Advanced Market Structure — STH, ITH & LTH: The ICT Hierarchy of Highs

Every trader can mark a high on a chart. The problem is that most of those highs mean nothing — price takes them out a few candles later, and the "resistance" you drew ends up in the trash. The ICT method solves this with a hierarchy: not every high is equal, and three labels — STH, ITH and LTH — tell you outright which peak is noise, which one defines the current correction, and which one holds the entire trend. This article is the first half of advanced market structure: the highs. We break down the mirror side — the lows — in the article on STL, ITL and LTL.

What STH, ITH and LTH Are

In ICT nomenclature, every swing high on the chart belongs to one of three levels of the hierarchy:

• STH — Short Term High: the basic three-candle formation in which the middle candle has the highest high.
• ITH — Intermediate Term High: an STH that has a lower STH on both its left and right.
• LTH — Long Term High: an ITH that has a lower ITH on both sides — usually formed at a significant higher-timeframe level (a PD Array).

Each level is a stricter version of the previous one. An STH is merely a local peak. An ITH is a significant high, because the peaks around it were shallower. An LTH is a structural high, because even the significant highs around it failed to take it out. The deeper you go in the hierarchy, the more weight a given level carries for the trend — and the bigger the consequences if it eventually breaks.

Notice that the whole construction rests on a single brick: the ordinary three-candle swing high/swing low formation. The hierarchy introduces no new candlestick pattern — it introduces a ranking of existing swings. That makes it fully mechanical: you don't eyeball whether a high matters, you check its neighbors.

How the Hierarchy Works — the Three Levels Under the Microscope

STH. The test is identical to any swing high: three candles, with the middle one printing a high above both neighbors. You'll find dozens of these formations on a BTC M15 chart every day. On their own they say almost nothing — but they are the building blocks of the two higher levels.

ITH. The word "intermediate" means something in between — and that's exactly what an ITH is: a high standing between two lower STHs. Since the peaks on both sides never reached its level, the move that created it had real momentum. There are noticeably fewer ITHs than STHs, and they define the active swing structure inside a trend — the places where corrections actually turned.

LTH. The rarest and heaviest level: an ITH surrounded by two lower ITHs. In practice, an LTH most often forms where price reacted to a higher-timeframe level — an order block, an FVG, a breaker — in other words, an element of the PD Array Matrix. The LTH is the structural anchor: until it is broken, the trend it belongs to formally remains in force.

The most important reading rule is this: a bull market prints higher LTHs and higher long-term lows. If price is supposed to go higher, it must not violate the last higher long-term low — the moment a candle closes below it, the bullish structure stops applying and the bias has to be rebuilt from scratch. The mirror version applies in a bear market. Notice how elegantly this filters out noise: a break of an STH or even an ITH may be an ordinary correction; only a violation of a long-term level changes the market picture.

How to Label the Hierarchy Step by Step

1. Choose your bias timeframe. D1 or H4 for swing trading, H1 for intraday — in line with the rules of top-down analysis.
2. Mark all the STHs. Walk through the chart and flag every three-candle formation. Don't judge importance at this stage — you're just collecting candidates.
3. Extract the ITHs. For each STH, check its same-rank neighbors: if the STH on the left and the STH on the right are both lower, the middle one is promoted to ITH.
4. Extract the LTHs. Repeat the same test one floor up: an ITH with a lower ITH on both sides is an LTH. A bonus quality signal: an LTH that coincides with a higher-timeframe PD Array level is the strongest version of that high.
5. Update after every new candle. The hierarchy is dynamic — a fresh peak only earns its label once it has confirmed neighbors on both sides. That means labels are always assigned with some delay and never "on the fly".

Step 5 is often the hardest one to accept: by definition, the hierarchy needs the right side of the chart before it can rank a high. That's not a flaw — it's the price of objectivity. Thanks to it, two traders looking at the same ETH chart will mark identical levels. Manually sifting STHs from ITHs can be tedious, which is why our SRL indicator labels swings and structure breaks automatically, showing at a glance which levels carry structural rank.

How to Use STH, ITH and LTH in Trading

The hierarchy is a labeling system, not an entry signal — but it organizes decisions at every stage of a trade:

Read direction from the LTHs. A series of higher LTHs and higher long-term lows = bull market, and you look exclusively for longs. A series of lower ones = bear market. Without this distinction, every deeper BTC correction looks like a trend change — when it's usually just a move between intermediate-term levels.

Read reaction zones from the ITHs and STHs. When price in a trend returns to the area of an ITH or STH, you get natural entry zones in the direction of your bias. The ITH is the level for swing positions; the STH refines the entry on a lower timeframe.

Read your invalidation point from the last long-term low. In an uptrend, you can keep buying corrections for as long as the last higher long-term low holds. A break of it with a candle close is the moment you stop looking for longs — no matter how attractive the local setup looks.

Read targets from the opposite levels. A short opened below an LTH has natural room down to the nearest long-term low; a long from an ITH area targets the previous LTH, above which equal highs with resting liquidity often sit.

The strongest version of this framework is a confluence of two worlds: an LTH formed inside a higher-timeframe PD Array. The institutional level (FVG, order block) provides the location, and the LTH label provides the structural confirmation that the market actually reacted. When both conditions meet in one spot, that high holds with a completely different force than a random peak.

Common Mistakes

• Treating every STH as resistance. Most short-term highs get taken out within a few candles — that's normal. Resistance worth building a scenario on starts at ITH rank and above.
• Assigning rank without confirmed neighbors. A fresh peak is neither an ITH nor an LTH until lower same-rank highs form on both sides. Labeling "in advance" produces false structure.
• Mixing timeframes in one hierarchy. An M15 STH is not a neighbor of an H4 ITH. The whole ranking is built on a single timeframe — and you move between timeframes deliberately, as part of top-down analysis.
• Ignoring the lows. Highs are half the picture. You only confirm a bias when the hierarchy of highs and the STL/ITL/LTL hierarchy of lows tell the same story.
• Calling a break of an ITH a trend change. A correction is allowed to break short- and intermediate-term levels. Only a violation of a long-term level changes the trend — anything before that is at most a warning sign.
• Drawing the hierarchy once and for all. Structure is alive: new candles promote and demote levels. You update the hierarchy after every completed swing, not once a week.

The STH → ITH → LTH hierarchy turns a chaotic forest of peaks into a readable ladder of importance. If you've already mastered the fundamentals — the three market states and the swing formation — from the articles on market structure and the swing low, the hierarchy of highs is the natural next floor. That leaves the second half of the puzzle: the lows. Their ranking works identically, only in the mirror — and it is exactly what decides where an uptrend really ends.

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Rafał — Krypto Bez Ściemy

Trader and founder of Strefa Tradingu. He’s been breaking crypto down on YouTube for years — no hype, no signals, with a focus on market structure and risk management.

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