Swing highs and swing lows are the skeleton of every chart. Learn to mark them, and "trend" stops being a feeling. This free lesson covers: Why structure comes first, What a swing high is, Name it, And a swing low, Which is it?, What an uptrend actually is, Read the sequence, And a downtrend, When only half agrees, Put it together.
Market Structure · Learn · Step 1 of 10
Most people decide a market is "trending up" by looking at it and getting a feeling. Structure replaces the feeling with something you can point at.
Once you can mark swing highs and lows, a trend has a definition — and more importantly, a condition that ends it.
Going deeper
Structure analysis long predates the current price-action vocabulary. Charles Dow described trends as sequences of successively higher peaks and troughs in the 1890s, and the definition has not needed changing since.
What makes it valuable is that it is objective. Two people marking swing points on the same chart will largely agree — which is not true of most chart interpretation.
There is no universal answer. One either side is the loosest common definition, two or three gives fewer and more significant points. Consistency matters more than the specific number.
Higher highs with lower lows is an expanding, unstable market. That is genuine information — usually that it should be left alone.