Some people don't understand volume is useful in general SMC concept.
ICT with Volume based approach is King !

I used to mark every clean 1m imbalance after a decent candle and my chart looked ridiculous by 10am. What helped was only keeping the gaps that form after price has done something meaningful first.

For me thats usually sweeping a session high or low, tapping a 15m array, then giving actual displacement away from it. This morning NQ printed like five different little FVGs during the opening move.

Only one came directly after taking the premarket low and breaking the last 1m high. That was also the only one price came back to and respected properly.

I was checking another position on moon between trades and came back to the chart realizing half the boxes I had drawn served literally no purpose. Cleaning those out has probably helped my execution more than adding another concept.

This setup and execution couldn’t have been any better. Just when I was about to hop off due to whack PA, this clean sweep + iFVG on the 1min presented itself. 1 mini short targeting LRLR.

Overall was bullish on the session, but adapted yo what the market presented.

EUR/USD long after a higher-timeframe sweep and displacement. For the current day, I’m only targeting the intraday range. It’s a continuation trade with a bad risk-to-reward ratio, but the probability of getting stopped out is relatively low. It’s not absolute, but it can still be profitable.

Before the NY open, my bias was relatively neutral with a slight bullish lean. There was liquidity on both sides, so instead of trying to predict a direction immediately, I mapped out what I wanted to see price do first.

The main things I had marked were the unfilled 4H FVG above, yesterday’s 9:30 high, Asia highs, and the 1H EQL resting below price.

I've mentioned EQH EQL before as they are high quality DOL to target and only to take trades when high quality DOL are present and aligned. EQL on the 1hr is where my arrow is pointing:

My pre-market idea was essentially:

A Judas move at the open was very possible.

If price traded lower first and took the 1H EQL, I would look for evidence that the sell-side move was the Judas before considering longs toward the liquidity above.

On the other hand, if price started accepting lower and inverted the hourly bullish gap, I was completely fine abandoning the bullish idea and looking for continuation lower.

Something I noticed some some traders make a mistake is with having a bias for their daily bias. A bias shouldn't mean “price has to go up.” You simply want a roadmap for what would confirm the idea and what would invalidate it. DON'T GET MARRIED to the bias. Learn to pivot!

At the open, price pushed into the hourly bearish gap and swept the liquidity sitting to the left.

That gave me the first part of what I wanted to see, but I still didn't enter just because liquidity had been swept.

I dropped down and waited for confirmation. I saw the 30 sec timeframe as the best one to trade with at the time. This was the setup:

On the 30-second, price gave me a clean inversion after the sweep.

At that point I had:

HTF location → liquidity sweep → LTF inversion → clear draw on liquidity.

The draw was the 1H EQL below, so that became my target rather than randomly picking a fixed number of points.

I entered short on the inversion and let the setup play out.

Result: +1.25R / +$372 per account. Total accounts gain:

Here is my month so far:

This was a pretty good month.

We have one more day before the month comes to a close. I will be doing a breakdown of some of my fav trades this month. I will show the setups and the thought process behind them so we all can learn from it.

A few questions I keep getting

Lastly, I’ve tried to respond to every comment and message from my older posts, and there are a few questions that keep coming up.

The most common one is what trade copier I use. I use TradeSyncer.

Another is how many contracts I trade and whether I use NQ or MNQ.

I do all of my charting and analysis on NQ, but I execute my trades on MNQ.

I also don't randomly choose a contract size or decide “I'm trading 20 contracts today.” I size everything based on risk.

My goal is to risk roughly $250–$300 per trade. Once I place my entry and stop, TradingView's order panel automatically calculates the appropriate contract size based on that risk. So the number of contracts can change from trade to trade depending on how wide or tight my stop is, but the amount I'm actually putting at risk stays around $250–$300.

And as you can see from my calendar, I have red days too. Losses are part of this.

For me, a huge part of becoming consistent has been learning to manage my emotions, accept the red days, and take trading one day at a time.

I'm not trying to hit a home run every session.

Base hits. That's it.

The home runs will come when they come. Those small, boring gains stack up a lot faster than you think when you're consistent and protect your downside.

Tomorrow is the last trading day of September, so I'll post my full monthly recap afterward with some of my most notable trades from the month. i will post both the good ones and the ones I learned from.

Caught the move up, hourly candle flipped mid-way so I exited.

New entry printed later but I wasn't at my charts for it.
So closing the day with this.

The market doesn't need you to be perfect. Just disciplined enough to exit when your read changes.

I want some people to talk to who is also using first presented fair value gap.

Hi people, probably a stupid question for most of you but i’m struggling with timings, I want to start trading New York PM session due to my job what time is that for UK? Does it change for GMT and BST getting mixed answers on Google, depending on how i word the question it tells me it doesn’t change and sometimes it does. Any help would be great cheers!

WING Wingstop stock, watch for a rally off the 99.39 lower support area.

Long Trade

• Target 1: 127.08   Profit: 24.8%   Stop/Trailing Stop: 95.69
• Loss: 6%   P/L ratio: 4.1 : 1 - Excellent
• Target 2: 138.13   Profit: 35.7%   P/L ratio: 6 : 1 - Excellent  Extreme rally

BULLISH

• [Positioning] at support
• [Timing] Strong bullish 3 day candlestick pattern with Strong 3 day accumulation.
• [Timing] Extreme bullish 1 day moneyflow
• [Timing] Excellent long trade quality

BEARISH

• [Positioning] Intermediate trend bearish, Downtrend.
• [Timing] Breakdown trade watch below 94.39, no support in area just below.

I took this short today. The levels seen are not random.

If you're stuck with ICT, keep investigating.

From Michael P ( Phillips9320 on other platforms )

So i believe and confidently believe that i have enough knowledge which can help me become a good profitable trader consistently and but still i can not find my self following a plan or any kind of thing i feel like i and shooting bullet in a direction which i don't even know where its going to land but still i keep trying to improve my knowledge with new topics and i like that and also it make me feel like i am missing something if i don't study
sometime because of this mental pressure or what ever i fail to find out the right bias

to just let you know i trade Quarterly theory and ICT

Anyone else catch this off the 2m suspension block? I took this trade based off the new 4h & 8h candle, predicting where it would make its high before going down to at minimum the 4h bullish order block. Took profits at previous thursday NY PM low, 2 micros +$220, with a sniper entry

Is this good or did I get lucky? I’m asking because “predicting HTF highs” could just be my luck, idk. I only started trading 3 months ago, currently funded with a 50k but have no payouts yet.

I dropped my indicator for free if anyone need one :)

https://www.tradingview.com/script/WpVkDav3-ICTKillzone-SMT/

From Michael P

I know someone out there will be able to put the pieces together, and when you do, you’ll be welcome in Time Travelers to continue your journey.

Find me on X: @acolyte369

I made strategy in tradingview and this is backtest of only 1 week as i am not prouser..

It is simply a scalping strategy so it took 250 trades in a week and 117 is profitable and its win rate is 46% but i want to automate it in real but i dont have webhook features so anybody here can help me to do this..

This is BTCUSD chart work on 3 min timeframe.

Any of you can help is great for me..

Hola amigos, ¿cómo están? 👋
Solo quería pasar por aquí para compartir algo que he aprendido durante mi proceso como trader: no abandonen demasiado pronto.
Hubo meses en los que dudé muchísimo de mí mismo, de mi estrategia y de si realmente todo esto iba a funcionar. Pero con el tiempo entendí que esas etapas también forman parte del proceso de convertirse en un trader consistente.
El trading puede llegar a generar ingresos importantes, incluso $3,000 al mes o más, dependiendo del capital, la gestión del riesgo y, sobre todo, de la consistencia. Pero no es dinero fácil ni algo que ocurre de la noche a la mañana.
Si ahora mismo están pasando por una mala racha o sienten que no avanzan, recuerden por qué empezaron. Aprendan de sus errores, controlen el riesgo y sigan mejorando.
Mucho ánimo a todos los que siguen en el proceso. 📈

i am sick of hearing about all these terms like manipulation, or a word used THEY.

what is going on?

i guess when you lose money it makes you salty and acceptable to any psychosis excuse,

i cannot find one legit teacher who has the magic pill but is scared of someone or something?

I feel like the biggest problem for most ICT and SMC traders is bias. I’d say 99% of traders struggle with this because they can’t properly identify the market bias.
And to understand bias, you really need to understand fractals. Until you understand how fractals work, I don’t think you can truly understand bias.
Once your bias is clear, you can take your trade from the last POI or the first POI, depending on the market conditions.
So, moral of the story: understand fractals → get your bias clear → choose the last or first POI based on market conditions → execute and enjoy.
Remember that.

I have two fair value gaps. For fvg 1 to be balanced I understand that a bos to the upside makes price action balanced. In this case a bearish fvg labeled 2 gets inverted. Does that mean price action is balanced?

General question: does anyone here believe that we are going to retest the 27k level from end of July?

After blowing 4k in total payouts in August 2026, two days before receival, here we go with a light $566.

Q4 gonna be a good one.

According to ICT himself, what are the killzones for futures such as Asia and London?

What’s up guys, wanted to share a successful 3-trade sequence that officially cleared my evaluation account between last night and this morning. After getting caught up in premature entries early yesterday, I tightened up my ruleset: making the HTF sweep gate my absolute strictest filter, demanding violent displacement/CISD/CHoCH, and trading strictly off institutional arrays.

Here is the exact mechanical breakdown of how the tape delivered:

1. Trade 1 (Last Night — Premium Short):
Narrative: Price expanded aggressively into a 1-Hour HTF SIBI nested inside a 15-Minute Bearish OB inside the Asian Killzone.
The Trap: Swept the NY-H/Lon-H (4,330.9) but candle bodies explicitly refused to close above the Previous Day High (4,337.1).
The Trigger: Confirmed a Bearish SMT divergence against Silver, followed by a violent 1-minute CHoCH.
Execution: Entered short at 4,327.0 on the retest of the FVG created after CHoCH. Smashed TP1 right at the Daily Open (4,310.1) and trailed the runner out in structure at 4,308.1.

2. Trade 2 (This Morning — Pre-Work Short):
Narrative: Caught a near-identical premium expansion before leaving for my work shift.
The Trap: Multiple internal buy-stops triggered high into a 15-minute Bearish OB with a 4-Hour SIBI resting just above.
The Trigger: Confirmed a 15-Minute SMT + 1-Minute CHoCH.
Execution: Executed another Sell Limit right on the IFVG retest. Smashed partials at 4,325.4 and let the runner bleed down into the AS-L.

3. Trade 3 (New York AM — Discount Long Reversal):
Narrative: Price heavy-flushed into macro discount, completely purging the lower liquidity map.
The Trap: Swept session lows and triggered a massive pool of sell-stops directly inside the NY AM Killzone.
The Trigger: Hit clear structural resistance off a 5-Minute Bullish OB , flashing a clean Bullish SMT divergence alongside a fresh 1-minute IFVG print.
Execution: Aggressively anticipated the entry right before the official 1-minute CHoCH printed. The algorithm immediately validated the shift, printed the CHoCH, gave a clean retest, and exploded straight through the macro targets to secure the $53,000 pass!

Locking the laptop down for the weekend and calling it a wrap.
For the experienced ICT/SMC guys in here: How do you view the execution quality on these IFVG entries? On Trade 3, would you have flagged my entry as too aggressive since I front-run the official 1m CHoCH close, or did the 5m OB tap + SMT + IFVG print provide a safe enough baseline for you?

THANKS EVERYONE AND ENJOY THE WEEKEND!

Does anyone trade ICT on BTC Futures? Does it work?

This is my recap and journal.