Why I stopped trading every FVG (and started grading them instead)
For a long time I traded every Fair Value Gap I saw. Some worked, most didn't, and I couldn't tell you why ahead of time — only in hindsight.
The shift came when I stopped treating FVGs as a signal and started treating them as a checklist. Specifically, I only take Inversion FVGs (a gap that gets violated and flips polarity) when they stack up against a short list of confluences:
HTF PDA delivery — is this inversion actually backed by a gap on a higher timeframe, or is it noise on my entry timeframe?
Liquidity swept beforehand — did price actually grab resting liquidity before reversing, or is this a random gap in the middle of nowhere?
SMT divergence — are correlated pairs/instruments confirming the move, or diverging (a red flag)?
Reversal speed — did price snap back with real displacement (V-shape), or is this a slow, grinding move that's more likely to fail?
Session context — did this happen inside a killzone / session open, where liquidity and volatility are actually there to support the move?
Once I started scoring every setup against this checklist (A+ down to C) instead of trading gut feel, my consistency completely changed — not because I found a "holy grail," but because I stopped taking the same low-quality setup over and over and wondering why it wasn't working.
I ended up building this grading logic into an indicator so I don't have to manually check all 5 things under pressure while a candle is forming. Happy to answer questions on any of the concepts above if you're working through this yourself — the checklist matters way more than any single tool.