Displacement is the visual signature of urgency: several large bodies in a row, little overlap, and an imbalance or two left in the middle. The move is not a drift, it is a repricing.
Traders in the market-structure school use displacement as the evidence that a break-of-structure was genuine rather than a marginal poke. A structural break accompanied by displacement is treated as more credible than one that crawls over the level.
It is still descriptive, not predictive. Displacement often happens into the end of a move as the last participants capitulate, which is why the same bars can be labelled either a breakout or a blow-off-top depending entirely on what comes next.
Related: break-of-structure, imbalance, wide-range-bar, volume-climax, volatility-expansion