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Inverted gaps (IFVG)

Filling a gap doesn't erase it. It flips it — and the flipped zone often matters more than the original.

Suppose a bullish fair value gap forms — an untraded span left below by a fast move up. Later, price comes back down and doesn't merely dip into the zone: a candle closes below the bottom edge, traversing the whole thing. The gap is filled. In classic gap-watching, that's the end of the story.

In ICT-style structure reading, it's the midpoint. A fully traversed zone becomes an inverted fair value gap — an IFVG. The logic: prices where buyers were once so dominant that the market gapped over them have now been decisively reclaimed by sellers. The same rectangle on the chart has swapped roles. What was a potential floor is now a potential ceiling.

Before — a floor

After — a ceiling

Same prices, same rectangle. Once price has closed through it, the zone is watched from the other side — the app recolours it and relabels it IFVG.

The retest is the event

An inversion by itself just marks the flip. The structurally interesting moment comes when price returns to the inverted zone from the other side — the retest. From there the zone runs the same countdown as an ordinary gap: if a candle closes back through it in the inverted direction within the window, the inversion is confirmed; if the countdown lapses, it expires.

Fill, flip, retest, confirm. The countdown that began on the retest is the same one every ordinary gap runs — only the direction it's watched from has changed.

This is why GapWatch treats inversion as a lifecycle state rather than a separate pattern: one zone, one history — formed as a gap, filled, flipped, retested, resolved. Reading that full sequence on a chart tells you far more than any single snapshot.

A worked example

A bullish gap forms at 711.16–711.88 on a 5-minute chart during a morning rally. Early afternoon, a selloff closes a candle at 710.90 — below the zone entirely. The gap is filled and inverts: 711.16–711.88 is now a bearish IFVG. An hour later price rallies back to 711.40, inside the old zone, and stalls; two candles later one closes at 711.05, back below the bottom edge. The inversion confirmed — the reclaimed level held as resistance.

The paragraph above, drawn. Green while it was a floor, red from the candle that filled it onward.

That entire paragraph is visible at a glance as one zone's timeline in the app:

IFVG ▼711.16–711.88CONFIRMED

Formed10:35

bullish FVG formed

Inverted13:20

closed through the far side — flipped to IFVG

Touched14:25

price retraced into the zone

Confirmed14:35

closed back through the zone

lived 4h 0m

The same zone as the app shows it — one card, the whole story. Times are illustrative.

As always: this is a description of structure, not a strategy. Whether confirmed inversions "work" in any tradable sense is an empirical question that depends on instrument, timeframe, and context — and it is exactly the kind of question our future research posts will examine with data.

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