What is a stop run in trading?

A stop run is a fast move that feeds on stop orders. Price reaches a level where many traders keep their stops, the first stops trigger and become market orders, those orders push price into the next stops, and the move accelerates on forced orders rather than fresh conviction. Upward it is a squeeze of short sellers; downward, a flush of long positions.

What it looks like on the chart

On the one-hour BTCUSDT heatmap above, each Stop Run mark is a chevron with a plate that prints the chain's total size in dollars. On the left, as price slid from 13:22, selling chains printed +2560.1k, +338.0k and +334.9k, and further down +505.2k just before the low. Off the low near 13:39 the direction flipped: a buying chain of +1685.2k and another of +354.8k carried price back up, followed by +663.7k into the high. Later, +1356.5k of selling came near 14:10.

How traders read it

• After the run, the forced orders are spent. Price that stalls just beyond a run is often a move running out of fuel; price that keeps going found real buyers or sellers behind the stops.
• Where it ran through matters: the heatmap shows which level the chain broke — often an obvious high or low where stops were clustered.
• Several runs stacked in one direction describe a market liquidating one side step by step.

On TapeHawk

The Stop Runs indicator marks a chain of aggressive orders in one direction, each starting where the last one stopped, with only short pauses between them — the shape a cascade of triggered stops leaves on the tape. Where a sweep is one large order, a stop run is several ordinary ones added together. Exchanges do not label stop orders, and TapeHawk does not claim to know them: the mark describes the pattern, not the order type. It fires once per chain, is drawn on heatmap panels of the symbols TapeHawk records, and reaches back 24 hours.