The life of a gap
A gap is not a picture on a chart — it's a process with a beginning, a middle, and one of three endings.
The previous guide covered how a fair value gap forms. Formation is only the first frame of the story. What makes gaps useful as a structural lens is everything that happens afterward: the revisit, the countdown, and the resolution. GapWatch describes that whole arc with five states.
One gap, five frames
Here is a single bullish gap — the same three candles every time — followed through each state it can reach. The first three candles are faded in every frame; only what price does afterward changes.
Formed
The gap just printed. The zone is drawn and nothing has happened to it yet — price is still off doing whatever caused the gap in the first place. Most gaps spend most of their life here, and a gap that's never revisited within a few dozen bars simply goes stale.
Watching
Price has retraced back into the zone. This is the moment the gap becomes interesting: a confirmation countdown starts, measured in bars. The question on the table — will the zone reject price, or absorb it?
Confirmed
Within the countdown, a candle closed back through the near edge of the zone, in the gap's original direction. Structurally, the zone held: price came back, tested the imbalance, and was rejected. The gap's story is complete.
Expired
The countdown ran out with price still churning inside the zone — neither rejection nor traversal. An expired gap resolved by indecision, which is itself information: the level didn't matter as much as the pattern suggested.
Inverted
Price didn't just enter the zone — it closed through the far side entirely, filling the gap. The zone doesn't disappear; it flips polarity and becomes an inverted gap (IFVG), now watched from the other side. Old support becomes potential resistance, and vice versa.
Why the countdown matters
The watching state is bounded on purpose. A retest that resolves quickly — within a handful of bars — says the market had a strong opinion about the level. A retest that drags on says the opposite. Putting a bar limit on confirmation separates decisive structure from drift, and it's what turns "price touched the zone" into a question with a yes-or-no answer.