Heavy

"Heavy" describes a market or a stock that feels like it wants to fall, or at least struggles to rise, because sell orders keep outweighing buy orders. It's a qualitative, in-the-moment read on price action rather than a precise measurement — traders say a stock "feels heavy" the way you might say a door feels stiff, even before it's fully declined.

The feeling usually comes from watching how price behaves at attempted bounces. In a heavy stock, rallies are shallow and get sold into quickly, pullbacks are sharp, and the price seems to sink back down even without obvious bad news. On the order book (the live list of buy and sell orders waiting to be filled), you'll often see sell orders replenishing faster than buy orders, or large offers sitting overhead that keep absorbing any upward push.

Heaviness can apply to the whole market (major indices grinding lower, most stocks red) or to a single name that's underperforming the market around it — for example a stock that keeps drifting down while the overall index is flat or green. That second case, relative heaviness, is often more informative to a day trader because it flags a stock being sold independent of broad market conditions, possibly due to sector news, an earnings disappointment, or large holders quietly exiting.

The nuance beginners miss is that "heavy" is a description of current supply/demand imbalance, not a prediction guaranteed to continue, and it's subjective — two traders can disagree on whether a chart looks heavy. It's also not the same as a confirmed downtrend, which is a more structural, chart-based pattern of lower highs and lower lows; heaviness can exist within a sideways range before any trend is established.