Does anyone else see manipulation on H4 candles before London?

I started doing that and found that many times the same candles that look like manipulation are institutional setups if you look at them with order blocks.

Thanks for sharing that. Those who study order flow or smart money concepts know that nothing is random. Everything is logical, if you know where to look.

I don't believe in SMC or order blocks.

It may be, but if they give you context and a structure to understand those H4 movements before London, then they serve.

In short: it is not manipulation or lack of liquidity. It is a combination of both + transition sessions + scanning stops. Whoever understands, wins. The rest, survives as you can.

When we talk about H4 candles just before the opening of London, it is essential to understand that it is not by chance that erratic and contradictory movements take place. What happens in that time slot is a silent battle between the big market participants: banks, funds and institutional operators who position their orders before the real volume of London is activated. These candles usually have long wicks in both directions because what they seek is a liquidity clean-up. That is, they eliminate both buyers and poorly positioned sellers before starting the dominant direction of the day. This behavior should not be seen as noise or senseless manipulation, but as a perfectly executed choreography. The big ones do not enter the market with direct orders of 100 million dollars, they do so fragmenting and generating traps that activate the liquidity of retailers. That is why these wicks usually coincide with psychological zones (00, 50, supports/resistances previous

Thank you for taking the time to write that. It opened my eyes to several mistakes I have made.

And how do you measure the "growing volume" if there is no real volume in Forex? That still sounds to me baseless theory.

Totally according to the approach. I also started to run a session journal, and discovered that 70% of the times the price does that H4 sweep before London, ends up respecting the broken level as support or endurance. It’s as if the market left clues. It also helped me a lot to start using graphics with UTC time instead of the time of the broker. It completely changes the reading of those candles. Sometimes only that change already improves the interpretation of structure and timing.

Excellent exhibition. I’ve been operating with similar concepts based on what ICT calls Asian Range Raid. Basically it’s the same thing: a liquidity sweep in the Asian session to create traps before London. The important thing is not to get into those candles. Waiting for them to define themselves and then operate the retest, that’s the advantage. It’s not about guessing the movement, but about reading it as a movie that already has a preset script.