What is a sweep in trading?
A sweep is one aggressive order that trades through several price levels of the order book in a single motion, taking all the size in its way.
The order book is a queue of resting orders at each price. A normal market order takes what sits at the best price and stops. A sweep is an aggressive order large enough to clear the best price and keep going through the next levels and the ones after, in a single motion, without price stepping back in between. It is the trace of someone who needed to trade now and paid through the book to do it.
What it looks like on the chart
On the heatmap above, each sweep is a chevron with a plate that prints the size it carried — +3899.1k, +2609.8k. A chevron pointing up in the buying colour is a sweep that bought through the offers; one pointing down in the selling colour sold through the bids. Notice how they gather where price moved fastest: several stack at the low of the sharp drop in the left third, one after another.
How traders read it
- Urgency. A sweep says a participant chose certainty of execution over price. They cluster around breakouts, stop levels and news, where waiting costs more than slippage.
- Where it ended. The price a sweep reached is the level the book was pushed to. Price that holds beyond it suggests the push had follow-through; price that snaps straight back says the sweep exhausted the aggression rather than starting a move.
- Into a wall or into air. A sweep that stops at a bright band on the heatmap ran into resting size. One that ends in thin liquidity simply ran out of orders to take — the next one can travel further for less.
A sweep shows who was in a hurry and where. It does not say whether they were right; read it with what the book looked like before and after.
On TapeHawk
The Sweeps indicator marks each one on the heatmap at the moment it began and at the price it reached, and prints its size in the quote currency. Hover a mark for the figures.