Absorb/Sweep
A microstructural market dynamic where limit orders (absorption) interact with aggressive market orders (sweeping) across multiple price levels, defining liquidity transition phases.
Two things can happen when aggressive flow meets a resting order book, and the difference decides what an order costs.
In absorption, the limit orders resting at a price level are large enough to take the incoming flow without the level clearing. Trades print, size changes hands, and the touch does not move — or moves and comes straight back. The book is doing the job it exists to do: converting impatience into inventory at a stable price.
In a sweep, the incoming order is larger than the size resting at the touch, so it consumes that level and continues into the next, and the next. Price moves not because opinion changed but because the arithmetic of the order ran out of counterparties. A sweep across several levels is one decision rendered as a price move, which is why it reads as information on a chart and as slippage on a fill.
Most of a session sits somewhere between the two, and the balance shifts with conditions rather than holding fixed. It tips toward sweeping when depth thins ahead of scheduled releases, when market makers widen or withdraw, and in the seconds either side of a liquidity void. It tips toward absorption when replenishment keeps pace with consumption.
The balance is measurable, and measuring it needs the book rather than the chart: top-of-book size over time, the size traded at a level before it clears, how many levels a single aggressive order traverses, and how quickly consumed depth is replaced. All of that is recoverable from a recorded feed; none of it is visible in a candle that compresses the whole exchange into four numbers.
What the distinction is not: a directional signal. Absorption and sweeping describe how a move was executed, not where the next one goes. Reading a sweep as a forecast is a separate claim and needs separate evidence — the two lenses apply here as everywhere.