Reversal Desk

Markets are not random. They are also not fair. The dominant participants — institutional traders running large position sizes — cannot fill orders the way retail traders do. They need liquidity: resting orders that become their counterparty. Retail traders reliably place stop-loss orders at predictable levels: just above prior highs, just below prior lows. Institutions exploit this predictability systematically. They push price through these stop clusters, trigger the retail exits, fill their own position using those triggered orders as counterparty, and then reverse.

v2 is a targeted refinement, not a directional pivot. The foundational philosophy, entry mechanics, exit rules, and position sizing are carried forward from v1 without modification. Two changes are made:

v2 does not change the core thesis, the entry trigger, the exit rules, or the position sizing framework. It adds two new hard filters, one clarification to an existing filter, one new Phase 3 monitoring variable, and specifies additional backtest deliverables TEMPER must require before granting clearance.

Unchanged from v1–v5. Markets are adversarial. Institutions must move price to liquidity pools — retail stops above prior highs and below prior lows — to fill large orders. The result is a recurring pattern: price sweeps a prior session's extreme, triggering retail stops as counterparty fill, then reverses sharply as the institutional order fills and the manipulation phase ends.