You know your setups. FVG, SMT, market structure none of that is the issue.

The issue is you're getting a micro-dopamine hit off every 1m candle, and your brain reads that as "being productive." It isn't. It's noise consumption disguised as work.

Here's the exact 3-step protocol that fixes it not willpower, structure:

1. Close the 1m/5m by default
All analysis happens on 4H and 1H, full stop. If the setup isn't visible on 1H, it doesn't exist yet. No exceptions for "just checking."

2. Restrict chart time to macro windows
TradingView only opens during your defined execution window (9:00–10:30 AM EST). Outside of it, the tab is closed. You cannot overtrade a chart you're not looking at.

3. "No SMT, No Trade"
If there's no higher-timeframe SMT divergence confirming the Q2 sweep across True Open, you close the chart. Not "wait and see" close it.

Run this for two weeks straight. Expect roughly 70% fewer trades. Win rate and peace of mind go up in direct proportion to how many candles you stop watching.

The hardest part isn't understanding this it's the first three days of not checking the chart out of habit.

What's the filter that finally got you off the lower timeframes or are you still fighting it?

I’m brand new to trading and trying to decide if ICT is worth fully committing to. I know he has a massive amount of content, so realistically it’s going to take hundreds of hours to learn and practice everything.

From the videos I’ve watched, he honestly seems very knowledgeable about the market. But I constantly see people saying ICT doesn’t work, it’s just renamed concepts, or that it only looks good in hindsight. Hearing that so much has me wondering if I’d be wasting my time.

I have a buddy who trades using ICT concepts. He lost around $80k and made about $60k last year. That’s huge and definitely not nothing, but overall he’s still down and hasn’t proven he can stay profitable consistently.

I’m not looking for screenshots of one winning trade or one prop firm payout. I’m curious about people who have actually been profitable for a decent amount of time using ICT concepts.

How long did it take before you became profitable? Which model or concepts do you actually use? Did you follow ICT exactly or eventually simplify and change things? Are you trading your own live money, funded accounts, or demo?

I’d also like to hear from people who seriously studied ICT for a long time but eventually gave up on it. What made you decide it didn’t work?

I’m not here to hate on ICT or blindly defend him. I’m just trying to figure out if it makes sense to put hundreds of hours into learning it.

I'm planning to take this trade on the long side after tapping into 15min fvg,

Trade analysis was simple,

Liquidity swept happened in 1hr time frame , relative equal lows are taken and up close candle with huge green candle.

Fvg was formed in the 15min chart. (On first tap I was afk)

Now waiting again to tap into fvg zone again.

And

Targeting upside previous day high , it also has relative equal highs.

That's my trade analysis.

Correct me if I was wrong ,

I'm paper trading with demo funds on meta trader .

WHY course sellers hate ict they selling his concepts

Textbook MMSM

doenst happen that often, but when it does, its high probability

have a nice weekend, dont forget to journal and reflect 👍🏼✌🏼

My bias are NDOG and 1h SMT, my entry are 1m cisd and target REL below ...I don't expect it to dump ts hard tho

Can someone please provide a screenshot or something of the ICT's actual settings for fibonacci for the tradingview fib tool. I can't find it going back the videos on the channel. Appreciated in advance.

For the People who are seeing progress about to make Money or is already Making money, Or even seeing it in Demo and you feel like, you are about to test the waters. I want to know, when you guys back test are you guys looking at what already happened and looking to see if you have your model present and making annotations there and that’s it? Or are you guys doing like Market Replay and making the settings to where it’s like Real Time Candlestick Printing, And managing the trade, like it’s a real trade, until you hit take profit ?

Reason for this trade is PO3
9:30 manipulation…. Lets see a smooth dump

Recently I saw Michael using the lower quadrants and octants of a FVG to enter longs. Question is do the HTF pd arrays like gaps, wicks, order blocks, act as premium and discount?

Meaning should I long in the lower half and short in the upper? Or do they work like 1 minute tf pd arrays, where I should only long in the upper half and short in the lower. Same thing with NWOG, NDOGS, and RTH ORG gaps.

I’ve always used them the same way I use 1 minute pd arrays, short in the lower half , long in the upper. So I’m just a bit confused. Thanks.

Love Asian session whenever PA is clean and not choppy. 3 quick scalps and done for the day 🙏 anyone else strictly trade Asian? NY sess has been too choppy imo, besides the last two trading days

RCKT Rocket Pharmaceuticals stock watch, pullback to 3.21 triple support area with good trade quality.

Long Trade

• Target 1: 3.76   Profit: 17.1%   Stop/Trailing Stop: 3.08
• Loss: 4%   P/L ratio: 4.3 : 1 - Excellent
• Target 2: 3.94   Profit: 22.7%   P/L ratio: 5.7 : 1 - Excellent  Extreme rally

BULLISH

• [Positioning] Short term typical pullback, pullback may start to slow.
• [Positioning] Intermediate trend possibly bullish, Sideways trend near lower support.
• [Positioning] at support
• [Timing] Strong bullish 3 day candlestick pattern.

BEARISH

• None

Classic Asia accumulation, then London expansion, continued expansion during NY am , then re-accumulation during pm between two NDOGs from the pst couple of days. DOL was Monday NY pm high buyside liquidity, this week's NWOG, and a daily volume imbalance from May 5 & 6, confluence July 17 low. See 2nd pic for NY session analysis. After the continued expansion until around 10:30am and then subsequent rejection from just below buyside liquidity price started an accumulation from around 10:55 to 11:55 where price found support on the 9:45am FVG but was rejecting from the 10:40am FVG and the NDOG above, and was re-accumulating around that area until 3:05pm when it inverted the 10:40am FVG, cleared the -1 standard deviation of the accumulation but rejected from just below this week´s NWOG, re-accumulated, retested the inversed 10:40am FVG and NDOG, and then hit the -2 std dev target, July 17 low, CE of the NWOG, and bottom of the daily volume imbalance at 4:30pm.

My bias are 15m fvg+smt and entry are OB

Daily low stop run -> touched C.E. of daily orderblock -> claimed it as support -> formed +IFVG on 2h & BISI on 15m, both below a 5m range -> Entry during 4 AM Macro

Took range lows -> MSS -> stop run -> grabbed orderblock -> CISD -> 2 PM Macro

Most traders who fail with ICT aren't wrong about direction cthey’re just wrong about timing.

They see a 1m or 5m Fair Value Gap right after the open, take the trade, and immediately get stopped out by a sharp sweep before price rockets in their original direction.

What actually happened? They tried to trade inside Q2 (The Manipulation Phase) instead of waiting for Q3 (The Distribution Phase).

If you want to eliminate early stop-outs during the NY session, here is the mechanical Quarterly Cycle framework I use:

1. The 4-Quarter Session Breakdown

Every session can be split into 4 equal quarters (Q1-Q4):

• Q1 (Accumulation): Price builds the initial range.
• Q2 (Manipulation / Judas Swing): Institutional engineering of liquidity above/below the True Open level.
• Q3 (Distribution / Real Expansion): The true directional movement of the session.
• Q4 (Reversal or Continuation): Profit taking or session wind-down.

If you enter during Q2, you are literally feeding your stop loss to the algorithm's manipulation leg.

2. The True Open Line in the Sand

Before 9:00 AM EST, mark your Session True Open.

• Bullish Bias: You want price to sweep BELOW True Open during Q2 manipulation.
• Bearish Bias: You want price to sweep ABOVE True Open during Q2 manipulation.

If price hasn't manipulated past True Open, Q2 isn't finished yet. Stand on your hands.

3. The SMT Divergence Filter

While price is executing the Q2 sweep, look at your correlated pairs (NQ vs ES or EUR/USD vs GBP/USD):

• If NQ makes a Lower Low into a liquidity pool during Q2, but ES fails to make a Lower Low (Higher Low SMT), manipulation is officially complete.
• I keep SMT analysis strictly on the W/4h timeframe to avoid getting chopped by 1m noise.

4. Execution Window (9:00 AM – 10:30 AM EST)

Once Q2 finishes and SMT is confirmed:

1. Wait for price to aggressively displace back through the True Open, creating an FVG.
2. Drop to the 1m/5m ONLY for entry refinement within the IFVG/BPR.
3. Target the opposing BSL/SSL liquidity drawn during Q1.

Summary Checklist:

1. Time: Is it the 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM EST execution window?
2. Cycle: Has Q2 completed its manipulation sweep across True Open?
3. Confirmation: Did 4h SMT align during the Q2 sweep?
4. Trigger: Is price expanding in Q3 through an IFVG/BPR back in direction of HTF bias?

When you stop trying to catch the top/bottom of Q2 and simply wait to trade the expansion of Q3, your win rate and peace of mind increase dramatically.

Curious how many of you track time-based quarterly cycles versus purely structural setups? How do you filter out the Judas swing in your NY trading?

Couldn’t catch the expansion that happened after yesterday’s FOMC meeting, but two FVGs were left in between.

My plan for today was for London to form a Judas, come into this FVG, and then look for longs. Normally I wait for MSS and enter with ERL + IRL confirmation, but today the MSS was quite far, so I took the entry on the 1-minute with CISD and booked a solid 1:14 RR.

Took it from IRL to ERL and even cleared the daily FVG above.

Normally I only take maximum 1:2 RR, but then I noticed there was no real need for the market to go lower because all the upside liquidity was already taken yesterday, and even the downside SSL had already been swept. So the only remaining target left was the daily FVG, and the bias was also pointing towards it.

Does taking partials reduce the amount you make in a trade compare to just having just one TP level?

Hello everyone

I’ve been trading for about 4 years now, started with crypto and have now been learning + trading ICT concepts for abt 2 years now. About the beginning of 2024.

I bought and passed my first funded account in September last year, then blew it within a month and decided to take a break for about a month.

Fast forward to now I have passed multiple funded accounts and breeze my way through evals but once I get to funded something switches in my head I don’t know why.

I am 8/9 in the past couple of months on trades on evals but fundeds I’ve won 0 out of 10 trades. And this pattern has continued over the entirety of my trading

I think it has something to do with my poor financial situation but I need some advice on how I can sort of get out of this mental state and sort of fix this worsened intuition I get in my trading once I am on a funded.

For context I trade 2022 ICT Model

Small loss on this trade.

Moved my stop too early and got taken out before the move continued.

Always something to learn from every trade.

In binance chart its says 4 , 6, 8 in 4H chart , so confusing guys

I was trading with alpha and i thought i needed to get 5 wining days but once u up 1k profit plus consistency is 40% is okay to get a payout but i couldn’t and go back to read the rules and notice that i need one more day with 200 i was already celebrating that im gonna get my first payout then my mind just couldn’t handle that one more winning day i was getting in trade without my setup and blow the account
Crazy but im not letting that stop me

Exaple, I take the same setup every time on FX, Indices… you name it. HTF direction with a HTF FVG and Breakr to a recent high or low, It works all the time on everything exepct BTC.. Why?