A brief dip below the floor of an accumulation range that fails to attract follow-through selling and quickly reverses back inside.
A spring takes out the obvious low, triggering stops and tempting breakout sellers, and then price re-enters the range. Wyckoff read it as a final test of supply: if almost nothing comes to market on the break, sellers are exhausted.
The confirmation is the test that follows. A successful spring is usually retested on lower volume, and that test is where the better entry sits, with a stop under the spring low. The vocabulary overlaps exactly with failed-breakdown and liquidity-sweep.
The failure version is straightforward and common: price breaks the low and keeps going. Nothing in the setup prevents that, which is why the retest and a defined stop matter more than the label.
Original diagrams for the ideas on this page. Illustrative, not real market data.
The bid-ask spread. Buy orders sit below, sell orders above, and the gap between the best bid (50.01) and best ask (50.04) is the spread you pay to cross. Bar length shows the size resting at each price.Breakout and retest. Price stalls under the same level several times, pushes above it, then drops back to touch it from above before carrying on. That touch is the retest, where the old ceiling is tried as a floor. A break that falls straight back under it is a false breakout.
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