Auction Market Theory - Balance, Imbalance, Acceptance and Rejection What is "acceptance"? What is "constructive price development"? for myself a lot of it has become intuition because of staring at screens for a few years + using certain thresholds as a gauge, but hopefully this can clarify a bit: (long tweet -> bookmark away) > Price traded above a key level, why is that not "acceptance"? Is a "candle close" acceptance? In AMT, the premise is that "price" is just an advertisement in other words it evokes emotion (hence the failed breakouts and breakdowns). Using this premise, price "breaking above" and "breaking below" doesn't provide the full picture. So two questions you can use to define acceptance: Did price spend time there and did it do volume there? 1. Time + volume = acceptance = new value. Neither = rejection = excess. okay that's kind of useless how much time and how much volume? this is something that you will have to figure out by spending a lot of time in developing some baselines (typical vs. atypical) and intuition. to take it a step further, "volume" alone doesn't provide the full picture. Next, we need to determine the "quality" of volume and the kind of positioning that is getting involved. In other words, we need to get a bit more granular to understand the dynamics between perps and spot positioning to make a more informed assumption when it comes to acceptance vs. rejection (what we called a failed auction). Since there is a lot of fragmentation and several parameters involved when it comes to crypto, we make educated assumptions based on parameters such as open interest, spot vs. perps CVD, passive orderbook skews (remember that is passive and aggressive behavior on both spot and perps). an example scenario to demonstrate this: price breaks above the local highs based on a short squeeze and also triggered breakout longs which extended the move to the upside, however spot is aggressively selling this "breakout" = swing fail. this can be a lot more detailed with more guidance but you get the idea. "acceptance" in the sense of AMT isn't just about price go up or down it's about digging deeper to understand market dynamics and positioning. coming to constructive price development: you have a few things in the jar- > perps passive and aggressive flow > spot passive and aggressive flow we want to assess how much work is the market doing and what kind of reward is being provided in exchange? to simplify, perps positioning is typically fickle bcs leverage apes and spot positioning has more weight behind it and is more difficult to bluff. i.e. when price pushes against crowded perps positioning that bluff gets called out...fast. so when assessing the real strength of a move, I like to see aggressive spot buying continuously into a move and even better if its pushing through crowded perps positioning that continues to fade the move. if there is retracement, it is shallow and gets supported with passive spot stepping up higher in the books to provide a cushion for a soft landing (can watch spot orderbook skew on 2.5%). the other aspect to assess work being done is the velocity with which open interest is getting added and the subsequent change in price, an area where a ton of longs or shorts pile on is one that points to a structural weakness if price where to revisit again. additionally, if open interest is going vertical while price slows down it can point to "juice isn't worth the squeeze" situation. understanding positioning is a lot more valuable imo than just looking at price since price is only a mechanism that evokes emotion. however, there is a lot of noise when going down this path and I notice a lot of misinterpretation of this especially when zooming in on ltf, so you need to learn how to parse out what information is valuable and what is noise. hope the yap helps clears things up a bit.