Revise & test yourself

When you've worked through a section, the summary re-teaches the whole thing in one read and the final exam tells you what to go back to.

Primary Concern A — Context / Framework

What makes an idea favorable for a trade? Not an indicator, not a support & resistance level — there has to be something that builds a reason to want the trade. Price is always in one of these four conditions:

Primary Concern B — Pairing Each Condition With An ICT Tool

Each condition couples directly with a specific reference point in institutional order flow:

The Market Efficiency Paradigm

Retail believes its sheer vastness drives price — supply & demand, trendlines, moving average crossovers. That's a facade. A small circle of traders — the banks — is the actual drive shaft that makes the markets go around. They are the liquidity provider; everyone else is liquidity. The markets are always efficient — but efficient for the smart money, not for the speculators.

The Daily Template

Every day the interbank price delivery algorithm runs the same generic, systematic structure — expansion, retracement, reversal, consolidation applied to time of day:

The Rules of Conditions

When you see a consolidation or holding pattern, think: the next leg is an explosive move — an impulse price swing. These processes are time sensitive, day sensitive, and intermarket related — when one market is being held while a correlated one is let run (why the EuroPound matters when trading fiber or cable), that's where the trade is setting up.

The Weekly Template

The same repeating format plays out across the weekly range:

Two Perspectives — Who Is The Victim?

The uninformed money doesn't acknowledge that smart money exists; its perspective is that indicators are the answer — that overbought/oversold is the precursor to a move ("indicator-itis"). If you're new and not infected with that yet, you actually have the advantage. The smart money perspective is that of the liquidity provider: everyone else is liquidity — in the form of buy stops, sell stops and pending orders above and below the most recent highs and lows. 90% of traders lose; a huge new pool of liquidity enters the market every single day.

Daily Price Action Logs — Start Here

Come in with no previous knowledge — go back to square one, even if you've made money before (if anything outside institutional order flow led to your profitability, it was coincidence). The very first thing: create a daily price action log with price charts, with this much data displayed per timeframe:

What To Note On The Charts

• Where price has shown a quick movement from a specific level — those big candles will be influential later.
• Recent highs and lows that haven't been retested — they'll influence future price delivery.
• Clean highs (two equal highs in close proximity): buy stops build above them and the market usually comes back up and runs through that. Equal lows: a big area for sell stops — the market has a willingness to go down and test that liquidity.
• What day the weekly high/low forms, and what time of day / killzone (London or New York) — it lends to prognostication.
• The daily high and daily low of every single trading day, and when they form. Note previous day's high/low and draw them out to 0 GMT.

Work the levels top-down: mark them on the daily, drop to the 4-hour — the same levels transpose immediately and more highs/lows become visible — then the hourly (which defines the weekly range), then a separate 15-minute chart covering the last 3–4 days.

The Fib Has No Magic

Fibonacci has no significance by itself — any other time it will fail you. The 62–79% levels work only because they're measuring how far the current price range has been — the foundations behind price action cause the indicator to work, never the other way around. Price alone — the open, high, low and close — gives you everything: direction, entries and exits.

Defining the Swing

• First you need movement: an impulsive price swing means displacement — someone with a lot of money and strong conviction has entered. Banks accumulate at the lows, then keep offering price higher as long as they find buyers.
• A swing high is 3 candles — a high with a lower candle on the left and a lower candle on the right. Then you wait for the 4th candle to be lower than the highest one — only then do you start waiting for equilibrium.
• Only fib pure, obvious swings — and don't count the Sunday candle (MT4/Forex LTD shows it; it's a non-event).
• Keep the same range as long as its low is not violated; once an old high is taken, re-draw the fib on the new, larger price leg — the parent price swing currently being traded in.
• Use the swing that showed reaction — the leg that moved away from an area you expected it to move from.

Equilibrium → Discount → Explosion

Turtle Soup — The Stop Run

If conditions are bullish and a low gets swept, that's when you anticipate a turtle soup — a false breakout below the low. Why do market makers run price below old lows? Because tripping the sell stops injects sellers — counterparties to their buy orders. Once it hits the level, the orders go hot and it explodes upward. It only needs to breach by a little; it should reject immediately. This is also how you answer "will it keep going lower?" — if it already took the stops out, it's probably done reaching.

Exits — Where the Market Makers Distribute

• Take profits above an old high — any old high, it doesn't have to be the oldest one. If it gives you two chances and you hold for more, that's greed.
• Market makers only allow price to retrace so that buy stops build above an old high — that's how they engineer liquidity. Those buy stops become market orders to buy, and smart money sells its accumulated longs to them. That's all institutional order flow is: the storyline between the highs and the lows.
• Intraday, markets reach for stops in grades of 10 and 20 pips above a high.
• Consolidations form at equilibrium — then expansion goes hunting the liquidity above (the buy stops over the clean/equal highs you marked).

Everything here is diametrically opposed to equilibrium vs. discount. A premium means price is at a really high level relative to its current trading range — you don't need overbought/oversold indicators to classify it; you just need the current range, and anything above the 50% level starts going into premium.

Selling Rules

Turtle Soup Sells

When price goes above equilibrium and takes out an old high at the same time — running the stops while in premium — that's really good in terms of probabilities: a turtle soup sell. Target the lows already established in the marketplace: take first profit below the first low, then the next low (aim ~10 pips below a range low, plus a few pips for spread).

Even on the daily chart these setups run 70–100+ pips — this is for those who can't day trade. The concepts are universal across timeframes.

Two Perspectives of Fair Value

Voids, Gaps & Where Fair Value Lives

• A liquidity void: sudden movement with large ranges, very little wicks, quick — price spent very little time at those levels. It will want to trade back up into that area and close it in later (not always immediately).
• A fair value gap (FVG): the range between the two up candles bracketing a down move — nothing filled in there, only one-way movement. Define it by the bodies.
• Where price only moved one way, no real buying (or selling) occurred — the market runs back up to close in the range where only selling took place.

At Equilibrium, Which Way?

Stacking the Overlap

High-probability fair valuation is an overlap of factors:

1. The total (parent) range — are you in the lower third? That's a deep discount.
2. The equilibrium of the most recent smaller range — below it is discount.
3. An institutional reference — e.g. the bullish orderblock (down candle before the move up through a short-term high) being hit at the same time as EQ. Its stated counterpart is the up candle before the market drops — "that up candle is exactly where resistance is on an institutional basis, so that's where selling occurs."

That confluence is where market makers build a net long book. They accumulate at a deep discount and liquidate at what retail sees as premium — it's fair value to the market maker to liquidate there. Price chasers buying up there are buying at a premium; the void being filled is where smart money scales out, wick by wick.

Liquidity (formally): the degree to which an asset can be quickly bought or sold without dramatically affecting its price. In ICT terms it's simpler: buy orders and sell orders.

The Story of the Stops

A short taken at a swing high is profitable as price falls — its buy stop rests just above that high (often right at it). A long from a low has its sell stop below the low. The market tends to find an interest in going back to where that large body of interest rests. So we're not looking for patterns for the sake of patterns — we're looking at where existing orders reside: liquidity above old highs, liquidity below old lows. It's just that simple, and it removes the retail, indicator-leaning perspective entirely — no bias relative to anything except price itself.

High Resistance — Why You Avoid It

• To run an old high, price must fight through every old low (standard resistance) and every intermediate high on the way — those stops are highly defended.
• Generally only a sharp injection of volatility — non-farm payroll, FOMC, a black swan — cuts through that kind of price action.
• This is the element of price action to trade least frequently.

Low Resistance — The Easiest Trading There Is

• After a sharp one-way decline breaks an old low, the run back up through the short-term highs created on the way down is low resistance — buy stops sit above every one of them, and each retracement sets up the next drive through.
• The low-resistance zone is defined from the broken low back up to where the drop began. Once price returns to the level of the old broken low, the probabilities fall off precipitously — it becomes a high resistance run for anything beyond it.
• Reverse it for the sell side: consolidation → expansion up breaking a short-term high → the fall back down through that one-sided run is low resistance, with sell-stop liquidity below every short-term low (and bottom-chasers building it up).

Impulse Price Swings

When you look at price action, think in terms of impulse price swings — high down to a low, up to a high, down to a low, over and over. Inside the impulse swings is where the detail lives. But there are smaller, more specific impulse swings with far more influence: the ones that are manipulative.

Market Protraction

Protraction is a time-sensitive impulse price swing — a small move that is highly sensitive to the time of day, designed and intended for manipulation only. It runs counter to the major direction you'll see after that time of day: if it moves higher at the protraction time, think the opposite direction. Its design is to fake out those who chase the initial move — to draw participants onto the wrong side, or to reach for liquidity (e.g. clearing out lows before the rally).

The 3 Protraction Times (per 24h)

Tip from the notes: hold Ctrl and tap Y (on the platform) to add the vertical 0 GMT delineations so you can see the time-sensitive swings.

What to Avoid

• Rushing massive gains — in pips or percent. Pips are a trophy thing for Twitter/Instagram; percent returns are what build consistent wealth, and you don't even need high percentages.
• Large risk in hopes of equally large returns — it's a misnomer that you need a lot of money and a lot of risk. Forex is not the lottery.
• Assuming small risk won't grow the account — compound interest is the missing element. Even $100 grows exponentially over time if you submit to it, and nothing says you can't add funds once you're confident.
• Sacrificing equity to poor planning — you need consistent parameters and well-defined low-risk setups: ideally 2% risk, no more, as a new trader.

The Reality of Reward-to-Risk vs. Accuracy

Greed puts you into the trade; once you're in, it transfers into fear. Learn to respect the risk side before you execute — nobody goes broke taking profits; they go broke taking too much risk.

As your accuracy grows while you keep hunting 3:1 trades, your equity grows exponentially — and you never demanded high accuracy.

The 6% Per Month Model

Focus on 6% of equity compounding per month — it doubles your money every year, whatever your account size. It only takes 20 pips per week, 1.5% risk, and a 1:1 ratio — and those setups form every single trading day (that doesn't mean trade every day: highly selective conditions only). A $1,000 account risks $15 a trade — a loss you can absorb without taking it out on anyone.

The easiest 6% setups form on the daily chart orderblock: the down candle before the move up; the body's open-to-high = the fair value gap. Wait for price to return, add ~5 pips spread to the limit order, stop 20 pips below (under the middle of the down candle), then graduate your exits: take half at the first multiple (banking 0.75%), stop to breakeven after the second multiple, scale the rest at the logical liquidity levels — the buy stops you mapped in advance. One setup like that framed on the daily is a 5:1, one-shot-one-kill.

• Select setups on higher timeframe charts — that's the primary function of a high-odds trade. The HTF gives the directional bias, the institutional order flow, and the framing of the buy or sell idea.
• Why? Because large institutions and banks analyze markets on a daily, weekly and monthly basis — without that view you limit your exposure to high-probability setups.
• HTF setups form slowly and provide ample time to plan — you don't need to be a day trader; jobs, businesses and life don't stop you from trading these.
• The HTF has more influence on price, so focus there — then transpose the HTF levels to lower timeframe charts to reduce the overall pip exposure of the stop. Smaller stop = lower risk by default.

The Refinement Ladder (Aussie Case Study)

Same setup, three levels of refinement — the daily bullish orderblock at 7512, with an old low violated down into it (sell stops taken into a level where banks have bought before):

With ~8 pips of risk, you're at a multiple of 3R before the 5-minute buy stops are even taken. Price only reaches 7542 — the hourly entry — after that, so the hourly trader is still being filled at the point where the refined trade is already several R in front.

Continuing the Aussie 7512 case study: framed with 2% risk and the refined 5-minute stop, the trade pays out in stages against the liquidity pools mapped in advance:

• Take half off at 3:1 — the buy stops don't even have to be blown out yet. That banks 3% on the trade with under 10 pips of risk.
• The remaining half aims at the higher-grade liquidity pools — the 15-minute buy stops paid 9R, the hourly pool 15R.
• The potential range was ~100 pips. You don't need the absolute high or low — the lion's share is enough. Even collapsing the runner at half the range tacks on 21%+ for the month; the full range nets 46%+. If all you ever got was the 3:1 first objective, that alone is over 10% per month.

What Fear of Losing Does

• Staying concerned about taking a loss promotes fear-based decision-making — it keeps your focus on the adverse and fosters trade paralysis (the inability to execute efficiently).
• Equity managed by traders who cannot take a loss can't profit long-term. Losing is inevitable.
• The professional equity manager understands: losses are costs of doing business. Over a long career your loss column will be very long — and it doesn't remove the profitability.

Framing the Trade

• The bullish orderblock's high-to-open defines the fair value gap — the most probable support.
• The mean threshold = the middle of the down candle; you don't want it violated on a closing basis.
• A simple 20-pip stop easily frames 3:1 and 5:1 reward multiples against the old high above.
• Position sizing: 1% of $5,000 = $50; divide by your stop (e.g. 25 pips) for your dollar-per-pip leverage.

The Math That Kills the Fear ($5,000 account, 10 trades/month)

The Scenario

You go long at the orderblock but place your stop just below the mean threshold — too tight — and get swept out for a full loss. The trade idea hasn't unraveled; you were just inaccurate in where the stop was placed. When a new down candle forms and price trades above it, that authorizes any return to it as a buying opportunity — re-enter at the top of that candle, but this time put the stop below the entire orderblock and allow more movement against you.

The Half-Risk Rule

Process-Oriented Thinking

• Efficiency in trading comes by way of process-oriented thinking — not reactionary or impulsive thinking, which leads to rushing entries prematurely. Professional traders are not in a rush to put money to work.
• Decisions must be binary — do X or do Y, black or white, like a flow chart. Without that structure, a vacuum forms where emotional, psychological and impulsive trading creeps in.
• You want your trading to be boring — monotonous, mundane, routine. Emotions are only allowed on the weekend after a smashing week.
• Your trading plan is uniquely yours — you can't copy someone else, and you're not trying to share it with anybody. Nobody else's opinion of your model matters.

The Three Perspectives — 7 Things In Agreement

The Classic Pattern — and the Trap

A bull flag: an impulse leg up (the flagpole), a small consolidation sideways or sloping lower (the flag), then a measured move — an equal leg added to the breakout. It's consistent in nice strong immature trends. The problem: in mature bull trends or at higher-timeframe distribution levels (premium), price prints FALSE bull flags — retail sees the classic continuation buy and it reverses. Same in reverse: false bear flags form at HTF accumulation levels (discount). Price does not move based on any pattern — chart patterns for the sake of patterns is how ICT himself fell victim early on.

Diagnosing the False Bull Flag (top-down)

1. Daily: fib the swing high→low — the flag is forming in premium, inside a big up candle (a bearish orderblock). That's distribution territory.
2. 4-hour: liquidity voids running up then down through the area — the whole range is treated as a bearish OB with a mean threshold.
3. 5-minute refinement: the up candle(s) right before the down move = the bearish orderblock. With two consecutive up candles, measure body-low to body-high across both — the equilibrium of that range is the mean threshold (which lands at the bottom of the last up candle).
4. Focus on the bodies — ignore the big wick; the sensitivity for selling short sits at the bodies and low-end wicks of the up candles.

The False Bear Flag (the buy side)

• On the daily, the decline is only running the stops below the bodies of old candles (ignore the wicks) — returning to the area for the first time in months.
• Don't just buy the rally — wait for a swing high to be created and violated on the upside. Then buy the return to the last down candle (the bullish OB), stop below the flag's low.
• Objectives: fill the down-candle range, the stops above the equal highs (clean levels), then the bearish OBs and liquidity pools above.

Who Gets Trapped

At some measure of equilibrium, price moves into a trading range. Neophyte and breakout traders bracket the range — buy stops above the old highs, sell stops below the old lows — hoping to catch a trend either way because they have no idea what's going on. Those brackets are the trap:

The Buy Model, Step by Step

1. Price breaks below the consolidation — the tripped sell stops are used to pair smart money's long orders (their counterparties).
2. Price expands (think IPDA) up to the liquidity above the old high — the buy stops are used to pair long exits: scaling out, taking profit, hedging.
3. New consolidation forms → sell stops build below it again → the cycle repeats, each time stacking orders a little higher. Every consolidation is priming.

• All the volume is in the bodies of the candles — so the liquidity rests above the bodies, not the wicks.
• Measured moves confirm the model: the first impulse leg out of a false breakout projects the next legs (108.75→109.25, 108.85→109.80 in the example — the 109.90 terminus tied directly to the daily bearish orderblock).

What Each Timeframe Is For

The Monthly Chart Seed (EURUSD Case Study)

• Smart money sells up-moves and buys down-moves — on the monthly, your eyes go straight to the last up candle before the breakdown: the bearish orderblock.
• The return to that monthly OB took 13 months to set up — then the move unfolded in 6: 2,900+ pips.
• Below the clean, equal monthly lows (look at the bodies — too clean): the sell stops of large trend-following funds, who leave stops in for a very long time. That's the target.
• With the range known in advance (OB high → equal lows), lay the fib across it and grade the swing — setups form every 25% of the range, on the way to the terminus.
• Every monthly candle holds ~20 trading days and ~4 weekly candles of setups — see the apple seed, but also every tree inside it.
• Hold the bias until it's clearly proven wrong — or the terminus is hit.

ICT's Only 3 Setups

ICT names the same three a second way later in the same lecture, as the three forms of discipline to gravitate toward — orderblocks, stop runs (turtle soup) and liquidity voids: "it may be order blocks, but for some of you the order block is going to be problematic… but you'll clearly see where the stop runs are and you'll be able to trade turtle soups. But maybe you can't do that either — well, you'll trade in liquidity voids." Same three setups, named from the other end: the range you trade inside is the liquidity void.

Bodies vs. Wicks

• The bodies of the candles are where the institutional volume is — the bulk of the bodies is as close to interbank prices as you'll get. The wick is generally comprised of retail pricing (brokers opening the spread — allow that erroneous, extreme price delivery).
• Do your analysis around the bodies. Price only needs to reach below the bodies, not through the wicks, to seek the truest volume.
• The bodies respect the mean threshold — the middle of the orderblock candle.

Rebalancing — Every Down Candle Needs an Up Candle

Everything Is a Hedge

Mapping It Top-Down

• Mark the bullish/bearish institutional order flow zones on the monthly, then drop into the weekly and daily — the same shaded logic maps years of price (the notes map EURUSD mid-2008 → mid-2012 this way).
• The tell for a shift: when the last up candle is violated, expect downside expansion (and vice versa).
• The daily chart will always seek the fund-level institutional order flow — the stops found on the monthly and weekly charts. That's where the whales (large funds, billions of dollars) reside. The banks can't counterparty with retail — even collectively we're too small.
• Keep the monthly/weekly levels on your daily chart and you'll see every significant price swing coming before it gets there — that's why the daily shows "unexplainable" sensitivity at levels that have no visible reference on the daily itself.

• Sponsorship = the willingness to protect an underlying price swing that has a high probability of unfolding — the impact of large institutions, banks and big equity traders funding the side of the marketplace you anticipate.
• Price is fractal — everything you see on one timeframe replicates on higher and lower timeframes, so the same low-violation pattern can be hunted on the LTF as the HTF level is hit.
• The elephant in the pool: a daily chart doesn't move dynamically without a large entity behind it — displacement is the water overflowing. Go back to where the move began: that root price level is the institutional sponsorship level.

Criteria for a Long (reverse everything for shorts)

1. HTF price displacement — a reversal, an expansion, or a return to fair value.
2. Intermediate-term imbalance — a move to discount, or a sell-side liquidity run (old low taken).
3. Short-term buy liquidity above the marketplace — ideal for pairing your long exits to sell to.
4. Plus time-of-day influence — e.g. London open for the low of the day, or a New York session low.

4 Stages of a Price Swing

Once market structure breaks bullish (the old high violated), sponsorship should protect price from ever returning to the origin — don't wait for the whole retracement back down; it's not coming. Each level of buy stops consumed just shifts focus to the next pool above; don't hunt reversal patterns or divergences at each old high.

The Monthly OHLC Study

Monthly charts only move with a great deal of money behind the swings — retail cannot move them. So the study: delineate the open, high, low and close of every monthly candle over the last 3 months, on every pair of interest, and transpose those levels into your lower timeframes. A few overlapping opens/closes is fine — that's confluence.

1. Find the most recent monthly down candle.
2. Find the prior up candle whose low is above that down candle's high — those two candles define your trading range.
3. Once price trades above the down candle's high, that down candle is activated as the bullish orderblock — buy at its open or less, targeting the last up candle of the range.
4. Reverse it: an up candle whose low gets violated activates as the bearish orderblock — the range extends down to the most recent down candle.

What Is Institutional Market Structure?

The analysis of correlated assets against inversely correlated assets, to determine what the smart money is accumulating or distributing. Currencies are the easiest — compare every price swing in the US Dollar Index with the foreign currency you trade. SMT = smart money tool / smart money technique.

Symmetrical Markets — Confirmation

Non-Symmetrical Markets — SMT Divergence

• This is how ICT anticipates a turtle soup before it actually happens — the failure swing tells you the coming break is a raid, not a trend.
• Cable case study (June & Aug–Sep 2016): cable pierced old highs — looked like a bullish breakout to retail — while the dollar refused to make its lower low. The dollar was being accumulated; cable was being distributed above the old highs, selling accumulated longs to the buy stops. "Retail candy land" — retail chases the false breakout while smart money watches the failure swing. That divergence is why ICT was a dollar bull for all of late 2016.

The Closest-Guarded Secret

• The goal: a 3–6 month outlook on where currencies are heading. Not from bank reports — "why would a bank tell you what their intentions are? That's like a football team telling you their plays for the Super Bowl."
• Not from sifting fundamentals either — a visual interpretation of the data via price action in the bond market. The 30-year Treasury bond (the benchmark behind US mortgage rates) and the 10-year note, both December contracts.
• Bond futures rally = rates lowering. Bond futures drop = rates increasing. And rising rates see an aggressive pouring-in of funds to buy the dollar — rates ↑ → dollar ↑, chasing yield.

Two Layers of Interest-Rate SMT

Why the Trendline Is a Phantom

• Trendlines are opinions, not edges. Everybody draws them, everybody sees the same touches — which is exactly why they fail. "Price has no awareness of your trendline. Price doesn't respect what you have on your charts — price only respects where the actual liquidity is in the marketplace." The banks "don't care what you're scribbling all over your charts"; what they are aware of is the sentiment that builds around those levels. Confidence that a line will hold is "really associated closely to flipping a coin."
• A trendline needs two points to draw and a third to confirm. Retail is taught to buy the third touch of a rising line (or sell the third touch of a falling line). The stops for those trades cluster in one obvious place.
• The real target is the liquidity pool, not the line: buy stops rest above point 2 of a bearish/declining trendline; sell stops rest below point 2 of a bullish/rising one.

The Phantom Play

• When bearish at a HTF premium array, ICT wants price to trade up into the area between touch 2 and the projected touch 3 — aiming for the high between point 2 and point 3 where the buy stops live.
• Look for an orderblock or a turtle soup above that high, after the 2nd touch and before the market ever reaches a "clean" 3rd touch. That failure-swing above the pool is the entry.
• A classic chart pattern — a triangle — also prints on this chart, and its breakout was false: "they would have been wrong even trading with that." ICT flags it as a pattern not yet covered, to be taken up later in the mentorship.

The Most Dangerous Pattern in Retail

• Trying to pick tops and bottoms is the single worst thing a trader can do — and the head & shoulders is the pattern that convinces people to do it. It looks like a reversal signal, so retail sells the right shoulder and puts stops above the head.
• Those stops above the head (and above the shoulders) are the liquidity the algorithm is engineering the pattern to reach. The prettier and more textbook the pattern looks, the more stops are stacked, and the better the target.

How ICT Fades It

• The neckline break is a turtle soup. Retail is taught to sell (or add) when the neckline breaks; instead, treat the break of the neckline as a stop-raid on the sell stops below it — the ideal spot to look for the opposite side.
• Anchor to the HTF premium/discount array first. Only fade the pattern in the direction the higher-timeframe bias already supports; the head & shoulders just tells you where the trapped orders are.
• The inverse head & shoulders is the mirror trap, and it is faded short, from a premium, when the higher timeframe reads bearish. The break above the neckline is not a bullish breakout — it is a run on buy stops, so sell there rather than expect price to go higher. The sell stops below the "head" are the objective to cover into.
• Study the daily and 1-hour examples below to see the buy/sell stops relative to the head, shoulders, and neckline.

The Interest Rate Triad

• Interest rates are the single most influential driving force behind market moves — "that's what makes the whole world go round." Nothing drives currencies harder.
• The triad is three futures markets overlaid together: the 30-year bond (long-term benchmark), the 10-year note (intermediate), and the 5-year note (short-term). Charts are free on barchart.com.
• A raw open/high/low/close chart tells you nothing — the edge is comparative/overlay analysis of the three against each other. That's why it "evades the majority."

Reading Smart Money via Failure Swings

• The three rates should confirm each higher high / lower low at the moment the Dollar Index is at a significant price point. You only need one to break the pattern — a failure swing — to reveal smart money participation (large volume shifting supply/demand).
• Have a predetermined bias first. The triad divergence doesn't tell you direction on its own — it validates an idea you already have on the dollar (e.g. the 99.50 rejection → dollar bullish → sell fiber/euro/cable).

• Mark each new range high and low.
• Entries on internal range liquidity (e.g. an orderblock), exits on external (old highs/lows).
• The monthly/weekly bias frames the low-resistance liquidity runs on the daily — "price has an agenda."
• Use the energetic low, not the consolidation low.
• Buy internal (orderblock) targeting the old external high in sync with the HTF.
• If there are no ranges, target swing-low turtle soups.
• External liquidity taken → an internal setup (orderblock) confirms.

Match the Timeframe to Your Pip Goal

• Work backwards from your goal: e.g. 10%/month needs X pips on your equity base → hunt only ranges that offer it. You don't need the range to break — framing the right swing can hand you 75 of a 100-pip range without ever clearing the old high.
• Two disciplines cover everything: (1) turtle soups — buying sell-stops / selling buy-stops, or (2) return to fair value — buying internal range liquidity. Pick whichever the chart shows most clearly.
• Gap risk: a liquidity void / big one-candle range beneath your long is where aggressive repricing stops people out — ICT hunts those as opportunities rather than fearing them.

Definition & Validation

• A bullish orderblock is the lowest down-close candle with the most open-to-close range, near a support level (an old low/high on the monthly, weekly or daily).
• It's only a suspected block until validated — a later candle must trade through its high. That displacement is the fingerprint of institutional sponsorship (big flows that can actually move price).

Entry, Risk & Targets

• Enter on the return to the open of the down candle (body high) — or as early as the very candle that broke the high, without waiting. Use wicks only where they overlap FVGs; otherwise focus on bodies.
• Set an alert and submit to time — plan risk, size and target while price travels down. Add ~5 pips to a limit order so the dealing spread fills you.
• The best orderblocks never trade below the 50% mean threshold (measured open-to-close, not the wicks) — a small stab through is tolerable.
• Stop below the block's low / the close of the body; raise to 50% once price runs away.
• You buy internal range liquidity (the block) and exit into external range liquidity — the buy stops above an old daily/weekly high — pairing your long exit with willing buyers.

Refinements

• 2+ consecutive down candles = one full orderblock — blend them.
• ICT wants a rally of 2–3× the orderblock's body height before trusting the retracement back for a second entry.
• After a stop run, price may not reach the refined block — use the bigger orderblock's mean threshold instead.
• Refine top-down monthly → weekly → daily → (even 5-min), always in the direction of the monthly/weekly/daily bias. Each fresh, higher down candle becomes the new block.

The Setup (bearish; reverse for bullish)

• Price rallies into an anticipated resistance / bearish reference point (old high, bearish OB, breaker…), then prints an M pattern — a failure swing that breaks the prior short-term low. That break is the market structure shift — confirmation smart money wants lower prices. No higher high needed.
• Once structure shifts, your focus moves to that short-term low and specifically the last down candle before the little rally — that's where the trapped buying happened.

The A-B-C Frame

• Entry: sell as price trades back up into that last down candle. Uses the full body of the candle — a small overshoot into the body is fine, but the body should not be violated; that's the Hallmark of a valid mitigation block. Expect ~20 pips of drawdown at most.
• Stop just above the down candle's high. Target: back below the low, on toward the next untapped support (e.g. the mean threshold of a liquidity void).
• The mechanic is "buyer's remorse" — support-broken-turns-resistance. Premium highs are bought by the less informed and sold by smart money. Every fresh rally that needs to be mitigated is another sell.

Bullish Breaker (a buy)

• An old low is violated — sell stops below it are taken (a false break / turtle soup). Sellers are now trapped short.
• Price then runs back up through the swing high between the two lows — the repricing that confirms a stop-run, a bullish market structure shift.
• The last up candle inside that swing high (the highest up candle prior to the drop) is the bullish breaker — its entire range.
• Buy the return to it: trapped shorts mitigate (cover) and add new longs at the same level → the explosive rally.

Bearish Breaker (a sell)

• An old high is violated — buy stops taken, buyers trapped long. Price then breaks the swing low between the two highs (structure shift down).
• The down-close candle in that swing low is the bearish breaker — sell the return to it as trapped longs bail.

• Anticipating rejection at every new high/low is the first — and hardest to groom — anticipatory skill. Best setups are in major-to-intermediate-term trends.
• A bearish rejection block: a swing high with long wick(s) where price pushes above the highest body to run buy-side liquidity, then declines. No higher high is required for the failure swing — read the bodies, not the wicks.
• Framing it: the block runs from the highest wick high down to the highest open or close in the swing high (regardless of whether that candle is bullish or bearish). Treat that range as a bearish orderblock. The wicks just flag where to look.

Three Entry Choices

• Bullish version is the mirror: lowest wick low + lowest open/close frames a bullish rejection block in an uptrend — buy the return.

The Market Maker Buy Model

• The curve is simply price going lower to go higher. On the sell side of the curve (the drop into support), market makers scale in early — their size is too big to fill in one move, so they hedge down.
• Each small bounce on the way down is a minor displacement = new accumulation. The last down candle before each little rally is a bullish orderblock. (Traders who buy those bounces get stopped out — they're piggybacking a hedging move, not the real low.)
• Off the major support the buy side of the curve begins. Every one of those old sell-side down candles gets reclaimed / recapitalized as price rises — the blocks match up on both sides of the curve, "like X-ray vision."

The Market Maker Sell Model (reverse)

• Anticipate a rally to go lower. On the buy side of the curve, every up candle with a small displacement down = market makers selling short early / hedging into the rally.
• To the right of the high, every return to one of those old up candles (a bearish orderblock) is a reclaimed short — the sell-side blocks match the buy-side ones.

• Definition: a down candle that trades down into a prior down candle / bullish orderblock when the context is already bullish. That second, higher block is the propulsion candle — highly sensitive, "predisposed to go higher."
• The mean threshold (50% of the body) should never break. Most often price only trades to the candle high (maybe a pip or two under) and then explodes — sudden, violent movement away.
• The mean-threshold rule is the edge: it lets you run an ultra-tight stop, and a break gives immediate feedback you're wrong — go to the sidelines or look to reverse.
• Bearish version: an up candle trading back up into a prior bearish orderblock — sell the mean threshold, or the return to the candle's low (below the body — extra sensitive).
• The payoff: little drawdown, immediate responsiveness — exactly what short-term traders want.

• A vacuum block is a gap from a volatility event — non-farm payroll, FOMC, an unforeseen geopolitical shock, or a futures session/Sunday open — where a central-bank-level repricing means no trade could occur between the prior close and the new open (a vacuum of liquidity). NFP can gap 30–60 pips.
• Treat the empty gap as its own candle: define its high, low, mean threshold, open and close, then trade it like any orderblock. Risk is defined between two reference points → more leverage for the same % exposure.
• A gap up from a discount after a decline = a breakaway gap (strength). A gap after an extended rally = an exhaustion gap / capitulation.
• Fill behavior is time-of-day sensitive: an early-NY (8:30) gap likely fills the same day; a 10–11am gap likely stays open → becomes an FVG for later.
• Two outcomes on the way down: a bullish orderblock inside the gap may halt the fill and rally (leaving a small FVG), or price fully closes the gap = perfect, balanced delivery → then a buy targeting the highs.
• Reverse the whole model for a gap down: wait for up candles to fill it, then sell.

• We want to sell to the buyers and buy from the sellers — sell at a premium, buy at a discount. Retail buys at premium and sells at discount.
• If the market is bearish, look to sell above old highs — there are dumb buyers above the highs, or shorts with their buy stops resting there. We sell into that pool of liquidity.
• Roleplay: "if I was short right now, where would my buy stop be? If I was long, where would my sell stop be?" — that shows you where other traders' stops are.
• The trick is knowing the underlying HTF bias. If it wants to go higher — wait for an old low to be taken out, then be a buyer.

• A liquidity void is a range in price delivery where one side of the market's liquidity is shown — wide or long one-sided ranges or candles, quick, with very little wick. A run down is a void of buy-side liquidity: it is the absence of buyers that let price travel.
• Price typically wants to revisit this porous range — a void of contrarian liquidity is itself the draw on price. On the worked example the ultimate draw was to get back up and close the void in.
• Price in a small range/consolidation = price in balance / at equilibrium; when it moves away it creates an imbalance = displacement.
• There's no specific time for a void to fill — it's relative to the surrounding price action.
• A void looks like big candles delivered to one side, occasionally with small gaps between them.
• The void gets covered back over in the future — once both sides have been offered, price is balanced out.
• Sometimes it fills instantly; sometimes it first drops lower, faking people out, then fills completely.

Framing an FVG (three candles)

• A fair value gap is a range where only one side of liquidity was offered. For a bearish FVG, take the big down candle and look at its neighbours:
• The candle to the left already offered buy-side from its low up to its close; the candle to the right offered buy-side from its open up to its high.
• The pocket left open — between the low of the left candle and the high of the right candle — is the FVG (in the example ~25 pips, 105.00 → 104.75). Only sell-side was delivered there, so price is drawn back to rebalance it ("perfect delivery" = both sides offered).

• The gap occurs on the timeframe you're looking at — broken down on smaller timeframes it would probably be a liquidity void (multiple candles), not one gap.
• Why expect the gap to fill? Because sellside liquidity was already taken beneath the low with a turtle soup, there are equal highs (EQH), and above them the FVG — a high-probability trade. (The example: ~100+ pips in about two days.)
• In rangey conditions (like December) this is the style to use: looking for stops and looking for FVGs.
• FVGs, liquidity voids, orderblocks and liquidity pools overlap a lot — a single run can take buy stops (pool), hit an FVG, and on a lower timeframe show up as a liquidity void, all at once.
• Once price breaks below the efficient range, only sellside is delivered below it. Reverse everything for a bullish FVG below the market.

Two Types of Divergence

• ICT likes to see the hidden divergence when looking for higher prices — while retail is staring at the classic bearish divergence at the top. Indicators are mathematically derived and measure only the past; price has zero awareness of them.
• Banks (UBS, Credit Suisse, Citi) aren't looking at stochastics — they attack liquidity where buy/sell stops rest. Funds are long-term trend-followers, and those very systems get targeted in consolidations and at tops.
• Bearish divergence for retail while we expect higher prices → we buy. Do the opposite of retail.

The Mechanic

1. Retail sees a type-1 bearish divergence and sells the "top" — with no qualified target, they hold forever expecting lower and lower.
2. Price gives them ~30 pips, then runs the sell stops below the equal lows, dips into a bullish orderblock (mean threshold), and the stochastic cycles to a new low — not oversold, just enough to grab the stops.
3. That new stochastic low against a higher low in price is the real (hidden) divergence — price snaps up and runs the buy stops above the old high, leaving the divergence sellers "holding the bag."

• The algo remembers double tops/bottoms as reference points — even after time passes — and reaches through them for the buy stops (above tops) and sell stops (below bottoms).
• We NEVER trust double tops and double bottoms — we always expect them to get swept.
• Extreme ends of the range are where high-probability trading lives; the middle is low probability. Double tops/bottoms frame those extremes.

The Measured Move (the real target)

• Retail sees the double top as resistance and targets the support low below. The algorithm does the opposite: measure the high-to-low of the consolidation between the two peaks, then project that distance beyond the double top — that projection is the objective (in the example, price hit it to within 1 pip).
• Same in reverse for a double bottom: project the range below the lows to find where sell stops get swept, then price reverses back to the double-bottom reference.
• That's why you get spike reversals at both extremes — the algo runs to the measured level, then reverses.

The one idea underneath everything

Currency price is ~90% delivered by electronic algorithms — the interbank price delivery algorithm. There is no auction market anymore; it is a price engine, and it is highly manipulated. A small circle of banks is the liquidity provider; everyone else is liquidity, in the form of buy stops above old highs and sell stops below old lows. The markets are always efficient — efficient for the smart money, not for the speculators.

What each month was for

Month 1 — Reading The Conditions

The four conditions, and the tool each one pairs with (L1)

Price is always in one of four conditions, and each couples directly with one reference point in institutional order flow:

All moves start from a consolidation. The market maker holds price in a range until there is enough money on both ends — whichever side has the most money to absorb is the direction it moves. Because you can't know which in advance, you always wait for the first expansion. And one condition is enough: find the one you can see clearly, couple it with its tool, and wait for those conditions only.

The daily template (L2)

The weekly template (L2)

Market protraction — the three times per 24h (L8)

A protraction is a time-sensitive impulse price swing designed for manipulation only. It runs counter to the major direction you'll see after that time of day — if it moves higher at the protraction time, think the opposite.

Equilibrium, discount and premium (L4, L5, L6)

The fib has no magic of its own. The 62–79% levels work only because they measure how far the current range has travelled — the price action causes the tool to work, never the other way round. So first you need displacement: an impulsive swing that says someone with size and conviction entered. A swing high is 3 candles (a high with a lower candle either side); then wait for the 4th candle to be lower before you start waiting for equilibrium. Only fib pure, obvious swings, and re-anchor to the new parent swing once an old high is taken.

Turtle soup is the stop run: price sweeps just past an old low (or high), the tripped stops inject the counterparties smart money needs, and it rejects immediately. It only needs to breach by a little. That also answers "will it keep going?" — if the stops are already taken, it is probably done reaching. Exits go above an old high — any old high; intraday, markets reach for stops in grades of 10 and 20 pips beyond a level.

At equilibrium the market can go either way. The easiest read on direction: which side of market structure broke most recently? If a swing high broke and price came back to EQ, the highest probability is long. High-probability fair valuation is an overlap: the lower third of the parent range, plus the equilibrium of the smaller range, plus an institutional reference (e.g. a bullish orderblock) hitting at the same price.

Liquidity runs — the filter that removes most bad trades (L7)

The habit that starts it all (L3)

Build a daily price action log: daily chart with 12 months of data (no less than 9), 4-hour with 3 months, 60-minute with at least 3 weeks (the day trader's bellwether), 15-minute with 3–4 days. On them, note quick moves away from a level, highs and lows that haven't been retested, clean/equal highs and lows (where the stops build), which day the weekly high/low forms and in which killzone, and the high and low of every trading day. Work top-down, keep the annotated charts separate from the executable chart, use one pair, and resist the urge to forecast. Do it every single trading day.

Month 2 — Risk & Trade Selection

Reward-to-risk beats accuracy (L1, L4)

Greed puts you into the trade; once you're in it turns into fear. Respect the risk side before you execute — nobody goes broke taking profits, they go broke taking too much risk. Drawdown is the most important thing, psychologically and monetarily.

The 6% per month model doubles your money every year, whatever the account size: 20 pips a week, 1.5% risk, 1:1. $1,000 compounding at 6% a month passes $2,000 in a year and $1,000,000 in ten. A 50% month is possible but is not a standard — do not expect it. ICT's stated goal is 50–75 pips a week.

Framing a low-risk setup (L2, L3)

• Select on the higher timeframe, execute on the lower. The HTF gives the bias, the order flow and the framing — because banks analyse on the daily, weekly and monthly. HTF setups form slowly and give you time to plan, so a job or a business doesn't stop you.
• Then transpose those HTF levels down to cut the pip exposure of the stop. The Aussie 7512 case study: 1-hour entry with a 20-pip stop, 15-minute refinement at 17 pips, 5-minute refinement at under 10 pips — so by the time the hourly entry is being filled, the refined trade is already at 3R.
• Take half off at 3:1 and let the rest run at the higher-grade liquidity pools (9R at the 15-minute pool, 15R at the hourly in the case study). You don't need the absolute high or low — the lion's share is enough.

Mitigating a loss (L5)

Selecting high reward setups — seven things in agreement (L6)

2 + 2 + 3 = seven things in agreement in the same direction is what makes a setup high reward. This is the framework, not the entry — the entry signal is the least of your concerns. Trading must be process-oriented and binary: do X or do Y, like a flow chart, because without that structure a vacuum forms where impulsive trading creeps in. You want your trading to be boring. Your plan is uniquely yours.

Rhythm: the big picture and intermediate views are set on the weekend; the intermediate can shift mid-week; the short-term view changes day by day — and that is where most of your losses come from. Every 3–4 months there is a quarterly shift. Intraday charts have no influence over price — they only reflect what the monthly, weekly and daily arrive at.

Traps 1 & 2 — the false flag and the false breakout (L7, L8)

• False flag: flags are consistent in strong immature trends — but in mature trends and at HTF distribution levels (premium) price prints false flags. The "breakout" only clears the bodies of the old candles, which is the turtle soup. Sell the first return to the bearish orderblock (the last up candle's open), stop above the flag's wick high, first objective the liquidity void the false flag created. Mirror it at a discount for the false bear flag — but wait for a swing high to be created and violated before buying.
• False breakout: breakout traders bracket every consolidation, so the brackets are the trap. In a bullish market false breakouts happen below the range (the sell stops pair smart money's longs); in a bearish market, above it. Then price expands to the buy stops above, which pair the long exits. Each new consolidation stacks the orders a little higher. All the volume is in the bodies, so the liquidity rests above the bodies, not the wicks.

Month 3 — Institutional Analysis

What each timeframe is for (L1)

Start on the daily even if you know you'll be a day trader. ICT day-trades for money velocity, not because it is better — higher timeframes compound exceedingly well too.

Institutional order flow (L2)

• The bodies are where the institutional volume is — as close to interbank prices as you'll get. The wick is retail pricing (brokers opening the spread). Price only needs to reach below the bodies, not through the wicks.
• Wherever price was delivered on the sell side, it must at some point be offered on the buy side to rebalance — the range gets closed in.
• Everything is a hedge: between the two extremes of a range there is bookmaking. A bank running a net short book still has to buy back the longs it used at the other extreme — that unwinding is the basis of the market maker sell profile.
• The tell for a shift: when the last up candle is violated, expect downside expansion (and the reverse).
• The daily chart will always seek the fund-level liquidity found on the monthly and weekly. Keep those levels on your daily and you'll see every significant swing coming.

Institutional sponsorship (L3)

Sponsorship is the willingness to protect an underlying price swing. Price is fractal, so the same pattern you hunt on the HTF replicates on the LTF as the level is hit. Displacement is the elephant in the pool — go back to where the move began and that root level is the sponsorship level.

1. HTF price displacement — a reversal, an expansion, or a return to fair value.
2. Intermediate-term imbalance — a move to discount, or a sell-side liquidity run.
3. Short-term buy liquidity above — what you pair your exits to.
4. Plus time-of-day influence — London open for the low of the day, or a New York session low.

The 4 stages of a price swing are origin → equilibrium → ~75% → terminus (above the old high, into the buy stops). Once structure breaks bullish, sponsorship should protect price from ever returning to the origin — don't wait for the full retracement, it isn't coming. Mark the midnight New York opening price: if you suspect bullishness, anything below it should be accumulated, at bullish orderblocks from the previous London or New York sessions. That is power of three in action. Classic support/resistance only works on a retracement when there is an unfulfilled objective above.

The anticipation drill — monthly OHLC (L4)

1. Delineate the open, high, low and close of every monthly candle over the last 3 months, on every pair of interest, and transpose them into your lower timeframes.
2. Find the most recent monthly down candle.
3. Find the prior up candle whose low is above that down candle's high — those two define your trading range.
4. Once price trades above the down candle's high, that candle activates as the bullish orderblock — buy at its open or less, targeting the last up candle of the range. Reverse it for shorts.

When two down candles form the block, the one with the larger body begins the orderblock. Refine monthly → weekly → daily → hourly to get closer to market. It is a top-down approach that leads you into setups you'd otherwise never know were there.

Institutional market structure — SMT (L5)

Comparing correlated against inversely correlated assets to see what smart money is accumulating or distributing. For currencies: compare every price swing in the US Dollar Index against the pair you trade.

This is how you anticipate a turtle soup before it happens — the failure swing tells you the coming break is a raid, not a trend. Always double-check an apparent breakout in a foreign currency against the dollar index. It is a daily-chart concept that sets the intermediate bias; execute it however you normally trade.

Macro economic to micro technical (L6)

• The goal is a 3–6 month outlook, and it comes from a visual interpretation of the bond market — the 30-year Treasury bond and the 10-year note — not from bank reports or sifting fundamentals.
• Bond futures rally = rates lowering. Bond futures drop = rates increasing. And rates up → dollar up, as funds chase yield.
• Run SMT in two layers: bonds vs. USDX, and the 10-year vs. the 30-year. The dollar failing to make a lower low while bonds make a higher high marks the quarterly shift forming.
• The interest rate markets control everything — without interest rates nothing in the financial industry moves. Rates give the direction; the technicals give the execution.

Traps 3 & 4 — trendline phantoms and head & shoulders (L7, L8)

• Trendlines are opinions, not edges — everyone draws them, everyone sees the same touches, and price has no awareness of the line — it only respects where the liquidity actually is. A line needs two points to draw and a third to confirm, and retail buys the third touch. The real target is the liquidity pool: buy stops above point 2 of a declining line, sell stops below point 2 of a rising one. Look for an orderblock or turtle soup above that high, after touch 2 and before a clean touch 3.
• Head & shoulders: picking tops and bottoms is one of the worst games to play, especially for the new trader — even seasoned pros don't do it — and this is the pattern that convinces people to do it. The stops above the head and shoulders are the liquidity being engineered for — the prettier the pattern, the more stops are stacked. The neckline break is a turtle soup, not a sell signal. Only fade it in the direction the HTF bias already supports.

Month 4 — The PD Arrays

The ten arrays at a glance (L3–L12)

Internal vs. external liquidity — the framework for entries and exits (L2, L3)

• Entries on internal range liquidity (an orderblock), exits on external range liquidity (old highs and lows). You buy the block and sell into the buy stops above an old daily or weekly high — pairing your exit with willing buyers.
• Mark each new range high and low. Use the energetic low, not the consolidation low. If there are no ranges, target swing-low turtle soups.
• Match the timeframe to the pip goal: under 20 pips, pass; 40+ pips is a viable 1-hour day trade; 75–100 pips needs the 1-hour or 4-hour; 250 pips over two weeks lives on the 4-hour or daily. A 1h orderblock with only a 20-pip target is no trade. One setup a week is enough.
• Two disciplines cover everything: turtle soups (buying sell-stops, selling buy-stops), or a return to fair value (buying internal range liquidity). Pick whichever the chart shows most clearly.
• Trading against the HTF narrative is a high resistance run — the trades you sit in too long. Low resistance runs give an immediate response and low drawdown.

The interest rate triad — the green light (L1)

Three futures markets overlaid: the 30-year bond, the 10-year note and the 5-year note. A raw chart tells you nothing — the edge is comparative overlay analysis of the three. They should confirm each higher high and lower low at the moment the Dollar Index is at a significant price point, and you only need one to break the pattern — a failure swing — to reveal smart money participation.

Traps 5 & 6 — divergence phantoms and double tops/bottoms (L13, L14)

• Divergence phantoms: indicators are mathematically derived and measure only the past; price has zero awareness of them. Banks aren't watching stochastics — they attack where the stops rest. Retail sells a type-1 (classic) bearish divergence at the top; price gives them ~30 pips, runs the sell stops below the equal lows into a bullish orderblock, and the oscillator makes a new low against a higher low in price — the hidden divergence ICT actually wants. Only pull up an indicator to read what retail is thinking, then find the institutional reason for the opposite. Retail's overlooked fifth condition is "is it even a time to trade?"
• Double tops / bottoms: the algorithm remembers them as reference points and reaches through them for the stops. Never trust them — always expect them to be swept. The real target is the measured move: take the high-to-low of the consolidation between the two peaks and project it beyond the double top. On the 15-minute expect a 10–20 pip stop run; on the hourly that rule breaks down — use the measured range instead. Extreme ends of the range are where high-probability trading lives; the middle is low probability.

The numbers worth memorising

The checklist before any trade

1. Which condition is price in? Expansion, retracement, reversal or consolidation — and does the next state in the rules of conditions support your idea?
2. What is the HTF bias? Monthly and weekly levels transposed onto the daily; which side of structure broke most recently.
3. Premium or discount? Buys at equilibrium or below; sells at 62% or above. Never buy a premium, never sell a discount.
4. Where is the untapped liquidity, and is the run to it low resistance? If the path is defended, pass.
5. Which PD array are you entering on? An internal-range reference with a defined mean threshold — not a line drawn on a whim.
6. Where is the external liquidity you'll exit into? Know the target before entry; if the range is too small for your timeframe, there is no trade.
7. Does anything confirm? SMT against the dollar index, the interest rate triad, time of day, the midnight NY open.
8. Is the risk right? 1–2%, stop beyond the block, sized off the pip distance, with a 3R+ objective and partials planned.
9. Does it respond immediately? If the reaction is lethargic, there are no institutional orders there — reduce or leave.

What the course keeps warning you about

This first episode is a prep to get your mindset correct before the lessons begin. Nothing is taught about price yet; everything here is about how to approach what follows.

Three stages

Everyone is treated as a green horn — someone yearning to learn how to do this. The mentorship is designed to move you through three stages:

It is not a year-long mentorship. The plan is roughly three or four months, and that count includes March 2022, when nothing is uploaded at all.

A deliberately stripped-down model

ICT built this as a simple model — one he describes framing so that his daughter could look at it and see that there aren't a lot of moving parts: simple to decide what she wants to do, and just as importantly when not to do something. No bells and whistles, no advanced theories.

What is and isn't promised

Independence is the point

He is openly realistic that some students will fail. From his 2016 paid mentorship there are students still trying to find their way, and others with mind-blowing results — the same material, different individual experiences. Responsibility is paramount, and it cannot be handed to anyone else. He frames it as a transferable skill — but one the student has to hone.

The markets and the platforms

The model is driven with index futures — but the concepts work in forex too, and he'll show how to scale them into any timeframe. ICT began in 1992 trading commodities and futures, moved to the 30-year treasury bond and the S&P, and found that intraday trading suited him where position trading did not.

Teaching is done through TradingView. For showing results outside a demo account he used a regulated broker rather than MT4 — because it has been shown how frauds and fakes can use that platform to edit trades after the market has already moved and pretend they were profitable. He is not recommending a broker; he is removing the ability to fake the result.

The arithmetic of the objective

You don't need the margin for a full E-mini contract. Outside the US you could trade a CFD on the US 500, but for US traders that is illegal because it doesn't go through a regulated exchange — which is why micros exist.

Bias before precision

What is asked of you

If drills and homework are suggested, participate as best you can. Not everyone can watch live data — there are businesses, school, jobs and family — and reviewing after the fact isn't the same as seeing it live, but it is the best you can do.

This is elements to a trade setup — the framework the whole model rests on. It is presented predominantly as a futures index mentorship, taught through TradingView paper trading or hindsight data, with the NASDAQ e-mini (NQ) as the main focus. NQ is a little faster and a little more aggressive than the S&P, but the same reading applies to ES and YM.

The episode opens with a set of live thinkorswim executions from that day — shown for contrast, not as a promise. Out of a screen full of reversals and small trades, the question posed is: which one of these would you actually want to learn how to find? The answer is the big one — and that single price leg is what the rest of the lesson dissects.

The size of the objective

Start on the weekly — form a bias

Before the new trading week begins, preferably on the weekend, get a read on what the next weekly candle is likely to do: higher or lower. You are not trying to predict its close — only which end it is likely to expand toward. That is your weekly bias.

Think of price as a paperclip and specific price levels as a magnetic impulse pulling it toward them. The speed and magnitude with which it gets there is not something that can be handed to you — that part comes from screen time and study.

In the week used as the example, lower prices were expected for a short list of reasons: seasonal tendency at that time of year, the discussion around the Fed raising interest rates, earnings season volatility, and the heavy underlying tone visible on the daily chart.

Then the daily — where the liquidity is

The majority of your analysis lives on the daily chart: its swing highs and swing lows hold the liquidity, and the draw on liquidity that makes the market go higher or lower is predominantly found there. With a bearish weekly bias, the expectation is that every short-term low gets taken, because sell stops rest below them.

The stop hunt before the move — the Judas swing

Dropping to the hourly and transposing the daily levels onto it: the week had been bearish all the way down, then went into consolidation, leaving a short-term high (buy stops above) and a short-term low (sell stops below). What happened next is the heart of the lesson.

1. Price drops first and takes the sell stops. This is the sucker play — it induces shorts: anyone selling on weakness gets tripped into the market.
2. Price is then driven up through the short-term high. That punishes the traders just tripped in, and sends every buy stop above that high into the market as a market order.
3. That flood of willing buyers at a high price is the perfect counterparty for smart money that wants to sell short at a high price. Then the market goes down, which is where it wanted to go all along.

On the 15-minute chart the setup is even clearer: the highs before the drop were relative equal highs. Retail reads that as resistance and, as every book instructs, parks buy stops just above it — so the liquidity is engineered there, and it sits in sync with everyone already short from the day before who trailed their stop above that high.

The entry — imbalance after a break in market structure

Once the run on the buy stops has happened on the higher timeframe, drop down to look for the trigger. The 1-, 2- and 3-minute charts tend to be the best for finding imbalances on the indices — the high-frequency algorithms operate at nothing really higher than three minutes, mostly at 15-, 30-, 45- and 60-second intervals. Even the 5-minute chart still has a lot of room for imbalances to occur underneath it.

Premium & discount — where you are inside the range

Take the range you're working in — the low of the day to the high of the day thus far — and split it. All you need is a Fibonacci with the 50% level showing.

Markets can stay in a premium for a while without going to a discount, so this is context, not a trigger. But when the fair value gap formed in the example, it formed in a premium — so the algorithm's opposing side of the market, the discount, is where price was headed. And below the 50% level sat both the sell stops and, right beside them, an imbalance left by an earlier single up candle — a buy-side imbalance that needed equal delivery. Price went down, took the stops, and closed that gap in completely.

When to watch

8:30 to 11:00 New York local time is the sweet spot — there is usually a setup in there. If you have a business, school or a job, that is the window to protect. If you can't watch live, TradingView's replay lets you study how price gravitated toward levels, though the candles are stilted and you can't practise entries with it.

Homework

An intraday chart is anything below the daily — 4-hour, 1-hour, 5-, 3-, 2-, 1-minute. The impulse to trade this the first time you see it will be a problem for you: there is no escaping a number of weeks and months of backtesting first.

This lesson takes the homework chart — the 15-minute NQ from the previous episode — and shows the evidence that makes a market structure shift real. Everything else can be stripped away: no commitment of traders, no breakers, no supply and demand, no Elliott wave. This is the algorithmic perspective, and there is nothing you need to add to it.

Shift, not break

Where to anticipate a shift

On the 15-minute chart there was an old low with sell stops beneath it, and relative equal highs with buy stops above. Price traded down through the sell side, then rallied all the way back up and cleared the equal highs. Those two price points are where you anticipate a market structure shift. You do not force it and you do not try to get ahead of it.

The evidence — the one condition

A short-term swing high is just a candle, a higher candle after it, and then a candle with a lower high. Simple — but it means a lot in the proper context. When that swing high is taken out, it is significant only under one condition:

Two details that matter at the moment of the break:

• Price only has to trade above the high — it does not need to close above it.
• Once that candle closes, watch the next candle: does it leave a fair value gap? A candle's high, one single pass up, and the next candle's low that doesn't completely overlap it. If it does, that gap is the earliest place you can look to trade.

The market trades back down into the gap — and takes off.

The order block, defined properly

Read it as a series, not a candle. A run of down-closed candles driving into sell-side liquidity is one continuous order block. The level is the opening price of the candle that started that series, extended out in time. While that series is running, the market is offering sell side. When price trades back above that opening, the state of delivery changes: now it is offering buy side, so what will it do next? Seek buy stops. Reversed exactly for a bearish order block — once the opening of an up-closed series is violated, the market offers sell side, runs below old lows and into imbalances until it reaches a discount.

Targets

Once you're short after a bearish shift, what you're reaching for is the sell stops below each short-term low and the fair value gap below. Multi-contract positions can scale out at those lows.

Inside the target gap, the first objective is its high end — the low of the candle that formed it. That is the low hanging fruit, the easiest thing to reach. Holding on to see whether it fills the gap completely, all the way to the far candle's high, is something you grow into over time; while learning, take it when the market gives it to you.

Two fair value gaps

What is actually moving price

High-frequency algorithms hammer orders in — buy, buy, buy. Put this in your notes: that is not what causes the market to go higher. It is volume coming in. What makes price rise is the algorithm constantly offering price at a higher price. That is also why your fill isn't guaranteed at the level you clicked: try to buy at 14,662 with a market order and you may be confirmed at 14,664 — negative slippage; filled at 14,661 instead and that's positive slippage.

Times of day to mark

Always set your times to New York local time. Mark the high and low of each session — the market will probably sweep above or below them and create precisely the situations taught here.

Internal range liquidity

Risk and how to sit in the trade

This is stated as a personal parameter, not a suggestion for your size. Once the trade is on you have handed complete control to the marketplace — let it do what it's going to do rather than overthinking every fluctuation. Watching the profit-and-loss number tick up and down is the worst thing to do; watch the chart instead, and ask whether it keeps giving you feedback that it is accumulating rather than going lower. Expect in advance that price may dip once more into the lower gap, so that when it happens you're already desensitised to it.

Keep the chart naked

Nothing is on the chart during live trading — zero. Annotations exist only so students can see the internal dialogue. Levels drawn on a chart lock you into one expectation of what can happen; a clean chart keeps you fluid with what the market is actually doing.

Homework

Backtesting is not just dressing up the chart and calling it done. Study it: how far did it move, how long did it take, how much drawdown would it have put on you? When you hit a stretch where nothing feels like it's working, the journal is what carries you through it.

A shorter, more direct lesson: no new theory, just Wednesday's and Thursday's trading measured against the model taught on Tuesday night. The instruction repeated throughout is the same one — don't use these charts alone. Go into your own platform, your own feed, and find your own examples.

Example 1 — e-mini S&P, Wednesday 26 January 2022

Start from the obvious low, run up to the high, and drop a fib on that range to get the equilibrium price point — the 50% level. The rally up pushes the market into a premium: it is really expensive up there. Now watch what happens on the way back down.

• It breaks down below the old high — but does it create a fair value gap? No. So there is nothing to do.
• It rallies one more time, then breaks down again — and this time there is a break in market structure.
• Price runs back up into the fair value gap, then sells off, reaching into the old low — which sits below the equilibrium of the whole range.

Zooming in — the 2-minute detail

From there the sequence is exactly the one taught in the last lesson. After the run above the old high, price breaks structure below a swing low; that candle sets the stage. The question is then whether price draws back up into the fair value gap left by the bearish market structure shift. It does — that is where you can go short, targeting the old low, or the annotated low from the wider view.

Hypothetically: short around 4419, cover around 4382 — deliberately imperfect numbers. That is the opportunity the range offered; you do not have to have all of it for it to be very nice delivery.

What to write down

Type those observations straight into the open space on the chart. Note also that using the entry candle's high, you technically could have been filled higher — but the framing here is deliberately the total range available in hindsight, because that is what trains the eye. These examples are never photocopies of each other; what recurs are the similarities, and recognising those is the point. It is the deer track again: you have to know what one looks like before you can stalk it.

Example 2 — e-mini Nasdaq, Thursday 27 January 2022

The low-to-high range is immediately visible. Going back in time there is an old high, and there are also relative equal highs — a reasonable initial objective, looking for them to be taken out. They are. But then: does it break down and give a fair value gap? No — so it doesn't even meet the criteria.

So price runs above the old high where buy-side liquidity rests, but it does not then break down below the short-term low — it goes higher instead. You keep waiting for a break lower to get the intraday shift. When a candle finally trades down through the swing low, that is the moment the opportunity exists: go back to that candle's high and that candle's low and look for the fair value gap — it is right there.

The market rallies back up and trades into it: that is the short. It breaks down, retrades into the gap once more, and then reaches below the equilibrium price point. Several targets sat there — the lows and the imbalance — and it hit all of them and travelled a little further still.

Homework

This lesson is the intraday framework: setting up the daily range and the intraday layout, and starting to think in terms of daily profiles. Bias and specific entry techniques come later; here the job is the structure of the day itself.

Which markets this is for

The boring part: contracts and rollover

Index futures trade with expiration dates, and the delivery month is in the symbol — ES for e-mini S&P, then a month code and the year.

Those are the only four months the index futures trade — e-mini S&P, e-mini NASDAQ and e-mini Dow. Expiration is the third Friday of the delivery month, and you do not want to be trading after expiration. The current contract is the front month (or nearby); the one after it is the next month out.

The bellwether timeframe

The 15-minute chart is where key highs and lows are marked and where imbalances like fair value gaps are found. Order blocks are deliberately kept out of this mentorship — there are models that don't rely on them at all. The fair value gap is the main focus, because it repeats, it's an easy pattern, and it's there a lot.

Framing the day

Put a vertical line at 8:30, and clone it out: an equal stretch of time through the morning, then the one-hour New York lunch, then an equal amount of time after that. Those are your boundaries.

The aim in the morning is to be in position before 11:00 and hopefully riding something into the lunch hour, then squaring up or taking some off if you intend to hold through to the close. The lunch hour can do weird things or simply go sideways — either way it is not a clean time of day for price action.

What to mark before 8:30

The question that keeps coming in is which highs and lows a stop run gets framed on. On the 15-minute, to the left of 8:30, find the most significant or obvious swing high and swing low:

You are looking for the first one — there's no need to go back days and days. Once those levels are on the 15-minute, drop to your first lower timeframe for entry, the 5-minute; the annotations transpose with you.

Three drives

Alongside relative equal highs, watch for three short-term highs stepping progressively higher — the classic three drives pattern (met years ago as the "three little indians" in Linda Raschke and Larry Connors' Street Smarts, the book that first made stop hunts make sense).

Displacement

That is the answer to the earlier question about a swing low that looked violated but wasn't used. The walk-through on the chart shows it repeatedly: a run above the swing high with only a weak move lower — pass. Another push up, a wick that snaps straight back with no gap in it — pass. Then price trades up and smashes down, the next candle closes, and there is the fair value gap. That's the short, reaching for the sell-side liquidity below the low you marked before 8:30.

The afternoon session

The afternoon wasn't going to be taught at all, but it is included so the treatment of the daily range is complete.

From there it is the same stop-hunt logic. A too-clean level — straight-line edges in the market — is a level in jeopardy; those don't tend to stay. When the swing low is violated, that small stop hunt is all that is necessary to start a buy program.

Late in the day there is a repeating phenomenon around 20 minutes to 4, 10 minutes to 4, and 4:00, driven by market-on-close orders: the algorithms start spitting out very aggressive pricing, forcing traders to cover or get out, and a move already going up tends to ramp into the close.

A NASDAQ example

At 1:30 there is a swing low sitting at almost the same price as an earlier one — relative equal lows, which retail reads as support and buys. Further to the left there is a fair value gap, and above the relative equal highs sits buy-side liquidity. If you think the market is going higher, the sell stops beneath those equal lows are what you want to be buying.

The counter-example is deliberate: taking a handful of ticks with a large number of contracts, worrying about every fluctuation and about the stop being hit. If someone has to stack contracts to make a tiny move pay, it suggests they don't understand how price works — otherwise they wouldn't be reaching for micro moves at all. You are not trying to do 25 or 30 trades. Look for the real move in the morning and the real move in the afternoon — and if you get the morning one, don't trade the afternoon; practise in demo instead of handing the money back.

Daily profiles — the homework

Patterns you'll see recur: bullish morning then a reversal in the afternoon; bullish morning then continuation, giving a measured move — the afternoon duplicating the morning's range, so a 200-point morning plus another 200 in the afternoon makes a 400-point day; or a consolidating morning that then trends in the afternoon, higher or lower. It's the same shape taught in the Forex daily range — an initial high and low of the day, consolidation, then continuation in the same direction — just with everything re-based to New York time.

How to internalise price delivery

• You do not trade patterns for patterns' sake.
• You do not trade indicator readings or momentum.
• You look to enter longs where retail sells, and shorts where retail buys.

Two camps, and what each one looks at

Picture the market as informed (smart) money — a small circle — and a much larger collective of speculative, uninformed money, constantly flowing in as new accounts arrive and flowing out as accounts blow up.

Smart money looks to cannibalise the uninformed group, because they're typically wrong in their directional bias and in their stop placement — if they use a stop at all. That is the familiar conundrum: a stop placed too shallow gets picked off prematurely, one placed too far away lets a spike take a big loss before price turns back their way.

The bearish fair value gap, candle by candle

This is an institutional order flow pattern — a three-candle formation, and the logic never changes.

Inside that space, price was only ever offered on the sell side.

Displacement — the range the gap must sit in

Conceptually, the bearish market structure shift is: market trading higher, a short-term retracement, a trade above an old or short-term high, and then a break down. Once that low is broken, the trade idea is born — you still don't know where you're getting in.

The high of that move is the displacement high; the level below the short-term low that got broken is the displacement low. That range is where you hunt the fair value gap — it is exactly where it forms, on every timeframe, not just intraday.

The bullish mirror

Everything reverses exactly. The bullish three-candle gap: candle 1's high is the low of the gap, candle 3's low is the high of the gap, and candle 2 is where it resides. The logic to blend in is the bullish market structure shift — price trades below an old low (perhaps another leg lower) into sell stops, then runs higher, takes out a short-term high and closes above it with energetic displacement. The gap lives between that displacement low and displacement high. If there isn't one there, there is no trade.

Live example — NASDAQ, 3 February 2022

Start on the 15-minute bellwether chart, naked. Mark 8:30 — employment data came out that morning — and look to the left for the first swing high. Draw it out in time. When price runs above it, strip down through the timeframes: 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 minute, all of them open at once and cycled through quickly, looking for the formation.

Watching it unfold, the filter does the work. The initial poke above the marked high went up and came back down — but every candle overlapped, so there was no gap, and no swing low had been taken. Nothing there. Then a higher high formed above the 15-minute level; now you wait to see whether it breaks lower. It trades below the swing low, and between that highest high and that low, the three candles appear — there is the gap.

An entry one tick above candle 3's high removes all the doubt, with the stop above candle 2's high (or candle 1, which forms the swing high). Price came back and offered that entry three separate times, the third almost completely closing the range back in.

Targets — internal, then external

Put a fib on the low to the high of the run. The 50% level is equilibrium; below it is a discount. Selling short in the premium, your first objective is the opposite fair value gap sitting below equilibrium, and after that the sell stops beneath the relative equal lows.

The actual trade that day: short 2 minis at 14,792.5 off the fair value gap, first partial at 14,675, and a limit order filling the rest at 14,647. Roughly 60 handles inside about eleven one-minute candles — over a thousand dollars in less time than a cigarette break — inside a move of some 120 handles.

What makes this a model

Every example shown so far happens at the same time of day, in the same way, and performs as taught. That is what makes it a model, a trading plan, an executable idea — rather than a pattern you trade because you think you see it.

Reading the daily chart for bias

The daily NASDAQ chart is where the read starts. Price ran a set of relative equal highs — taking buyside liquidity — then broke below a swing low. That gives you a range to work with: this high to that low. Note how energetic the run down was: four consecutive down-closed candles is a lot of movement.

Once sellside had been taken out below the old low, price was likely to retrace back up inside that range. It did — up into a premium (above equilibrium), then back down into a discount, bouncing off the old low.

With a bearish market structure shift lower, a rally into a fair value gap, and old lows still sitting below, the bias each day is bearish. The targets in that range are the midpoint of the low-to-high (where there was also a gap) and the old low beneath it.

What a bias does — and doesn't — promise

A bearish bias does not mean every single day closes down. Count the up-closed candles during that decline from the high to the low: two. When delivery by the algorithms is spooling — price expanding directionally one way — there will still be up-closed days where a short you took lost. No big deal; you go into the next day looking for shorts again.

What traders hung up on daily bias are really demanding is a magic bullet: sell the exact high, buy back the exact low, catch the whole move, never take a loss, and skip the days that go against them. Nobody trades perfectly. You have to accept the grey area — the place where things aren't clear, and only past experience of seeing things unfold carries you through.

Bias sets your leverage

Bias doesn't only tell you which direction to hunt — it sizes the trade. Trading with the bias justifies the larger position; trading counter-trend to it means the leverage gets dialled right back.

The consolidation hurdle

After the retracement, price consolidated around equilibrium — and that condition makes a true reading on bias very difficult. This is stated plainly: there are times when even ICT does not have a clear read on what he's looking for. The honest answer is to demand more price action and more information — "Intel" — from what the market does after the 9:30 open.

Not knowing is worth saying out loud: "I don't know" is not ignorance and not an absence of skill — it's honesty.

Framing the intraday chart

On the 15-minute chart the 8:30 crosshair goes on — a vertical line marking the time you start looking back to the left from.

• Look left of 8:30 for the first low. That's your reference; there's liquidity resting below it.
• Where a candidate low sits inside another candle, don't use it on its own — use the extreme, because that's where the liquidity will be.
• Keep looking left. Those relative equal highs are what retail reads as resistance — they see price stopping there. That level makes the first target to reach for, and the market later showed how "real" that resistance was by going straight through it.
• A longer-term intraday target sits further left again, at the high beyond it that is essentially the same level.

Trading what isn't on your chart

Price traded below that old low, rallied, went down once more below the old low but not below the prior low, then turned higher. The honest question about the entry: what was seen on the NASDAQ two-minute chart that allowed a long there?

On the S&P: price traded below the old low, took sellside out, then broke a swing high — a bullish market structure shift. Look back through that price leg and there's the fair value gap: one candle up, the next candle's low leaving the gap, with displacement either side. Price traded back down into it at 10:36, and that candle is the long.

These averages tend to move in tandem. So the S&P fair value gap is used as the trigger, and its timing is taken across to the NASDAQ — entering long at 14,505.5, in close proximity to an order block, with no gap of its own required. The exit came above the old high at 14,622.75: 117 handles, $2,345 on one contract.

Why exit at the first target rather than hold for the rest? Holding it would paint the picture that these moves can be taken down every time — and the reality is that developing this takes far more time than most expect.

Cracks in correlation

What gave the confidence that this was turning? Stack the three averages: Dow on top, NASDAQ in the middle, S&P below. During that decline the NASDAQ and the S&P both made a lower low — and the Dow refused to.

And understand why the Dow held up, because getting this wrong hurts anyone you pass it on to. The Dow is not refusing to go lower because buyers are coming in. It is an unwillingness to deliver to that low.

For a developing student without a natural affinity for reading price naked, these intermarket relationships are the best indicators you'll ever have. No moving averages, no stochastic, no Fibonacci — the only reason a fib gets pulled up here is to show where the midpoint is. Optimal trade entry hasn't even been mentioned yet.

Leaders: buying information

The morning started late and unfocused, into a sloppy 9:30 open, with the daily chart sitting mid-range so price could take liquidity on either side. So the technique used was one picked up from floor traders and George Angell: when you have no read, put a single contract in and see what happens.

• You're not picking a spot. You're reading how price behaves against that order.
• Is it moving away from the order easily, lethargically, or running straight against it?
• The equity number isn't the point — the feedback loop is.
• If the contract gets run over, your bias probably isn't in alignment.

Two of those leaders went in that morning, plus a short that was covered. They cost around $750 and produced a drawdown. That drawdown is not a skill failure — treating it as one misses the point entirely. It's a premium paid for Intel, a small investment to get a better read on the next swing on the daily chart. The 117-handle trade cancelled all of them out and still pocketed about $1,100 on the day.

And not all losing trades are the same thing: some are simply wrong ideas. Not all of a losing record is errors — which is why a statement alone can't tell you whether someone knows what they're doing or just got lucky.

Stops, and why you need one

On that two-minute entry the stop goes just below the low of the entry candle — maybe one tick. What if price goes down there and keeps going? That's what your stop is for.

Why you're doing this

The closing frame is deliberately modest. Contrast the YouTube pitch — "$60,000 in one trade, here's the withdrawal" — with something sustainable: a consistent weekly return you could genuinely live on. You don't need $144,000 in two weeks. If it covers your car note, or half your rent or mortgage every month, think like that and let it evolve from there.

A deliberately short episode, answering the steady stream of requests for forex. Nothing new is being taught: it is simply applying what you've been trained with on the futures indices to a currency pair, with the time of day set relative to New York or London.

The chart being used

Reading it on the daily

The higher timeframe read is the same sequence used on the indices:

• Relative equal lows are marked out. The market trades down through them and creates a run higher.
• Price rallies through a swing high, drops back in, then runs again and takes out that swing high — two points of market structure traded above, in order.
• Go back through that price leg and look for a fair value gap. There are two. Price trades down into one and it sends the market higher.
• Above sits buy side liquidity, and an old high further back is a candidate draw on liquidity.

On the daily candle of 10 February 2022 the run higher could be trusted, because price had rallied, consolidated, and then started another run into the high. And even a failure swing that never gets above the old high is fine — if there is enough range from the open up to that high, that is enough to take a stab at it and see what yield you get.

Time of day

Framing the intraday setup

Dropping into the 10th of February on the 15-minute chart, midnight New York is marked, price rallies, and then the New York session arrives. That run is boxed off and the analysis goes top down, 5-minute to 3-minute to 1-minute, asking the same two questions of the price leg each time:

Both yes gives you a valid condition to go looking for a trade. Then you go back through the leg and find the fair value gap. Here there were two — price could stab down to the lower one, so be mindful of it, but try to get your entry in on the upper one.

Targeting when there is no range to trade inside

The practical lesson of the night: when there is no obvious range to work within, how far can you expect price to go? Take a fib, anchor it from the swing low to the swing high, and use the −1 standard deviation projection. On this example that landed at 133.153 — the high printed at 133.15 and price reversed from it. (His fib settings are shown in the OTE primer video on the same channel.)

Bias on a cross — look at its components

That is the whole method for these crosses: frame the logic for higher or lower from the two instruments that make up the pair, then apply the time of day and wait for the pattern. Nothing else needs buying — no subscription, no service, no course.

Two days of NASDAQ e-mini futures, 14 and 15 February 2022, used to teach one idea from two sides: the shape a bullish day takes, and the afternoon setup that is left when the morning is unusable.

The daily frame

• A swing high and a swing low are chosen: the low is the most recent one after taking out a short-term low, so the sell side liquidity resting below it has been dug into.
• A fib from that high to that low gives the 50% — equilibrium. Anything below it is a discount.
• Monday traded down into a deep discount but did not take out the lows over on the left.
• Monday closed indecisive — the body basically absent, open and close essentially the same.

Power of Three

That is the bullish version; invert it for bearish. It is not important to predict the closing price. What you are being trained to anticipate is the likelihood of the market making some kind of fake move — a Judas swing: the false move that typically starts London and the New York session.

How an order block is actually found

On the 5-minute chart of the 14th there were four down close candles before the surge — a complete order block on that timeframe, anchored to the daily bullish order block. Price broke down out of the high, retraced back into that imbalance, and there it was: fair value gap with an order block and an optimal trade entry, all in one place. It rallied — sloppily, but continuously driving higher.

A note on his clock: the bell rings at 4:00 pm New York time and there is a little trading past that, but he looks at 4:30 as the close, to judge what the full range has done and what imbalance or liquidity pools are left over.

The day the run already happened

The 15th opened with an enormous overnight run, technically in the London session. Asked whether he'd have caught it: no — he'd have missed it, and wouldn't have seen it coming even if he'd been awake.

Why those lows exist at all: the morning printed relative equal lows. Everyone long from overnight jams a stop loss right underneath them, because that is what the books say to do. When price then starts to rally above, that pool is sitting there — that is engineering liquidity, and it is even better when the high above has not been taken out yet, so there is still a draw in both directions.

The afternoon setup

The sequence that afternoon, and the reasoning behind each step:

• Price drops post-lunch, takes out the sell side below the relative equal lows, and digs into the imbalance. Look at the bodies of the candles — they respect the level. That is not random; these are algorithmic principles, and the markets are unbelievably precise in better conditions.
• Having run the overnight stops, there is no reason for price to come back down there. They don't want to give the traders they just stopped out another chance to get back in — so the setups that continue the run higher are sneakier.
• A swing high breaks, energetically, leaving a fair value gap. Price trades down into it and makes a short-term low. You could buy there.

The worked numbers from the chart: the short-term low forms at 2:34 pm with a low of 14528.50, so a buy limit at 14520.25 — or reaching for the 14528 even number — is a nice place for the order. The stop goes below the short-term low that forms after the fair value gap; those are the rules. That worked out to about 14.25 handles of risk, roughly $85 on six micros to make about $300 — somewhere near 3.5 to 1. He flags his own arithmetic as he does it: "thereabouts — I'm roughing, I don't have a calculator in front of me folks, you do the math." Two harder numbers follow in the same breath: buying at the wrong candle would have meant nine points of heat, "basically $54 if you were trading six micros", and on one mini it is $20 per handle. For the micro itself, take the figure Lesson 6 states outright — 1 point = 4 ticks = $2; that is the one to size from.

Imperfection, heat, and what invalidates a gap

And expect heat. Buying one candle late here would have carried about nine points against you before it worked. Don't expect to be in at the lowest point with no drawdown. If you are going to trade small timeframes and be nimble, you have to learn to trust the setups and let the stops do their jobs — a stop-out is one trade you got wrong, not your career. Look for the next one.

He closes with a bonus on the same chart: after the run, with the buy side above still untaken, price trades down into another imbalance and hits the order block — a second buy for anyone who missed the first, from the pattern already taught free in his short-term trading series.

The longest episode so far, and the one he calls the underpinnings of what his camp does. It answers the question he has been asked more than any other over the years: can you teach me the daily bias — will it be an up day or a down day?

The economic calendar

He uses forexfactory.com's calendar — not the only one, just a preference for the colour scheme; they all say much the same thing.

If you are going to speculate — certainly if live funds are going in — you want to know what the calendar says for the day, or you can be surprised adversely by a sudden rush of volatility.

Power of Three is the daily bias

He is blunt that there is no secret to it: it is the brass tacks of looking at what the daily range is likely to form.

Not every candle in a swing will conform. But in a sustained higher-timeframe swing you are not seeing many up close candles when it's bearish, and not many down closes when it's bullish. Traders make a big deal out of one down day in a bullish run and it takes them out of their game — he felt that too in the 90s.

The opening range

This is the part he says his own students will smile at. On a bearish day:

Why it matters: every premium array will reside and form inside it. The fair value gaps, the stop raids, the optimal trade entries — every potential shorting candidate from any approach he teaches, including in the paid mentorship — forms in that bracket. It tells you how much leeway you can give the market once it trades below the opening price and still take a favourable entry. Those are close proximity entries.

Mapped onto the three phases: accumulation is the open and above (where smart money aims to get short), manipulation is that initial rally — the sucker play for the breakout artist, a run up only to go down — and distribution is between the low of the day and the close, where the short positions accumulated at and above the open are being distributed. How do you know the low is in? By time reference: if price has been beaten lower and you're getting to 3:30 or 3:45, it's probably close. Not always — sometimes there's a fast sudden continuation.

Reading the daily chart with it

The bearish case being carried in these episodes, laid out step by step: the market has been going lower, sell stops below a low were taken, then a natural retracement, then the decline resumed, then one more push up that was a failure swing — it didn't get above the high — and then a break down that created an imbalance as it took out a short-term low. As he puts it: that is the model.

The bullish version is the same logic inverted, and he walks it through older data: a swing low forms, the next day opens, washes down and closes on the high — bias bullish, so expect the opposite pattern each day, opening near the low and expanding higher, drawing toward the fair value gap and then the relative equal highs where the buy stops rest. Some days give you a consolidation or an indecisive candle and you may take a loss. You do not abandon the bias until price gets above those highs, and then you study whether it still wants to go higher.

The paint roller

Taking the trade on 17 February

The daily bias was bearish — price had worked the upper end of the daily fair value gap and then put in multiple bearish market structure shifts. So the day was expected to open, rally to make the high, sell off and close down. It might not close on the low; a big down move is enough. You just need movement.

• The dashed level is the midnight New York opening price — that is the "open" of Power of Three, and price trading above it is the same little tick on the daily diagram, scaled down.
• Price rallied above it into a fair value gap: a sell above the opening price. Open-to-high, projected down, gives the opening range for the day.
• Price was pumping higher ahead of the 8:30 release — tipping their hand that they're pricing in a premium market ahead of the news, so the news gets used to sink it, with the shorts already accumulated above the open.
• At 7:00 am it rallied above relative equal highs and cleaned up an imbalance.
• Then a swing high broken to the upside (buy stops taken), followed by a swing low broken — and those down close candles were sudden, energetic, full of momentum. That is how you know you have a market structure shift; a lethargic, meandering decline is not one.

Bearish breaker, entry, and target

Going deeper on the 4-minute, the pattern present is a bearish breaker: a high, a low, and a higher high, with price returning to it. He teaches the breaker in the free lessons, and the reason it matters here is the stop:

For entry, once price is trading inside the gap he only needs it to trade above that candle's high — the easiest, lowest-threshold entry technique, so he is definitely part of the move rather than waiting for a better fill that may never come. The target was the relative equal lows at 14381, and the projection method was the range high to that low multiplied by two — which is where the low formed. Filled around 14515 aiming at 14381, that is more than a hundred points on one contract.

Risk, and the size of these markets

His floor is $10,000 as an absolute minimum, and he thinks $15,000 is fairer for what the NASDAQ was doing then. His own broker required close to $22,000 per contract, and he has no problem with that — plenty of margin means nothing sudden can smoke the account.

To answer the students who asked what he'd do with a discount-margin account, he ran a clearly-labelled TradingView paper account from $10,000, NASDAQ only, for two weeks using exactly what is taught here — including three losing trades on the 14th, visible in the executions — and finished up the equivalent of 582%. He is explicit that it is paper, that he won't do it with live funds, and that it is not what he teaches students to expect.

The mindset it requires

He counts the candles to make the point. In that bullish run, how many down close candles? Two. In the bearish leg, how many up closes? Five. If a losing trade on each of those days would blow your account, then you are over-leveraged or over-trading — that's how simply you can diagnose the problem.

And a warning against rushing: those posting that the concepts don't work because they bought a bullish fair value gap that day had missed the whole point — the bias was bearish. Ten episodes in, you are not going to own the world. The moves repeat, always, so don't feel like you're missing out by not trading yet.

An earlier broadcast than usual, and a hindsight view of something that was pointed to before it happened, so the setup could be seen the way his private group sees it. The trade shown here was taken through a live TD Ameritrade account, not a demo — and it is teed up as a taster for the market structure lesson coming on the Thursday.

The daily picture

The e-mini NASDAQ, March delivery. The imbalance had already been outlined — the high of one candle to the low of another — and price had traded down to a discount and back up into a premium.

It then came back up into a premium market above 50 and filled that gap in. This kind of retracement can lull traders into thinking it's going higher — but the thinking was down: the liquidity resting below is what gets attacked, so all of that consolidation just sets up another selling opportunity to run down there. The market needed to rebalance first, and it spent three days in that range before releasing to the downside and trading into the sell-side liquidity below.

On the hourly, the same story with more detail: the high and low ends of the fair value gap, price trading up into it, selling off, consolidating, and selling off once more.

Two opening prices, two purposes

Several people had written in confused about why he quotes both the midnight opening price and the 8:30 opening price. They are two separate reference points:

Setting up the morning

Price had rallied and taken out a short-term high on the Friday, then started the breakdown. Overnight he was watching, but hoping it would not take that low out before the morning — the wish was to see it trade up, take the high, then consolidate after running below the short-term low. Being in a hurry before the New York session would have spoiled the short and the re-entry he was after. Monday was a bank holiday: trading stops at 1:00 pm and resumes around 6:00 pm New York time.

On the 5-minute chart the 8:30 rally was, in his mind, acting like a Judas swing. The 8:30 candle opened at 13,798.50, so he wanted to be short somewhere above that price, anticipating further weakness and a run below the old daily low.

So the operating range for the short was that imbalance. Volatility means price can colour outside the lines and that's okay — the bodies of the candles support the idea he is looking for; the wicks he could care less about, because what matters is getting in when it's ideal.

Down to the entry

The gap looks skewed on the 4-minute because it takes two candles to show that range. On the 3-minute, price works up inside the imbalance and at 10:33 — as it bumps against the top end of the fair value gap and starts to move away — that is the short. Fill was 13,858.25; the exit, after the holiday reopen, was 13,612.25. Over 240 handles.

And the draw on liquidity below hadn't been reached yet, so it acts like a big magnet. Without that framework the fluctuations feel like noise and chop; they are not — they are telling you exactly what price is going to do.

The halos

Back in the chart-book days, charts arrived once a week with Friday's closing data and the daily candles, and until the next book came you hand-drew the open, high, low and close on the markets you followed. Whenever a swing high or swing low appeared, you drew a little ring — a halo — above it:

It went over his head the first few times; he only understood it by going into the charts and saying okay, here's a swing high. Which is also the only way to trust a model: back testing, working through the price action, and classifying the swing highs and swing lows until the patience is real.

Confirmation, and the alternative entry

After executing he wanted to see displacement, and it came. That is the confirmation — the point where you sit back and let it do its thing.

The holiday session closed at 1:00 pm ahead of the usual bell, reopened at 6:00 pm, gapped lower and accelerated straight into the sell stops below that old daily low. Once it runs deep into the low, that's it — take profits and move to the sidelines. The gap left behind is then likely to be rebalanced and filled, and it was; price traded around the old low and eventually pumped up into the afternoon.

Knowing when enough is enough

When you're new and you've just caught a good lick, there's an impulsive tendency to go straight back in for the dopamine hit. He did exactly that as a younger man — nice run-ups, then a big winner, then a feeling that it wasn't enough, with no support structure around him telling him it was. One of the mental hurdles to contend with is knowing when enough is enough: after real money in a live account, don't rush back in.

Later the same morning

The bias after 9:30 was still bearish — the run up hadn't changed it. Equities opened, consolidated, ran up to make a high, then ran up again and took that high out: that is your run on stops. Wait to see if it wants to break down. It did. From there the selling opportunity was the fair value gap between the low and the high, or, trading with the longer-term bias, the sell-side liquidity resting below the relative equal lows.

He teaches it this way so students can pick the trader they want to be — scalper, day trader, intraday swing trader, short-term trader holding overnight, daily or 4-hour swing trader, or position trader. Position trading isn't his personality: too many things show up on a chart that make him change his mind. He excels in the short term, where the account can move with velocity.

The account

Shown live to answer the hardline critics who want to know whether he can push the button. The six days of trading include a scratch where he got in too early, a curiosity short that snapped against him for a small pinch, and then the short outlined above — held through the 6:00 pm reopen — closing for $4,920. One line showing a large negative figure is not a losing trade: it is a broker settlement adjustment on their administrative side, something anyone trading live funds has probably seen in their own account.

He opens with a warning rather than a hook. This is advanced price action theory, it will raise more questions than it answers, and you cannot learn it in one video. It is also brand new: a lesson his paid mentorship group has never seen. The aim is to take you deeper than the higher-high / higher-low idea that makes up the retail view of market structure.

The chart is the NASDAQ March 2022 contract, and to the Forex traders asking when he'll go back to EUR/USD: what is being taught works in Forex, stocks and bonds. He is teaching price, and index futures happen to be the vein of volatility worth mining right now. He is also explicit that he is not in the business of picking tops and bottoms, and doesn't teach his paid group to do it either.

The only question that matters

Not patterns. Not harmonics, not Elliott wave, not ratio ideas — nothing you can attribute to a retail mindset. And this is why he abandoned indicators: anything that covers up candles or pulls your attention onto what you put on the chart — what he calls lipstick — stops you being receptive to the clues price is giving you. The labels in this lesson are on the chart only to communicate how he internalises the structure; in live trading he labels them in his mind, because on the chart they would be a distraction.

The daily bias question follows from it: the next draw on liquidity. But the daily range will not always submit to a clean bullish or bearish expansion — sometimes you get intraday consolidation, and a trade taken on a good idea turns on you. The point of this lecture is to give you the clues that tell you your idea has probably been proven inaccurate.

The hierarchy: parent and child

On the hourly, inside the daily fair value gap, he marks long-term high and low, short-term high and low, and between those swing points an intermediate term high and low.

So the long-term high framed by the daily analysis should not be broken to the upside. If it is, the daily read is probably wrong: demand more information, study more price action and sit on your hands — or, if a trade is on, admit it and take the stop out as risk management.

The discovery: rebalance creates a key level

Price traded to the high end of the daily fair value gap, broke down, found support at the discount end, rallied back near the high but did not take it out, then consolidated — the shape retail reads as a bull flag, which is exactly the pattern he likes to fade. Inside that price action is the rule to write down:

Which gives an intermediate term high two classifications: it is either a short-term high with a lower short-term high on either side of it — the Larry Williams definition — or, and this is the main one, it is the swing that forms as price trades back up to rebalance an imbalance.

Where he departs from Larry Williams

The foundation came from Williams — the VHS Future Millionaires Confidential Trading Course, and the market structure chapters of Long-Term Secrets to Short-Term Trading, which out of a 2,000-book collection is one of the handful he finds useful. But the next step is his own:

That is what let him anticipate the failed swing as it was forming: the imbalance had been rebalanced, so that swing high was an ITH, so the high should not be taken out — and the up close candles building into it were therefore a bearish order block forming in real time, not something to be labelled after the fact.

He is blunt about John Murphy's Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets — the retail trader's bible, and useful mostly for knowing what not to do, since it is what the 90% crowd still follows. Trend lines are the example: which swing low do you attach it to? It's all subjective. "We don't do technical analysis, we do technical science."

Framing the trade top-down

What repeats on the lower timeframe is a fractal: the same single-candle imbalance and rebalance seen on the hourly, appearing in miniature. Not identical, but closely related to the general idea.

What an order block actually is

That is the light-bulb: on the aggressive entry you do not need to see a swing low broken first. The model taught to everyone requires the short-term low taken — the market structure shift — before price returns into the imbalance to sell. But if the higher-timeframe structure already tells you the market is exceedingly weak, you can trade the imbalance inside the order block as it forms, with the stop just above that high. On the hourly order block that means the drawdown is limited to one candle's movement while the downside objective is many times the risk.

The classic low-risk, high-confirmation short is still there for those who want it: price trades down below the order block, comes back up and bumps the bottom of it, trades into the little gap — that's the entry, stop above that candle's high.

Targets

Once a short-term low and an intermediate term low are taken out — or just the intermediate term low — you have a significant break in market structure, far more meaningful than noting a short-term low was taken. That is what unlocks the projections:

• Range replication: measure the long-term high to the long-term low and repeat that distance downward for generic price targets.
• Fibonacci: anchor from the intermediate term high down to the long-term low, and the −1.5 standard deviation projection is where the low came in.

Institutional order flow

In a bearish leg, price may come back up and touch an up close candle — that is the bearish order block acting as a speed bump — but you do not want to see it traded above. If price never even overcomes the nearest up close candle, the ones beyond it are irrelevant and the market stays heavy. That is institutional order flow, and it is your signal to keep holding while the move works.

Put together, that's the whole answer he gives to how do I know which swing high and swing low to use. Two components: market structure tells you when the idea is broken; institutional order flow tells you the move is still good.

Ending on "I don't know"

The forecast delivered — the run below the daily low happened exactly as outlined weeks before — but price is now back above that old low. His verdict on the hard right edge, in front of the paid group and everyone else at once: neutral. Do nothing. Not trading Forex, futures, crypto, stocks or bonds, and letting the rest of February pass without engaging.

He closes with the riddle. If trend lines, moving averages, harmonics, Fibonacci, Elliott wave, supply and demand, volume profile and the rest all really moved price — how does the market decide which discipline to follow on any given day? They contradict each other. Subscribing to them is a faith-based premise. His answer is that the market books and prints candles on two principles only: liquidity — above old highs for buy stops, below old lows for sell stops — and imbalance / rebalance.

And the final warning on the daily: you can go long when the daily chart is going lower, but why swim against the tide? Why be the salmon that fights up the current, spawns, and dies — you got there, but you failed in the end. Those quick counter-direction pops on the 5 and 15-minute are traps that just create another selling opportunity. Study the daily, limit your forecast to about five days, and don't be upset if you can't call the whole weekly range yet. It took him six years.

Why the labels correspond to anything — and how far he claims they do

This is an extra lesson, added because the previous night's market structure lecture went deeper than students were accustomed to. It is the same material, but simplified back down into the language of the channel and shown working: "it's one thing to talk about it and provide the basis as to what I'm doing when I'm doing these executions." The reason it needs simplifying is stated plainly — "I had to create a language that gets to generally the basis of what that is doing without all the complications within it… you're probably looking at your chart thinking 'how do I classify this swing high as an intermediate-term high versus a short-term high — how does he know?' Right, that's the part you're never going to get."

Why the executions are in a demo

He is technically bearish on equities, but the market has already delivered the move he wanted. With heightened volatility, uncertainty around Ukraine and the possibility of a black swan popping off at any time, he is not willing to risk the February gain he has already banked in his live account. Losing it would eat at him all through March — toxic thinking he learned to avoid the hard way.

And the honest test cuts both ways: if the logic didn't work, it would fail on the demo just as easily as it would fail live. The candles print off the same live data.

Objectives, not hopes

On the size of that number: "20 isn't money — it's a percentage." Start with a dollar if you like; the compounding effect of hitting it consistently is what is astonishing. He will not claim students can hit 20% every single month — he might miss it himself in a given month — but it is the goal being aimed at.

Are you ready for live money?

He will not answer the "do you think I'm ready?" email — ever. There will never be a record of him telling a student to go live, because when the account blows the human instinct is to say a guy told me to do it. His own experience is the argument: he rushed into live trading in 1992 after one book and no back testing, saw a one-two-three top, and was down 50% on his first trade. He closed the account, afraid.

What "documented" means, decided in advance, never once you're in: what you're waiting for, what makes you push the button, where the stop goes, how much you're risking, what you're aiming for, and where partials come off — if you take partials at all. "I got into a trade and then I tried to figure out what I was supposed to do once I was there" — that is retail, and that was him in 1992.

Framing the morning

Price had run below a low. He is bearish, but he doesn't want to sell it there. So the question becomes: what is it likely to reach up into? Two magnets sit above — an up close candle (its low or open) and a fair value gap. Price can trade right up into either and still resume lower afterwards; it may need to go up into it first.

On the hourly there are relative equal highs — and above them, buy stops. Retail-minded traders look at two matching highs and read the textbook answer, resistance, a ceiling. Which is precisely why price should be expected to go over it. He anchors a level to those highs, calls it 14,110, and treats it as the target.

What makes an order block high probability

Straight from the previous night's lesson, restated plainly:

Note the fractal: the single hourly down close candle he is watching is made up of two candles on the 5-minute chart. When price rallies away it leaves a gap, and when it trades back down and overlaps the gap between one candle's high and the next candle's low, you have an hourly order block containing a lower-timeframe order block containing a fair value gap — a hierarchy from higher timeframe down to lower, all framed on the same idea that it's going higher for buy side.

Time of day: don't chase the open

Instead, take a step back and run the checklist. Am I in a discount — below 50% of the low-to-high range? Yes. Am I inside the order block? Yes. Has the equities open happened? Yes. Am I bullish, and has price traded lower so the public reads it as resistance and expects the next support level to break? Yes. It doesn't do what they expect. Price hits the order block on the 5-minute and rallies.

Why it rallies is not a mystery once you follow the liquidity. Whoever gets long down here doesn't want six or ten points — they want to sell up where there are willing buyers. When price trades above the level, the buy stops become market orders to buy, flooding the market with the liquidity that lets the early longs exit at a higher price into people who have to be there.

Holding it, and where the stop actually goes

Once the gap fills, the low that formed is an intermediate term low — and that low should not be taken out until the objective is reached. That is what gives him the confidence to sit through the retracements. As long as the down close candles keep supporting each new leg, the trade is fine.

The stop only gets raised once the market has rallied above and taken out a set of down close candles — then it can move up beneath the next set, treated as one order block. And if price does come down and break the low of those down close candles, "well, there you go — you probably did the right thing by getting stopped out, because it might be failing and going lower."

Mid-trade, watching an opposite-close candle form is where new traders break. Even in profit you feel it: the urge to collapse the trade because the uncertainty "eats at you like mental cancer." He read the same retracement differently — as price going back into the down close candle so smart money could accumulate more long positions. That's where he bought again.

Pyramiding: build the base first

He bought three micros, then two, then one, and let it run to the objective. He counts that as one trade with three scalings, not three trades.

Which answers the comment that you can't grow an account trading micros: "stop thinking you need a lot to make a lot." What you need is the ability to compound. And if that one trade is your week — you hit it, you stop, you go back to a demo — the equity growth and the peace of mind of not having to over-trade are the actual point.

The balancing act

He is equally blunt about who owns the outcome. Take one comment out of context, watch a couple of videos, go all in on something you think you see forming, and then email him saying you blew your account — whose fault is that? When he blew accounts it wasn't the broker's fault. He was out of control, taking 60 or 70 trades in a day.

So treat these executions as the goal, not the starting point. Nobody is this precise at the beginning; it takes time to grow into the understanding. He believes a YouTube student can do this consistently after about six months of practice and screen time — consistently meaning one trade like this a week, worked in exactly this way.

Why price is the teacher

None of what was executed is retail: no Elliott wave, no harmonics, no supply and demand. He is direct with traders who still use those tools — study this and you'll find that your winners have this information underneath them, and your losers are missing it.

He closes on expectation-setting. You will lose money — everyone does, every educator, every system; some take stunning losses, some just nuisance ones, and the really good traders recover a drawdown so cleanly it's like it never happened. That's experience. He isn't promising riches. The realistic goal is to outpace inflation: get consistent and profitable, and the price of gas or groceries stops being the thing that decides your year. And once you have it, it's yours — like riding a bike. Some students got it in weeks, some took a couple of years. Being a slow learner is fine; he was one.

This one is brief and answers a request — "I got requested to show how I use this model." There is no lecture here, just a trade taken live and talked through from the read to the exit.

The read, before any button is pressed

He does not buy where price is; he expects it to drop down into that fair value gap first and places the limit there. The gap closes, and the entry fills — "that's not bad, it's the low candle." His own comment on the precision: "probably random."

What he is actually watching

The immediate thing he wants to see is expansion through a small fair value gap around 14,122 to 14,138. He also expects price to pause there — to consolidate and reaccumulate for new longs, something like a bull flag — rather than running in a straight line.

Reading the crowd at 14,160

Buy side sits right around 14,160, and that level is in the crosshairs. He expects a consolidation and maybe a small retracement there — the kind that gets everybody thinking it's time to sell short.

Confirmation from the correlated market

With the position open he pulls up the E-mini S&P micro just to get a feel, and it looks like it wants to run as high as well. That agreement gives him fuel, or confidence, that the NASDAQ will make the level.

Managing it

Price reaches into an order block, and that is where the six come off. He then changes his mind on part of the plan and closes there — "because it's getting real close to the closure of that gap." He is candid that this is a judgement call: "I might be wrong, but just for general principles, 14,220 I think is doable." The business limit order fills at the objective.

A channel update filmed on vacation, partly because people were "freaking out" thinking he had gone missing. The trade is taken on a live funded account, aiming at a mile marker: getting the equity to $50,000.

What the live account is for

Building the setup

He watches the candle in question close, because the close is what completes the imbalance — until then the gap isn't confirmed. The plan is stated before it happens: it is technically the open, so volatility can come in and overshoot that low. He doesn't care if it does. If it goes back up into the fair value gap, he will buy it.

Why not just buy at the open?

That low sits outside and below the fair value gap, so trading through it does not negate the gap. The reason is narrative, not geometry: he expects people to look at that gap, decide price is going up, and buy immediately — with their stop loss below that swing low. Those sell stops were resting at 13,612, and they get taken. Price then trades back into the same fair value gap, and that is the entry. He is plain that entering long right as the low breaks is a high-risk entry.

Choosing the objective

The target is the 80 level, and it is chosen for three overlapping reasons:

He believes price is going higher than that. He takes the smaller objective anyway because he is on vacation — the objective is sized to the circumstances, not to the maximum available.

Managing the open

Once filled, he wants to see price expand aggressively, not "dilly dally around" — an energetic run above the swing high formed just to the left. There is a small fair value gap in the last three candles up; he doesn't think it needs to be filled or even revisited, but if price did come back he would expect it to be supported there, i.e. not trading below the 630 level.

Once the trade is working, the stop can go at the entry. And if that took him out, the day would be over — he'd move to the sidelines and take no more trades, because it is FOMC.

The economic calendar

The result

The limit order fills. Drawdown from the entry candle's low was about three handles — roughly $60 — on a trade aiming at $1,000. The day and the month close out at $1,255 on two trades, less about $15 in commissions, and he takes no more trades that month.

Two asides worth keeping. The waiting is where new traders get nervous — the position was fine, the discomfort was the trader's. And on the monitor tab, the account's commissions look high; that is because he ran latency tests and deliberately did things that mimic what a new trader would do on first going live.

This lesson answers a question from the comments: what do you mean by multiple setups, and what do they look like? One viewer objected that you couldn't find four such examples in a week, let alone several in a single day. So the whole of one Friday gets walked through, setup by setup.

The split day

There can be multiple setups inside each. The morning typically offers two to three, because volatility arrives at the 9:30 open.

Framing it on the daily first

On the E-mini S&P June 2022 contract, price had recently traded above relative equal highs — buy stops and buy-side liquidity were resting there. Once it goes above them, continuation higher is always possible; but here a swing high formed, and that changes the question.

With the swing high closing, the next day is framed for a short: an open, rally, then power of three — accumulation, manipulation, distribution — layered with the next level of analysis, premium or discount. Price is above old highs and stretched out, so it is clearly a premium market. And the down close candle back to the left is the daily bullish order block, at 4504. Trading down into that after running above the highs is the favourable scenario.

Stacking the reasons to go lower

On the hourly, to the left, there are relative equal lows — not exactly equal, which is why they are named relatively equal. Liquidity resting below them is likely to be sought on its own, but it becomes further likely when a discount array — the daily bullish order block — sits down there too.

Which opening price?

A recurring question, answered plainly. Trading index futures there are two opening prices: midnight New York time, and the open of the candle that begins at 8:30am.

Swing projection: where does it stop?

Knowing it should go lower is one thing; knowing how far below the order block is another. The 15-minute chart supplies the sequence that qualifies the move: a swing low decisively broken, then a trade back up into the imbalance left behind, then an expectation that the forming candles push below that low. That low then becomes a fulcrum point — measure the high down to it, and project that same distance lower.

Two projected levels came out of it: 4514.5 and 4501.25. Which to pick? The one that agrees with the narrative: 4501.25 sits just below the daily bullish order block at 4504. And 4501.25 was exactly that day's low.

Checking the boxes on the day itself

"How many boxes did we just check off there? A whole lot." Probabilities go through the roof that this is bearish. Price then breaks lower, runs the old swing low's sell side, rebalances aggressively back up into a bearish order block, sells off into the short-term low, and works through the lunch hour into the daily bullish order block.

Slow down here

The morning setups, one at a time

Each one has the same skeleton: a short-term low broken with obvious, energetic displacement → a fair value gap left behind → price returns into it → short → target the fulcrum point below.

Sizing it: go short two contracts, take one off at the first target, let the rest ride toward the lower-timeframe objective later in the day. That partial is what makes the next retracement survivable — even if the remainder gets stopped out, the first contract keeps the trade profitable.

Missing a trade

And the goal that makes all of it work: understand where price is likely to reach for. Get that, and "it becomes easy to know what you're looking for." He is deliberate about the wording — he did not say it becomes easy to make money. Over time, though, knowing what you're looking for is what makes making money easier.

Turning the day around: the PM liquidity pool

The morning's most energetic high took price all the way down to the daily bullish order block — the daily objective. It is Friday, the objective is met, and the market is now in a discount. End of week means a retracement back into the weekly range, so the question becomes what it can aim for.

Anchoring a fib from the day's 9:30 rotation high down to the target, anything above the 50% level is premium. So the market moves from discount to premium, and that premium area is the afternoon's buy-side liquidity pool.

Engineering the liquidity to buy into

Who is buying at the low? The smart money that sold short all the way down — covering a short is buying, and if they're covering they are no longer bearish. So they buy in the discount and target the buy stops above, selling into those waiting buyers.

The afternoon setups

On the last one, you can sell into the fair value gap directly, or wait for a confirmation entry: let it turn after hitting the gap, break lower, produce another break in structure on the 1-minute, and take the imbalance that creates. And a rule recalled from earlier — if there is a fair value gap with a small one right above it, anticipate price trading up into the higher one, but use the lower as your entry.

Back testing is discovery

The method is manual: go through old charts and annotate them — type notes into the empty space, map the moves out, see the logic. It is tedious and it takes desire, and he suggests a minimum of a year of the practice, continued even once you're trading live funds.

And the whole search list is short: liquidity, imbalances, time of day. That's it. The algorithm isn't following retail logic — it's asking where the money is, who is the easiest prey right now, and running for it. No harmonics, no supply and demand zones, no Elliott wave, no Wyckoff, no Gann.

Finding your own model

Of the six setups on this day, one of them is yours — maybe the old-high buy, maybe none of the morning shorts. A unique model is simply a setup so similar every time you take it that it repeats the same general idea, just on a different chart, day and timeframe. Everyone can use the same teachings, find setups in the same session, and disagree on every individual trade — one long while another is short.

Everything is fractal: drop to a 30-second or 15-second chart and there are more setups still. Or stay on the 15-minute and trade the daily range — there is no reason to do anything less than that unless you want to.

He closes by asking for patience over questions. If your head is spinning, you don't need to know what you're asking for right now — you only feel like you do. Take the material at the pace it's given, study it, and a couple of months from now you'll see things in price action you can't identify today even in hindsight.

A lesson on how to apply this model to the FX market. Long-time students will find much of it familiar — most of it already exists in the free lessons on the channel — but there are subtle nuances in forex that index traders don't have to think about.

The daily read on EURUSD

Price moved above relative equal highs, taking the buy stops out of the marketplace, then started going lower. So what is it reaching for next? Sell-side liquidity below — and to the left there are two sets of relative equal lows, so two areas of sell-side liquidity.

The mechanics of the run above the highs: those buy stops get taken, anyone short is knocked out at a loss, and that flood of market buy orders is the counterparty to smart money selling short up there — with the expectation that price goes below the lows beneath.

Annotate your charts (even though he doesn't)

Institutional price levels

Projecting the objective

Revisiting the swing trading measurement: anchor to the highest open or close of the retracement up and the lowest open or close of the swing low, then treat the old low as a fulcrum point. Three candidate levels came out: 1.0919, 1.09, and 1.0901 — and all of them are only valid if that low is broken.

Choosing between them is again a matter of convergence: the relative equal lows sit at the 1.09 big figure, so the level to aim for is the lowest fib projection that doesn't go through 1.09. Multiple reasons pointing at one price is the whole basis of the target.

The day's shape

Before the day even begins, the draw is known: below the lows, down toward the 1.09 convergence. At midnight New York time the day starts, and what he wants to see is a rally — protraction against the expected direction of the intraday move. That is the Judas swing, the manipulation in accumulation–manipulation–distribution. Price trades up into an imbalance, that forms the daily high, and the rest of the day is distribution looking for lower prices.

The algorithm goes higher once more, and once more, and again — then begins its descent. This is not buying and selling pressure; the algorithm is simply constantly offering price above that opening price. And every rally above it is not automatically an entry — it becomes one when you couple it with time of day and price.

Killzone times — FX versus index

Inside that bracket you are hunting your setup, and the price you want is at or just above the midnight opening price. What price runs to on the way up is not the imbalance itself — it overshoots that slightly — it is the last up close candle, the bearish order block. You know it is one because of the sequence: displacement lower → fair value gap → price returns to the last up close candle. And he uses the body, not the long tails and wicks.

What news is actually for

Watch what it does to a trailing stop. If you were short from higher and had been trailing, your protection is a buy stop above the recent swing highs — so price gets jammed back up against it, above the opening price, right into the news. Your stop floods the market with buyers willing to pay a higher price, and those buyers are the counterparty to the smart money selling short. Every buyer has to have a seller.

Down to the objective

On the 4-minute chart he strips the leg down and asks you to pause and find the fair value gap yourself. Price runs up into it, closes it in, and then and only then runs aggressively below the short-term low and reaches the objective.

It doesn't get to 1.0900 exactly — but it reaches the fib standard deviation projection and the old daily relative equal lows, with the candle bodies respecting that level and very little movement beneath it. The day's low was around 1.0901.

The 8:30 rule

To the objection — you're talking about the midnight candle and now the 8:30, which do I use? — the answer is both, with a tiebreak:

Exits: stop being perfect

On a hypothetical $100,000 demo — the size used in funded account challenges — that one trade gives you what you're looking for. If the stop feels tight, using the swing high above instead is fine.

He closes with the honest footnote: he did not take this trade, and he hasn't taken any FX pair trades at all in 2022. The point is that the model works in forex and in index trading — it's a matter of adjusting to what you're trying to trade, and knowing the handful of rules that differ between them.

This is the lesson answering the question the comment section kept asking: if you only had one way of doing it, what would you do, and what does that look like on the chart, step by step? The answer is this model — nothing else bolted on. He begins the answer by refusing the premise the question smuggles in: "a specific style of trading that, if I only had to pick one way of doing it, obviously hits all the time — well there is no method that hits every single time. Everything that I trade with and teach is like everything else: it's imperfect. That means there's going to be losing transactions, largely because of the operator — me or whoever else is using it — and you have to take ownership of that." Again later: "if I had a way that I would never lose, I would have never came out publicly and became a teacher."

The chart layout

The three panes are linked, so anything drawn on one timeframe appears on all of them. On one screen you get the identical result: annotate the daily, switch that chart to hourly and mark it up, then drop to the 15-minute and every annotation from above is already there. You do not need a wall of monitors.

Step 1 — the daily chart and the bias

Bias on this EURUSD example is bearish. Recent price action: a big drop, five down days, then a candle trading back up to create a daily fair value gap. Measured against the range from the high, the market is deep in discount, so a retracement is likely.

As soon as that gap forms you can expect a rally back into it. And critically: trading back to that candle's high is enough to set the stage for a new round of selling. You don't need the midpoint, you don't need complete closure of the gap, and you don't need to catch the high of the day.

Step 2 — frame the target on previous daily highs and lows

The daily draw on liquidity is the old low below. But that is not the intraday trade target. The target is framed from the previous day's high and low — Wednesday's, in this example — giving a defined range of opportunity of roughly 60 pips for Thursday.

The shape expected for the day, then: open, rally up into the daily fair value gap and above a short-term high — the Judas swing — then sell off toward that previous daily low. Why should it reach it? Because anybody who bought up in that rally is trapped, and there is always a buyer and a seller.

Step 3 — the hourly, then the 15-minute

The hourly does one job here: it shows that the daily imbalance also exists on the hourly, and it shows relative equal highs anchored right at it. That's the whole hourly workup — the frame of reference is still that daily gap.

On the 15-minute, add the daily dividers (a vertical line at midnight) and extend the midnight New York opening price forward to 11:00am. That's the reference the day gets measured against. Scalping on the 5-minute, he'd plot two reference points instead.

The sequence on that chart: price rallies above the relative equal highs, then breaks down below a swing low — and in doing so leaves a fair value gap. That is the setup. The New York killzone in forex is 7:00am to 10:00am, and the displacement lands inside it.

Step 4 — refining on the 5-minute

Split that 15-minute range into five-minute intervals and look inside the decline for a gap. There's a small one, a stretched-out one, and another above. Which to use is where your own style comes in — but the honest trade-off is stated plainly: get greedy with a higher limit and you may not get filled at all.

What an order block actually is

At the top of that 5-minute range sit three consecutive candles. All three together are the bearish order block — it begins at the lowest candle's low. Price traded up into the bottom one of the three, which was sufficient, and it never reached the last up close candle before the down move.

So the common answer — that an order block is the last up close candle before the down move — is the one he is correcting here. Price didn't even reach that candle, and it didn't need to, because the parent 15-minute imbalance stops the run short. That's also the answer to "how do I pick the right order block": you pick it by where delivery changed, not by counting candles.

How the day actually delivered

The entry wasn't at the very highest high, and price ultimately went a little lower than the exit. Who cares. The trade was structured, and it made sense.

How to back test and journal this

Everything above is the back-testing method — the move had already happened. The routine: annotate the chart, toggle the label to the top left, zoom to the area, screenshot it into a study journal, and do it every single day.

You can't get hurt, because it already happened. Everything anyone ever learns is learned in hindsight — a surgeon studies medical journals about events they weren't present for. What you're building with thousands of examples is the greatest technical analysis book you will ever own, in your own words. Over years it forms your psychological makeup, and the setups begin to leap off the chart.

A note on gold

Nothing in this walkthrough used an indicator. Only price, a few rectangles to highlight imbalances, and the lines you draw while you're still learning to see it — in time you won't have those on your chart either.

This is a deliberately long, two-audience session — the private group's midweek commentary blended into the YouTube teaching. It is also the lesson where the question "teach us bias" finally gets answered directly, and where the reason not to trade is given as much weight as the reason to.

Sloppy price action is a signal, not an inconvenience

Cable — his own favourite pair — is walked through and dismissed on the spot. On the hourly: "there's absolutely zero, nothing in this chart, nothing to trade on, not one thing." On the 15-minute, the same. It is all back and forth, and that is what "sloppy" means: nothing you can easily pick out as bullish, pulling to a level, expected to rally from there.

By contrast, the euro 15-minute was called clean: a run up, a return to the old daily low, then a real energetic run higher leaving a gap. Clean means the story is legible in the candles. On the dollar index hourly, the bodies respected the imbalance with only wicks poking through — "that is algorithmic price action… that's not supply and demand, it's not harmonic."

And a related instruction: have a hobby outside of trading. Not more videos — an actual outlet, otherwise you burn out.

You do not need to trade every day

Stated as bluntly as it gets: "put the potato chips down, put your drink down, listen — you do not need to trade every single day." What you need instead is to understand why today or tomorrow is a day where your bias is highly probable to deliver to a target you already know is likely to be traded to.

Knowing when not to do something is described as crucial: it keeps you from blowing the account, keeps you from being undisciplined, gives peace of mind, and removes the fear of missing out. The failure modes he names are not technical — lack of responsibility, no adherence to rules, and not putting in enough time. The same underlying issues follow a trader into any approach, which is why a push-button solution changes nothing.

Higher timeframe bias, and not calling tops

The dollar index was long-term bullish, having hit the 100 and 101 targets, and he refuses to call the top: "I don't mind being wrong by not trying to pick tops and bottoms." What would change his mind is price trading below the lows he points to — and even then it would take time before the long-term stance changed.

He does have students who trade contrarian to his stated bias — waiting for the point where retail reads a reversal, then taking the counter-trend leg. On euro that leg was mapped out: run down into the old daily low, rally to create a fair value gap, buy it, and sell into the 62% retracement or the bodies of the candles above — roughly 30–40 pips, a bread-and-butter trade.

The order block as a bookmark

On the dollar index 15-minute, two up close candles into a downside displacement are labelled a bearish order block: take the low of the lowest up close candle and its opening price, and draw them forward in time. Price hammered it.

The algorithm doesn't know where your stop is — your broker does. What it works from is the logic that gets regurgitated in every book and seminar: put your stop above the high. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at a declining chart, find the most recent short-term high, and know that anyone short who trailed their stop has it sitting right above there.

Bias from the daily dealing range

On the e-mini S&P daily: the dealing range is drawn from the most recent swing low — a candle with a higher low either side of it — up to the high. Price then retraced back down to about 50%, equilibrium of that move.

The upside target set is a premium array: the last up close candle before the displacement lower. That single candle gives you four targets, in order of ease:

The opening prices: midnight and 8:30

First, the housekeeping: on TradingView, set the time zone to New York. It doesn't matter where you live — do that and everything being taught lines up. Then take the opening price of the midnight candle and draw it forward in time.

The day shown is the better case: price was already below the midnight opening price, and after 8:30 it was below it again, still under the midnight open. That is a heavy discount — "we're really, really cheap on the day" — on a day when the bias is bullish. No indicator, no divergence, no Fibonacci required to see it.

If you're not comfortable buying the London or overnight low, you don't have to — you can wait for 8:30.

Where the target comes from

On the 15-minute, two level highs are marked as relative equal highs — and that formation engineers buy stops. Every book tells every reader that stops go above the old high, and that price stalled there twice, so retail reads it as formidable resistance. When price then drifts sideways and slightly up, they read a bear flag and project a measured move lower.

The shape of the day, then: a small move down to make the low of the day, then a rally up to clean out that liquidity. You are not trying to predict the daily closing price — you're trying to participate in the morning session move that gets you long and runs into that area. Point of origin, terminus. That is what narrative means.

Make it boring

The closing block is about how you condition yourself. Refining which days you trade, what time of those days, which asset class, which market in it, and which direction — that is how you narrow things down to a recipe, and a recipe is an algorithm.

And when the read is wrong, that is not a verdict on you: "I'm going to make mistakes, I'm going to read it wrong, I'm going to react too late, I'm going to react too soon." It means you're human. What it doesn't mean is that the framework broke.

The comment section kept asking one thing: can you show this working in the London session, on forex? This lesson is the answer. The level was published in advance in the previous episode, without a safety net — "I can't edit a video on YouTube; once it's there, it's there" — so the claim can be checked against the recording at roughly the 20-minute mark.

Where the level came from

The call was that the dollar index would drop below the 100 level, and that if he were making the market — setting the parameters at which the dollar goes down to set up a buying opportunity — he'd take it to 99.92.

The derivation was deliberately plain. There was a run up at the beginning of a candle; draw that out in time and you get a small band of about three pips, roughly 99.95 to 99.92. That's what was eyeballed, on the fly, before midnight.

Price dropped, made the low of the day inside the London killzone, and reacted — close to the outlined level, not exactly on it, and that is fine. He was also not convinced the dollar's top was in; this was a setup going into London, which is what he'd expect at that time.

What the dollar index then did

The barometer: why the dollar tells you what euro will do

If you trade forex you have to relate your analysis to something. Euro is the trading market; you need a barometer to measure its movement, and that barometer is the intermarket relationship with the dollar index.

What euro reached for was the previous week's high — it traded up above it and cleared the buy stops resting there. That is the false breakout, and the only reason it can be called false in advance is that the dollar's buy level had already been published.

He took neither side of it. "Could I have bought that? Sure… did I? No. I went to sleep." Being able to do a thing doesn't obligate anyone to do it — the aim is to get you trusting your own analysis and leaning on your own experience, even when there isn't much of it yet.

The euro entry, step by step

On the 15-minute chart, euro's high of the day formed inside the London killzone. Then strip it down — straight to a 2-minute chart, which holds a very clean fair value gap.

After running above the old weekly high, price traded lower and took out a short-term low: a shift in market structure. There was a nearer short-term low it could have used instead, and the reason it didn't is the whole lesson of the sequence.

Once the run through the short-term low happens with displacement, the gap becomes the entry. Price didn't reach it on the first attempt — it went a little deeper first. You don't chase it. You wait, because the London killzone is still open, and it retraces into the fill.

The five-minute chart was used at the end for one reason only: the fractal moves up then down, so everything fits on one clean chart. Nothing special was being done with that timeframe.

The takeaway

Risk on, risk off

The dollar index on the hourly is the starting point, because it explains why the relationship between the dollar and everything else exists at all.

The same logic reaches the stock market and the index market. Everything taught here is universal, so it works across them.

The forecast, checked

The published call was the dollar dropping to around 99.92, then running the relative equal highs and heading higher, with objectives named around 102 and 103. Then, on the e-mini S&P, the reverse: weakness into May, reaching for the relative equal lows on the daily. Both are now on the chart.

The point being made with all of it: "this is what it's like to be mentored" — a bias built on tools that make sense, nothing ambiguous, nothing splattered across the chart. And it is offered to be judged. "If I'm right or if I'm wrong you get to be the judge."

The two opening prices

Two reference prices do two different jobs, and they are routinely confused.

The day that refused

He states the miss plainly: he expected one more spike up to flirt with 4320 and then a roll over. "This is one of those times where I didn't get it right and I have no problem telling you."

On the 15-minute there were only one or two tiny moves above the midnight opening price — anemic, where he wanted a 15 to 20 handle Judas swing. London broke down at 3:00am, retraced into a bearish order block and its imbalance, then rolled over right before the 9:30 open, ground through lunch and sold aggressively into the close. Power of Three was in effect — just so small it may not be useful to you.

The 8:30 model, for contrast, is what didn't appear: something to the left prior to 8:30 — a short-term high — a rally above the 8:30 opening price running those stops, then a break down with displacement leaving an imbalance, a rally back into that imbalance, and the sell-off. "The model doesn't exist in today's price action on the five-minute chart."

The one sound entry

The London open setup was, in his opinion, the only real sound entry that took place: displacement leaving a fair value gap, a rally into a bearish order block and its gap, and it's held through the micro market structure shift below the short-term low.

That kind of repeating behaviour is what he calls a signature in price action: algorithmic things that repeat, but which need discernment and experience to know when they're likely and when they're not.

Power of Three on the New York session

On this day that low came in around the lunch hour, beginning at noon: a retracement through lunch, one more punch above the high, a break down, consolidation — and then continuation into the afternoon session.

Trading a market this heavy

The answer is not to abandon the concepts, it's to drop the requirement that isn't being offered. Go to the 2-minute and 1-minute charts and use the small imbalances to get in sync with what is already in motion — without waiting for a rally above the 8:30 opening price, because it isn't likely to come.

Holding, and being human

His own day: he took his wife to the airport and captured about $2,000 in the e-mini, against two figures he names for two different sizes: holding what he had on that morning was "around twelve thousand dollars today alone", and holding just one of the two contracts and letting it run was "about eight grand or so." He doesn't dress it up — "real life creeps in, it's going to happen."

The daily e-mini S&P recap first, because the whole day sits inside it: the bearish order block marked weeks earlier, the seasonal tendency into May, the risk off relationship with the dollar — and the call that price would draw down into the relative equal lows. Today it tapped them.

Bodies inside the imbalance

On the hourly there's an imbalance coupled with an actual gap — between one candle's low and the next candle's opening. Several candles afterwards poke above that area, and that is fine.

The 15-minute checklist, and the two references

At 9:30 the equities open — the bell, the clapping on television — and price ran a short-term high, broke lower, and left an imbalance. Run the checklist:

At 8:30, using that candle's opening price: price traded above it, so it was in a premium — and it was also above an old high, which makes it a premium too. That last point answers a question from the comments.

Power of Three, and who supplies the liquidity

The shape of the day: the open, a rally — manipulation — creating the high, then the move lower to distribute the shorts below where stops rest. Smart money sells short into the buy stops up high, rides it down, and offloads into the sell stops beneath the relative equal lows.

Down through the timeframes

On the 5-minute: relative equal highs with buy-side liquidity resting above the opening price, plus a cluster of highs just to the left that might get cleaned out for good measure. The furthest high was judged "too rich" an expectation — the nearer area was reasonable. Price punched up, took them, broke down, came back above the opening price once more, then "gives up the ghost" and ran aggressively for the sell side.

Some traders stop there — short up high, buy it back below the lows, walk away. Nothing wrong with that if that's your model. On the 1-minute, the same sequence refines: run above the relative equal highs, break below a swing low with displacement, retrace back into the small gap above the opening price — that's enough, you can be short there, weathering one more run up into the entry.

The Nasdaq trade, narrated

Insomnia, an early start, and a setup already formed. The backdrop: a high taken out — buy stops run, breakout traders long — then relative equal lows broken, giving a market structure shift on the 5-minute in a market where heaviness was the protocol. Below those lows came displacement, leaving fair value gaps above.

The fractal and the swing hierarchy

Zoom in and the same pattern nests: relative equal lows, a high taken, then two candles pushing below — the identical structure as the larger move, just smaller. A gap forms, price trades up into it, bodies respect it, a wick goes slightly above, then it breaks aggressively lower.

So when price retraced back into an up close candle — a bearish order block — that was the area to execute in. And he's explicit that this narration is not the public model: "I didn't say that's what this was — I'm telling you how to read the tape."

The execution, contract by contract

Longer-standing students will recognise the whole thing as a market maker sell model — selling in the area where distribution would take place. Later, at the 9:30 volatility, he also took a small long scalp in the live account, exiting around 13,409 when he'd wanted 13,425 — apprehensive they might not stab through it. About $740, and then his attention went elsewhere.

SMT — the divergence that isn't an indicator

Both indices declined in concert, but look closer. On ES, the rally after 8:30 made a high that was lower than its overnight high around 2:30am. On NQ, the same rally made a higher run.

The Fibonacci settings

Anchor the fib to two price points, then open the tool's style settings and type in the levels you want.

Run the projections the other way and one standard deviation below the low marks a sensible place to take profits — which is exactly where the market turned and retraced. For the little level labels: anchor a price note to the high you want and drag; hold shift and it stays level. The same trick keeps trend lines straight.

On the live sessions

The chart is the micro Nasdaq 100, and the recording starts inside an imbalance — the initial one, with a second above it that price could stab into. It's FOMC, and he has deliberately waited a few minutes for the initial shakeout before saying anything.

The shape of a news release

The two o'clock announcement makes the initial leg where the market prices in whatever it's going to do, high or low; around 2:30 that leg finishes and the rally begins. On the day, the turn came just a little past 2:30 — "pretty much close to that in terms of algorithmic delivery."

Running versus sweeping

He is deliberate about the vocabulary, and the two words mean different outcomes.

The call, and how it played

The expectation stated in advance: drop down into the blue shaded area first — "the end of the road for the bears" — then run out Tuesday's highs. He notes the sell-side pool resting just below the turquoise imbalance, so a small dip beneath it wouldn't upset the idea. What he did not want was price dropping too far, because that would upset the fair value gap that hadn't been traded into yet.

Shorts along the way were framed the same way each time: sell into the return to the imbalance or the bearish order block, with the stop above the high of the most recent up-close candle to the left. Once price rallied and crossed back above the larger fair value gap near 13,150, he anchored a Fibonacci from the 2 o'clock high down to the post-2:30 low and projected upward — the target came out at 13,437, and the market hit it.

Wicks or bodies — the fib decision

Drawn from the low up to the high, the projections gave one objective, then a second — the day fell just short of the further one, which he treats as the extreme target. The measurement of the earlier decline worked the same way: anchor the 2 o'clock high down to the low, find 50% of that range, and note that the turquoise fair value gap sits below the 50% — a discount, and the draw.

Eight setups in one move

Counting back through the session he finds eight distinct trades inside the single sequence — the drop into the fair value gap, the return to it, a scalp long up into the buy-side above the high, the short into the objective, the buy at the turn, the return to the order block, the small imbalance on the way up, and one more after the recording stopped.

The warning attached to all of it

This episode opens with a warning that it isn't the usual lesson: "if you don't have the proper mindset for this one, this could be taken out of context." It is delivered once, deliberately — "this is not going to be a repeating theme, I just want to let the foundation be laid here" — and then the model diagrams follow.

Where you actually are in the journey

Why he won't trade live in front of anyone

He has been asked for years to run live sessions and take trades on camera, and has refused for one reason: somebody will copy something and push a button with live funds, lose money, and hand him the blame. The most he will do live is state a bias — "this is what I think is going to happen, it might go up to this level or down to that level" — and that is opinion and logic, not a trade idea.

The day the setup didn't come

The idea he had drawn attention to: price drops into the fair value gap at the 9:30 equities open — the Judas swing — creates displacement, leaves a gap inside that displacement, and offers a long back into it, targeting the relative equal highs above. It's Thursday, ahead of non-farm payroll Friday, and those highs are the obvious draw.

Price did trade into the shaded area on the 15-minute — the candle stopped right at the old candle high — and then "the next candle just gave up the ghost." Run the checklist on it:

The exercise: draw it on a napkin

The question for your journal is a subtitle in itself — where do setups form? He runs this exercise with students constantly: could you draw the diagram out with a pen on a napkin and explain to a co-worker exactly what you're looking for in price?

Pattern one — the run on relative equal highs (bearish)

Pattern two — the old fair value gap above (bearish; reverse it for longs)

The market is below an old fair value gap and trading up toward it. You are bearish, but you expect it to reach that gap first.

Those are the two entry strategies for this model — there is nothing else to work out about what it should look like. If it doesn't feel simple, watch that part again, then go and find it in live data and in old back testing. "It's algorithmic, it repeats."

Losses, and the ones that don't cost money

The chart is the e-mini S&P June 2022 contract on the daily, and the opening instruction is blunt: everything taught here works in forex. It is not limited to index futures — the questions in the comments are already answered in the earlier videos. "Don't start here — go back to the very first one."

The backdrop that was called in advance

Weeks earlier the bearish order block was marked, and the high of that candle was named the most unlikely level to be traded to — price should not go up to and through it. From there the expectation was a draw down into successive levels, the last being the relative equal lows where sell-side liquidity rests.

So the sequence on the daily reads cleanly: relative equal highs are run — smart money selling into those buy stops while entering a bearish seasonal window — then the decline down to attack the sell stops beneath the old lows. They sold high and now have to buy it back cheaper, and the sell-side pool below is where that happens.

Daily rebalance theory

This traces back to something taught on Baby Pips in 2010: study the last three days — the open, the high, the low and the close. It was a laboratory experiment to see whether anyone would find what he had found. Nobody arrived at the fair value gap.

Which liquidity gets taken first

Midnight, 8:30 and 9:30

On the daily, Tuesday printed a big wick up, a small wick down and a tiny body — the sort of candle that gets called mixed or indecisive. "No. No no no no." Break it into hours and it's the opposite of indecisive: an opening price at midnight, a rally, a decline, and a close back near the open — with relative equal highs above and an old low below, and the run taking that buy side at 9:30 on the way to Friday's low.

Stripping down the timeframes

The displacement leg is the price swing that broke through several short-term lows on the way down. Shade that swing while you're learning, then descend through the timeframes looking for the gap inside it.

Stops, and the risk you have to leave open

How the day finished

The whole model in sequence: the setup identified, the move back up to rebalance Monday's range at Friday's low, the level hit, and the pattern forming at the expected time elements. Smart money sells short there, adds to it at the next area, and the decline pairs up with the sell-side liquidity below. A limit order would have been filled during the lunch hour.

The invitation, and the timeline

This one is framed as "a quick little ditty on institutional order flow" — a practice run in reading the tape rather than a new pattern. The position is a long taken against the daily bias, and the whole lesson is the reasoning that makes that acceptable.

Draw on liquidity, and the target you actually need

The first job is to draw the buy-side and sell-side liquidity pools and let the framework explain the entry. The market had dropped below relative equal lows — "I bought those sell stops" — so the sell side is taken and dimmed on the chart, leaving the live levels in colour.

What retail is seeing at the same moment

Order blocks, drawn as they happen

The additions are made on order blocks marked live on the chart, not after the fact — "you saw it happen, I've outlined it, gave you the logic."

Managing the stop

With six contracts long after the additions, the stop moves up just a little, underneath the low — "it should not trade back down into that; if it does I'm wrong, and that's fine."

Reading the delivery

The confirmation being looked for is behavioural, not indicator-based: price driving higher in big candles, with speed of delivery toward the level. A large green candle gets its own nickname — a "caffeine bar" — "if I'm bullish I want to see that; if I'm bearish I see it, I don't like it." As the move develops, the down-close candles are supporting price and we're seeing expansion: exactly what the premise predicted.

How it finished

The 4051 and a quarter level was left to the market — "it doesn't need to at this point" — with over five thousand hypothetical dollars booked reading order flow, and the fulfilled liquidity level recoloured on the chart.

The chart is the Nasdaq June 2022 daily, on Friday the 13th. The week had declined hard and Friday put in a retracement. Posted on the channel that morning: the 12,553 level is "too clean" — one candle's high is 12,547, the next 12,553, and those relative equal highs are the draw on liquidity.

Reading down the timeframes

The afternoon setup

Power of three on the day: the consolidation drops down to create the low of the day — accumulating long positions, manipulating early longs out and taking the overnight stops — then rallies. The retracement that follows is what the trade is built on.

Descending to the entry

The execution errors — and why they happened

Ten contracts came off after the rally out of the order block, the mistimed twenty went next, then more, and a final single contract was held late in the day in case of a parabolic run into 12,553 — "this wasn't in the cards today." None of the closures were above the 12,430 level being aimed for.

On still struggling with bias

Back testing that trains the subconscious

The second half of the episode is a study method, taught from personal experience: the coping skills learned for generalised anxiety and agoraphobia after 2001 turned out to work on students too. The mechanism is positive self-talk placed inside the back testing.

The account, and why it is shown

Monday 16 May 2022, and the reference point is unchanged: 12,553 and a quarter — the relative equal highs on Nasdaq — still the draw on liquidity behind a bullish bias. The S&P had a daily swing low much like the Nasdaq; it had no relative equal highs of its own, but the bias was judged warranted at least for the beginning of the week.

Why there was no short — even though it looked like one

Work starts straight on the one-minute chart, because the bias is already bullish. At 9:30 the market takes out a short-term high and declines — and that decline is deliberately left alone.

SMT — letting the two indices pick the instrument

Both markets dropped to relative equal lows and retraced. But then Nasdaq made a lower low than its 10 o'clock low, while the S&P refused to go below the low it made at 10 o'clock. That refusal is the signal.

Close-proximity entries

The sequence that was traded: a run on sell stops, a rally, a short-term shift in market structure, then a retrace back down into the fair value gap. The entry, though, was not clean — the recording software had to be restarted "and the whole time this candle was doing its business."

Where the second market structure shift came in

As the market started to rally, the highs being taken out gave one more indication that market structure had shifted bullish again — which is where the add was made, into the small fair value gap that formed off it.

Proof of concept, and the limits of it

The chairman spoke at two o'clock in the afternoon. The review is run deliberately backwards — starting on the one-minute chart and working out to higher timeframes — "kind of like a bottom-up analysis."

The Judas point, one tick short

The lunch lows

The market then dropped below relative equal lows — and those lows have a specific identity: they are the lows made during the New York lunch hour, noon to one.

What that manipulation does to everyone in the market

The annotation made live on the chart was that long holders were "raked across the coals" — not permitted to profit on the run to 12,553.25. The move starts off looking like it will reach the level everyone was watching, falls short of it, and breaks down.

The entry, and the one that got away

The correction offered on the chart at the time matters as much as the fill: that area was annotated as not resistance — "don't look at it like that… it's going to lift off from here." Price went down to an order block and started rallying.

How the afternoon delivered

The most important part: the setup that never came

Working back out through the timeframes

Why the examples are index futures, not forex

Scout and sniper — what a "call" actually is

Answering a critic who said the bar had been lowered for calling out trades: "I don't call out trades. I'm not going to put you in a trade, I'm not going to give you an entry, a stop, a target." What he does instead is point to where the market is going to go.

Building the trade down the timeframes

How the rest of the day walked down

Partials came off on the way, one via a limit order that filled on camera. From there the day repeats one shape over and over:

The whole day was narrated live on Twitter — "I literally took them through every minor fluctuation" — and the trade was outlined in detail, with reasons, way before it happened. Everything is time and date stamped; nothing is edited or deleted, spelling errors included.

The outside day, and what it forecasts

The morning: opportunities that never come to fruition

Price traded up into an imbalance, worked lower, made a small fair value gap, bumped into it and traded lower — and none of it was a short. The market "many times can present opportunities that look like they're likely to form a setup but it really doesn't come to fruition."

What a consolidation day is

The setup, called in advance

The instruction given on Twitter was literally to draw vertical lines at 3:00 and 4:00 New York time — that window is where the setup would form — and to study the middle of the daily range.

The execution

On the one-minute the market rallies above, bumps into the buy-side liquidity, and smart money uses that to go short. The checklist runs in order: is that a swing? yes. Is there a fair value gap? yes. Does it trade back up into that range? yes. Then it works lower, back into the middle of the range.

Around the trade

The week's final review, and the market finally made a run below the 12 May 2022 low. On the hourly the day consolidated, ran up — taking the stop on the final balance of the paper trade from the previous session — moved into a deeper fair value gap that created the high of the day, and then broke down below 3915.25.

The rule that separates this from break-and-retest

Confluence, spelled out

How the day walked down

"But it didn't go to a premium"

Why he won't hand you a daily example

The live account beside him

A price action review of the session that had been called live that morning on ES. The day started with a gap when the session opened Sunday evening, drifted lower, made relative equal highs, broke down through the sell side and into the Sunday gap, and then spent the rest of the day working around that one level.

The Sunday opening gap as a weekly reference

How the day traded around it

The objective, and how close the delivery ran

"Sloppy" defined

Drawing the dealing range — the correction

The lesson closes on a mistake seen in a student's public study: measuring a range low-to-high, taking the 50% off it, and then applying that level over on a different price leg. "That's not how we do it."

Where the market is drawing to next

On signals and dependency

The daily chart had delivered up into a bearish order block, and the day's range traded up into that up-close candle without quite taking the high above it. The whole lesson hangs off what was happening inside that one daily candle.

The three sensitive prices in an order block

Two stages to a delivery — measure the most recent one

On the five minute, the run up was not one clean pass. One leg made a single pass from its candle's high to its candle's low; the other made two — low, high, a small retracement, and then a second level running.

SMT divergence — setup, timing, and the trap

The early run as a heads-up for 9:30

Why it was going up to keep going up

A short review of an ES session that ran the sell side at the open, shifted structure, and rallied all afternoon. The lesson worth keeping is a piece of negative evidence — what it means when a big move offers no entry at all.

Premium and discount without an indicator

The morning, in order

The core observation: no model entry

Which shift in market structure is the shift?

Ending the week on purpose

The daily ES chart had worked inside a fair value gap that is also a breaker, filled it, and started to rally. From there the lesson builds the bias, then spends most of its time on the two things that decide whether you ever get good: which days you engage, and what you do with your charts afterwards.

Reading the bias off the daily

Non-Farm Payroll: study it, don't trade it

Stop trading by Wednesday

Power of Three, on a lower timeframe

Spotting, not signalling

The journal that builds the experience

The final section is the method itself, drawn on a two-minute chart — with the caveat repeated twice that the arrows are not a trade entry and not a trade exit; that trade was not taken, in live or in demo. It is how your chart should look when you journal after the fact.

How the afternoon finished

The day opened with a stated draw on liquidity — 4070, below the daily fair value gap — and it never got there. "It did not give a setup either, based on the model I'm teaching you." The lesson is built out of that failure, and its agenda is stated up front.

What the morning actually showed

Not support and resistance, and not a full rebalance

Narrative, defined

Carrying the higher timeframe down

The model is a scalping model

Navigating the New York lunch hour

Choosing the dealing range

SMT, and buying the sell stops

Four ways in, once the bias is calibrated

Managing it out

Being wrong twice and still getting paid

Narrative comes before everything

The day in this episode was framed before the 9:30 open, not after it. On the daily chart the S&P had relative equal lows sitting below the market — a draw on liquidity — and a fair value gap further down. The bias posted in advance was bearish, with 4070 named as the objective, and a stated condition: if price goes below those lows, it is not going down there to go back up — it is drawing into that daily fair value gap. That single statement also predicts the size of the day: a large range day, not a small one.

ICT's warning here is aimed at a specific misreading of his own material: people teach that price always sweeps relative equal lows and then reverses the other way. That is not the case. The pattern alone tells you nothing — what the market is reaching for is the whole point.

The daily range framework

The reference point for the day is the opening price at midnight, New York local time, extended forward across the session. Power of Three then plays out around it: shorts accumulate, the market runs up into a short-term premium — the Judas swing — and only then breaks lower, taking sell side in stages until it reaches the objective.

Once short, you take a partial at the first objective and then submit yourself to time — the last hour, three o'clock to four o'clock, is when the delivery into the daily range objective comes.

Lunch, and why the highs get swept

New York lunch runs 12:00 to 1:00. On this bearish day the algorithm repriced higher through the lunch hour, taking the stops above the short-term highs formed inside it.

Large range days can form with a busy lunch hour, so the session can make a significant high or low there. If you don't trade the lunch hour, that's fine — the model's next setup waits until after it.

The afternoon: ask the range a question first

The PM session setup on this day was a bearish breaker: a swing low, then a rally to a higher high that runs the buy side, then a break back down below that short-term low. When price returns to that level with a bearish narrative in place, it should repel price and send it lower. Here it did — heaviness fell below 4070 and then accelerated with no retracement into the daily fair value gap. As ICT puts it, that is an algorithmic sell day: you are on board beforehand, or you watch the ship sail without you.

Algorithmic theory: time and price

This is the reminder ICT returns to for anyone who has lost it along the way.

The algorithm doesn't count the orders

When a short-term high is penetrated, the algorithm has no idea how much volume rests above or below it — and it doesn't need to know. It simply has to take out a short-term high, and it does. ICT's analogy is a video game: what keeps Pac-Man inside the maze is the program, and every modern game map has boundaries that are coded in.

The economic calendar is useful for exactly this — you can see in advance where those events are likely to form.

The four times of day

Set your platform clock to New York local time. The model takes the student to the chart at specific times, with a specific logic in mind, looking for one repeating pattern.

The pattern itself is deliberately narrow. On a bearish day at 8:30: price is above the midnight opening price, it runs a short-term high, then trades lower through a swing low and leaves a fair value gap. Rally back into that gap, sell short, with the expectation of a run to the sell side liquidity below.

Five points, then stop

The model ICT built for his son is shaped around the person, not around the market's maximum. Short attention span, easily distracted, real money on the line — so the threshold is set low and easy to hit.

Reading a setup that is failing

ICT was short from the 9:30 setup and took a partial as price broke below the low. Then he closed three more contracts before his stop was hit. The reasoning is worth following, because it is narrative reading rather than a rule:

• Multiple levels of sell side had already been taken — old lows, then relative equal lows, then another low, then another — without price moving very much.
• After the buy side had been run, that high should have been the high of the day and price should have torn lower. It didn't.
• The up-close candle above should have capped price as bearish institutional order flow — at most one more touch, or a small poke above the short-term high, then aggressively lower.
• Instead price reached back up into that order block and traded into it. With that many levels of sell side already taken, the algorithm's next objective is buy side — which sits above that high.

The model has to fit you

The closing promise is deliberately not a promise of riches. The skill set removes the fear of missing out, the fear of failing — and the fear of inflation, because it will always outpace it. Money management is the one piece left, and it comes next.

The three-bar swing at an old high

The episode opens on USDCAD. The market ran up into an old daily high last week — not by much, but it ran it — and the following day printed a lower high. That gives a swing high: one candle with a lower candle to its left and a lower candle to its right.

The complication on this particular chart was a down-close candle beneath price — a bullish order block — which price would have to dig into on the way down. That is the impediment to one big sudden candle clearing straight through to the objective, and price did indeed close about half-way into that candle's body.

Why forex rebalances a one-sided move

After the 8:30 news displacement the down move left an unusually elongated imbalance — all sell-side delivery with not enough buy-side delivery in it.

Drop a fib on the swing and you get the equilibrium at 50%: you need price at that point or higher before selling, so the sell window is between equilibrium and the top of the imbalance. Entry anywhere in that range is acceptable — 129.44 to 129.47 in this example — and the risk is small in pips. Forex is very scalable, which is its advantage over futures, where you are stuck with the contract size and either make it work or don't take the trade rather than over-leverage.

The London close hour

The keys to daily bias

This is the topic ICT is asked for most, and he names the expectation directly: you want a simple A-B-C procedure that always works and always yields a winner. What follows is the simplification — the rules his students actually follow.

The weekly question is the same question you would ask of a daily chart, just one tier up: is it gravitating toward an old high to run above it, an old low to run below it, or an imbalance it needs to revisit? Or is there simply no data that week, so the algorithm works other markets and this one is lackluster?

Why not trade every day

These rules deliberately give you permission not to know the bias outside of them. The everyday trader is more prone to losing trades, because there are days you should not be trading at all — the mistake ICT made blowing accounts at 20, 21 and 22.

Journalling is what proves it. Back-log every day, mark up the charts, and over time you will see that the best setups occur when calendar events are in play, and that they originate around the same time the news comes out. That is what turns "plan your trade and trade your plan" from a cliché into a procedure: the calendar gives the day, the killzone gives the time, the weekly chart gives the direction.

Reading the wick days

On the S&P hourly there was a stretch that whipsawed both sides — sell side taken, then buy side taken, then a break down. That is usually FOMC or a rate announcement.

Protected lows: buying before 9:30

On the S&P, the market opened at midnight and went down into an imbalance, then came off it energetically — a bullish shift in market structure during London. London creates the high or the low most of the time, around 70% when the directional bias is right, so that low is probably pricing in the daily low. Price then retraced into the New York session, into a fair value gap and the last down-close candle of a three-candle order block.

The targets were set top down: buy-side liquidity above as the first partial, then the low of the hourly fair value gap, then its high. All three were hit. Everything is read from candles relative to time and price — no indicators, no moving averages, no candlestick replacements.

Risk on, risk off

The two markets in this episode were traded as one idea. USDCAD had the high-impact news, so that is where the read starts — the dollar is the first currency in the pair.

The same logic answers the perennial question of which pair to trade: start from the economic calendar. Trade the pair the news is in, or the correlated pair. If the driver were on EURUSD, compare EURUSD and GBPUSD for SMT divergence — if both fell ahead of the news and GBPUSD failed to make a lower low, buy GBPUSD, because it is the relative strength leader and they move in sympathy. The same applies to AUDUSD and NZDUSD.

A day where the expectation fell short

The episode opens by showing something rare in trading education: a call that didn't come to pass. The read was for price to run up to 3805, and from there ICT would have watched for a short to form, a drop into a discount, and then a run beyond it. Price ran the short-term buy side, gave up the ghost just above it and broke lower. The trade taken was stopped out plus two points — covering expenses.

Two things then kept him out of trouble, both of them time-based. The New York index AM session is 8:30 to 11; trades can be taken after 11, but sticking to the rules means accepting that you will miss certain opportunities. And with the move failing off a Fed chair event while the noon hour approached, the better response was to close the computer rather than keep pressing the morning session.

The low of the session came at one o'clock — the close of the lunch hour — after price closed in the fair value gap. The PM session runs 1:30 to 4:00, and ICT prefers to wait for 1:30 because the price action is cleaner. From there the market drew all the way back up to the level he had wanted in the morning.

The gold standard setup

The afternoon long is the pattern the whole model has been building toward.

The numbers on that trade

Position size follows from those numbers, and the arithmetic is deliberately plain (lot-size calculators are a free Google search away — this is worked by hand to show the process):

• $10,000 equity, 1% risk per trade → $100 is the total amount you are willing to lose.
• $100 across nine points of stop → about $11 per point.
• An E-mini contract is $50 a point — you can't trade one at 1% risk.
• A micro is $5 a point, so two micros, $10 a point.
• Nine points × $10 = $90 risked — under a full one percent.
• 25.5 points × $10 = $255, a 2.25% return on one intraday scalp.

What one percent actually compounds to

One percent a day, Monday to Friday, four weeks a month is not 20% — compounding makes it about 22% a month. Professional money and fund managers do 12–15% in a year and call it a stellar year; over 20% is a blockbuster they parade in front of clients.

The two-order version of the same trade shows the ceiling: at 2% risk you place two limit orders at the same price with the same stop, take one off at the first objective, and let the second run to 3805.50 for the daily range. That is 2.25% banked plus roughly 4.5% on the runner — about 6.75% in one day, from two orders in one trade. The funded-account challenges asking for 10% are achievable on that math, but only if you know what you are doing and can weather drawdown. Once funded, aim for 10–15% a month, take it, and stop.

The drawdown ladder

This is the rule that keeps a losing streak from becoming a crisis.

The hard stop is not optional

If the stop gets hit, it did you a favour. Your job then is to listen to it: the next trade is managed with less risk, because you now have a task — come out of drawdown incrementally.

When the stop is allowed to move

These rules are static, so you always know where the stop is and when it moves. Measure the expected range from your entry to your target — 25.5 points on this trade, so half of it is about 12.5 points.

The point of trimming rather than jamming straight to break even is that you get the small reward of reducing risk without inviting the worry that comes from a stop pressed up against price. What you should be doing instead of watching the stop is measuring whether price is still giving you what you expect — is institutional order flow still on your side?

• Do down-close candles keep supporting price?
• Does it run below a short-term low and then run higher with energy, having taken the short-term sell stops?
• Does it drop into a fair value gap, re-accumulate, and send another leg higher?

As long as those things are happening, collectively or individually, you are on the right side — keep holding for target. At competition-level leverage, which ICT puts at 3% to 4.5%, you take partials instead: pick a static number of points that always triggers one, and take something off whenever price reaches it. That part is yours to define — static rules cast in stone take away the individualism you bring to your own model.

The final word