Pullback

A pullback is a move against the prevailing direction of a chart that does not, in the end, reverse it — price falls back inside an uptrend, or rises inside a downtrend, and the earlier direction later resumes. The word is used constantly, but it carries a problem worth being explicit about: the definition depends on what happens afterwards. While a counter-move is under way it is indistinguishable from the opening stage of a full reversal, because the only thing separating the two is a continuation that has not happened yet. That is why pullbacks are usually discussed alongside a level or a tool that supplies some other reference — a prior swing low, a moving average, a retracement grid — so the reader has something to point at besides the move itself. None of those references make the distinction reliable; they only make it explicit. A chart labelled with pullbacks is always a chart labelled after the fact.