Mitigation Block

A mitigation block is a smart-money-concepts (SMC) idea. It is the last candle moving against the trend right before price makes a strong, impulsive move in the trend's direction.

The theory behind the name: some large orders placed just before that impulsive move end up on the losing side of it. Traders using this idea believe price tends to come back to that zone later so those trapped orders can be closed out, or "mitigated," at a better price, before the original trend resumes.

A stock is in an uptrend. It prints one down candle from $102 to $100, then reverses sharply and rallies to $115 without much pause. Traders using this idea would mark the body of that last down candle, roughly $100 to $102, as the mitigation block.

If price later pulls back toward $100–$102, they would watch for the uptrend to resume from there, treating the zone as a place where buyers are likely to step back in.

The two ideas are closely related and often confused. An order block is usually defined as the last opposing candle right before an impulsive move, marked where it happened. A mitigation block refers to the same kind of candle, but the emphasis is on the expectation that price will return there to "mitigate" the trapped orders. Different traders use the two terms slightly differently.

The premise rests on institutional orders being trapped at a specific spot, which cannot actually be observed. Nobody outside those firms can see where their orders were filled, so the zone is inferred from candle shape after the fact, not confirmed.

In practice, price does not always return to these zones, and when it does, it does not always reverse there. This is a chart-reading framework some traders find useful, not a proven signal, and this page is educational only.