12 May 2026
When two supports sit a tick apart
How we decide whether to keep both shelves or merge them into one zone during a mapping session.
Students often arrive with two nearly identical support lines — a swing low from March and a slightly lower wick from April. On a daily chart of a mid-cap ASX name, those ticks can look meaningful until you zoom out and see price treating the area as one shelf.
In lessons we ask three questions: Did price linger, or only spike? Which edge produced more decisive reactions? Would a stop under the lower line still fit your risk rules if we treat them as one zone? If the answers point to a single band, we draw a rectangle and retire the duplicate ink.
Keeping both lines is fine when they serve different timeframes — for example, a weekly low versus an intraday lunchtime shelf — but only if you label which map belongs to which decision. Unlabelled twins are what fill a chart before the open and empty it of clarity.