Every pair on your Scan screen shows a small journey with four stages — Watching, Range Building, Setup Forming, and Confirmed & Sent. If you've ever wondered why a pair sits at one stage for hours before moving to the next, this explains exactly what's happening at each step.
Watching
Every pair starts here, every session, automatically. This just means SonaPips is actively looking at that pair's price action — no setup exists yet, nothing has happened. This is the default resting state, not a sign that anything is wrong or slow.
Range Building
This is the Asia session forming its range for the day — the zone of highs and lows that Big Players usually react to later when London and New York open. This stage simply reflects the fact that the Asia session takes hours to complete; there's nothing to speed up or skip, since the range needs real time to actually form.
Setup Forming
Price has moved beyond the Asia range, and SonaPips has picked up on it — but this is a heads-up, not a signal to act on. No entry, stop loss, or target numbers exist yet at this stage, deliberately. This is the earliest, least-certain moment a move could be real, and a genuine share of these early moves turn out to be traps rather than real, sustained breaks.
Confirmed & Sent
Roughly an hour after Setup Forming, SonaPips checks whether price is still genuinely beyond the Asia range boundary. If it is, that's when the real entry, stop loss, and target get calculated and sent — this is the number-bearing signal actually meant to be acted on. If price fell back inside the range instead, the setup quietly resolves as a fakeout, and nothing gets sent for that one.
Why the wait between Setup Forming and Confirmed matters
This isn't arbitrary — it's the one deliberate design choice this whole product is built around. Sending a real trade signal the instant price crosses a level would mean acting on moves that haven't actually proven themselves yet. The wait exists specifically to filter out fakeouts before they cost you money, not to slow you down for no reason.
What to actually do while a pair sits at each stage
Watching and Range Building: nothing to do — these are purely informational, showing you the market is in its normal early hours.
Setup Forming: this is genuinely useful to know about, but not to trade on. If you're on Analyst Pro, you'll get this as an early heads-up email — still not something to enter a position on.
Confirmed & Sent: this is the moment with real, actionable numbers — entry, stop loss, and target — the point where a decision actually makes sense.
The honest part
Not every pair reaches Confirmed & Sent every session — some days, a pair simply sits at Watching or Range Building the whole time, because nothing worth confirming happened. That's not a malfunction; it's the same "fewer signals you can trust" principle applied honestly, even when it means a quiet day.