What is Swing High & Swing Low?

The local peaks and troughs of price — the reference points from which all market structure is read.

A swing high is a local peak — a candle whose high is higher than the highs of the candles around it — and a swing low is a local trough, a candle with the lowest low among its neighbours. These turning points are the raw material of structural analysis: connect the swings and the trend appears, watch which swings break and BOS or CHoCH appears, look just beyond them and the liquidity map appears, because that is exactly where traders park their stop losses.

Swings also do practical jobs inside individual trades. Stops belong behind the swing that invalidates the idea — below the swing low that a long trade depends on, above the swing high that a short depends on — because that placement ties the exit to the market's logic rather than to an arbitrary pip count. Not all swings are equal: a swing on the daily chart outranks one on the 5-minute, and part of multi-timeframe skill is knowing which swing you are actually trading against. Mark the major swings first and most of the chart's story tells itself.