You can spend years chasing indicators. You can master every technical pattern. But if you cannot see what’s missing—what the institutions left behind—you will always be late. Because the market is not just built on price—it is built on power.
That power reveals itself in a very specific way: imbalance.
When institutions enter the market with size, they do not trickle in like retail traders. They strike like lightning—leaving price surging with no time to balance. These moves cause price to skip levels, forming what we call Fair Value Gaps (FVGs)—not just empty space, but the echo of impact.
A Fair Value Gap is formed when one side of the auction—buyers or sellers—overwhelms the other so completely that price cannot fully trade both directions. The three-candle sequence shows it:
This wound? That’s where the market may return. Not out of kindness, but because institutions often revisit what they left undone.
Now here’s the part most miss: FVGs are not just tools. They are territory markers—flags that say, "We were here. We might return."
But the real advantage comes when you learn to align them with the Wyckoff Method.
Wyckoff teaches you the narrative—the silent story of accumulation, markup, distribution, and markdown. It shows you where smart money is preparing their ambush. But FVGs show you the trigger—the moment their cannon fired and left a hole in the terrain.
Think of Wyckoff as the war room. FVGs? They’re the blast craters.
When you spot a Spring (accumulation) or UTAD (distribution), and the breakout leaves a clean imbalance behind, you have confluence. You have timing. You have tactical alignment.
That’s when you prepare your entry—not before.
This is how you trade like an operator, not a tourist. Your stops are surgical. Your targets are structured. You don’t trade every gap—you trade the ones that match the footprint of war.
Because not all gaps are divine signals. Some are traps. You must be selective. An imbalance during lunch hour or inside chop? That’s noise. But one formed during a news breakout at session open, layered on top of a Spring or UTAD? That’s a loaded opportunity.
Your edge sharpens when you stop looking for setups and start waiting for alignment.
FVGs, when combined with Wyckoff and clean supply/demand zones, become the edge that institutional traders don’t want you to see. They allow you to act not just on what is visible—but on what was violently left behind.
And this isn’t just about charts. It’s about discernment.
In life, just like in trading, what is missing often matters more than what is present. We don’t always suffer from what we see—we suffer from what we don’t understand. Fair Value Gaps are a visual parable of this truth.
They are the holes in logic. The fractures in the market’s mask. The opportunities to return and redeem what was skipped.
Scripture says in Isaiah 28:17, "The hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies…" These gaps are the lies. Your job is to let your discipline be the hail—merciless, precise, cleansing.
You are not a reactionary trader. You are a trained one.
So next time price shoots away from your screen, don’t chase. Watch where it leaves a scar.
Because when it returns—you’ll already be there.
Planted. Ready. And dangerous.
