Wyckoff phases

Think of a stock as breathing in and out. First, large players quietly build a position while the price drifts sideways and the crowd is bored: that is accumulation, like a shop stocking up before a sale. Then the price trends up and most of the gain happens: markup. Near the top, those same players quietly sell into the strength and the excitement: distribution. Finally the price trends down: markdown. Between clear phases the stock is just ranging, with no decision to make yet.

Naming the phase changes the question you are asking. In accumulation you are hunting an entry. In markup you are riding the trend and trailing a stop. In distribution you are tightening or stepping aside. In markdown you are simply not long, and you wait for the next accumulation to form.

Detection runs in two passes. First it finds the real structural swings: the moves large enough to matter, not every little wiggle. Then, inside each swing, it reads the character. Is volume expanding or drying up? Is broker flow confirming the move? Is the price action clean or choppy? That second pass is what separates a genuine markup from a noisy bounce that fools most indicators.

This structural read is the single most predictive signal we have. In our testing across the whole market, the stocks with the strongest structure beat the weakest by about 11.85% over the following month, more than any flow or price signal we measure. That is why the phase anchors so much of the rest of the analysis.

On a stock's page the confirmed phases are painted as coloured bands behind the price, under a heading that says plainly this is phase history, read in hindsight. Green is accumulation or markup, red is distribution or markdown, grey is ranging. Reading it left to right tells you the story of where a stock has been. The bands only ever cover phases that have fully completed, so the most recent stretch is deliberately left unlabelled here; that is what the live provisional read below is for.

For the trailing window the app now computes a live provisional read. Instead of sitting at ranging until a phase is textbook-complete, the classifier gives the current stretch a provisional label — you will see it as the current phase marked forming, for example Forming: Markup — and firms it up or discards it as more days arrive. It is less certain than a confirmed band by design, but it means a fresh downturn earns a live bear label within a few trading days rather than going unnamed for weeks. Read the confirmed history for the structure that held, and the forming current phase for where the window is leaning.