Market Structure Tools: Smart Money Concepts, ZigZag & More

Market structure analysis, swings, breaks, liquidity zones, used to be the hardest thing to automate because it lived in a trader's eye. The Setup.Cash engine ships four structure tools that turn it into data your bot can act on, alongside the core Swing High/Low Detector, Fractals, and Support/Resistance Zones.

Smart Money Concepts (SMC)

The SMC indicator automates the vocabulary of the smart-money school:

• Break of Structure (BOS): price takes out the last swing in the trend's direction, continuation confirmed.
• Change of Character (CHoCH): price breaks the counter-trend swing, the earliest structural reversal warning.
• Order blocks and liquidity levels derived from the swing map.

For bots, SMC's value is precision on state: "uptrend structure intact" becomes a condition, not an opinion.

ZigZag

ZigZag filters out every move smaller than its threshold and draws only the significant swings. It's the foundation for:

• Pattern logic: higher-high / higher-low sequences as explicit conditions.
• Swing measurement: the size of the last leg, for projection targets.
• Remember: the final leg repaints until confirmed, build rules on completed swings, which the engine exposes safely.

Variable Heat Map (VHM)

VHM scores how hot each price area has been, where the market keeps returning, where it accelerates away. Use it to grade zones found by other structure tools: a break through a "hot" area carries more information than one through untouched space.

Archer Moving Average Trends (AMAT)

AMAT watches a fast/slow moving-average pair and emits clean long-run / short-run state flags. It's the simplest structure summary in the library, a ready-made regime bit for gating any other strategy.

Building Structure-Aware Bots

A robust recipe: AMAT or SMC defines the regime → Support/Resistance Zones or VHM define locations → a momentum trigger like RSI times the entry. Describe the whole stack in plain English with text-to-strategy, then backtest it before it touches real money.