Market Structure

Market structure describes trend using only the sequence of swing highs and lows. An uptrend prints higher highs (HH) and higher lows (HL): each rally exceeds the last, each pullback holds above the prior one. A downtrend prints lower highs (LH) and lower lows (LL). When swings overlap without a consistent sequence, the market is ranging.

The appeal is that this is a definition of trend built from price alone. No indicator, no smoothing lag, just the geometry of the swings.

Structural events

Two moments matter most in structure-based trading. A break of structure, where price takes out the latest swing extreme in the trend direction, confirms continuation. A change of character, the first break against the prevailing sequence (an uptrend losing its last higher low), is the earliest structural warning that the trend may be over.

Systematizing it

Human "structure traders" draw these labels by eye, which makes their rules hard to test. Encoding structure algorithmically forces you to fix the swing width, a noise filter, and wick-vs-close break rules. Those choices change results materially, and a backtest is what makes that ambiguity explicit instead of hidden.

On AlphaProve

The swing points this trend skeleton is built from are exactly what ctx.indicators.williams_fractals and pivot_points locate, so the structure a discretionary trader eyeballs becomes numbers a rule can compare. The swing-width choice the page warns about is a parameter on those indicators, so you can sweep it across values in the no-code builder and watch how far the labels move. And because get_htf(tf) exposes any higher timeframe with no lookahead, a strategy can read structure on the 4h while timing entries on the 15m — the multi-timeframe read structure traders otherwise do by eye.