12-MAY-2026
Technical analysis (TA) and order-flow microstructure are two cultures that rarely converse. TA operates on bar-level price and volume aggregates and enjoys near-universal use among retail and discretionary traders; microstructure operates on tick-level limit-order-book (LOB) events and forms the standard quantitative vocabulary at sell-side desks and in the academic literature. We argue that several common TA features admit natural interpretations as coarse-grained observers of underlying microstructure dynamics, and we offer a framework for stating such interpretations as falsifiable hypotheses. We do not claim a unified theory bridging the two domains; rather, we propose a research programme of pre-registered empirical studies — one TA feature at a time — to identify which patterns are microstructure-substrate-grounded and which are folklore. Four bridging hypotheses are developed in detail. No implementation is reported in this paper; the empirical programme is left as future work.
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