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.