Price Action, Trend and Market Structure

Price action refers to the raw movement of an instrument's price over time, as displayed on a chart. It's considered the most fundamental building block of technical analysis, since virtually every other technical concept — trend, support and resistance, chart patterns, and indicators — is ultimately derived from studying price action.

Trend, introduced earlier in the Market Guides module, describes the general direction price action has taken over a period — upward, downward, or sideways. Trend is essentially a higher-level pattern that emerges from observing price action over time, rather than a separate, independent concept.

Market structure refers to the broader framework of highs, lows, and price behaviour that forms as price action develops — for example, patterns of higher highs and higher lows during an uptrend, or lower highs and lower lows during a downtrend, concepts explored in detail in the Trend Structure Explained lesson later in this module.