leads to nothing actionable at all — which is a good reason to prefer the first even in the rare cases where the second is true.
A worked example
Place the stop at the level, then add the buffer. Two steps, both mechanical.
Size from the total distance, not the level distance.
And if you are swept anyway, do nothing different. The trade was defined and it ended as defined. Re-entering because you believe it was a hunt is trading a story, and 20 of the 108 above would have had you re-entering into a breakdown.
The original data
Across our study of 24,971 trading videos, 71 cover stop hunts. The median one gets 2,514 views, 85% never pass 50,000, and the median length is 10.1 minutes.
The corpus carries description text for 61 of those 71, and across those 61, 14 mention invalidation, failure, or what a bad read looks like.
About one in four, which is the fifth-highest rate in this glossary — behind stop loss, why traders lose money, position sizing and trading psychology. It makes sense: the subject is being stopped out, so being wrong is unavoidable in the telling.
When it fails
It was a breakdown
20 of 108 in the count above. The level broke and stayed broken, and every visible feature at the moment of the break was the same as in the 88 that came back.
Calling every break a hunt is a way of never accepting a losing trade, and it is the specific harm this vocabulary does.
You moved the stop instead of the size
A buffer that keeps growing is a stop that keeps not existing. The buffer is a fixed measured distance, and the adjustment for it happens in position size.
You started seeing intent
The mechanism is order flow, not malice. Once “they hunted my stop” is available as an explanation, every loss has one, and no losing trade ever teaches you anything again.
You judged it after the reclaim
Reclaimed sweeps are obvious afterwards. At the moment the level goes, the 88 and the 20 are the same picture — which is why the response has to be decided in advance.
Related
Liquidity is the mechanism in full: why resting orders attract price.
Stop loss placement is where the buffer goes and what it costs.
And Wyckoff described the same event ninety years ago, with a test attached that the modern version usually drops.
I used to take this personally, which is embarrassing to admit and I think very common. What changed it was realising that my stop was in the same place as everyone else’s for the same good reason, and that a market reaching an obvious price is not a market noticing me. The fix was mechanical rather than emotional - move the stop a bit further, size the position smaller, and stop reading intent into arithmetic.
— Michael Whitman, from this video
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.