How New Students Should Start Part 3

Date: 2026-09-02

[00:07] ICT: Good evening, folks. Welcome back. I appreciate your patience. Sometimes life gets in the way, as I mentioned on X before posting here. So we’re in Part 3 of how new students should begin, what they should do, and what the most important things are. You see a lot of hype around certain things in this industry—heat maps, liquidity maps, things that populate your chart and make it really busy and difficult to read. What information is actually useful? I want to show you something you’ve probably suffered through yourself because you didn’t listen when I said in the lectures that you have to be a good manager of information and data.

Prioritizing Key Market Data

[00:56] ICT: What data am I referring to? Key levels, PD Arrays, and higher-time-frame macro perspectives. I’m going to keep this video brief. I could make it very long and bore you, but I want it straight to the point so you know what to do and how to do it yourself each day, each week, and each month. It’s the same continuous pattern. It’s a regimen. You do XYZ to obtain ABC123 data.

[01:36] ICT: These reference points are what we use to call price moves and continually measure them to determine the likelihood of a price run continuing. We’re measuring the strength or weakness of a price run and its continuity. If you’re like most students who come to me, listen to everything I teach, and then say, “Wow, I have all these lines and all these things on my chart,” your chart probably looks very close to this.

[02:16] ICT: Now, I forced myself in front of Caleb the other day, and you saw the recordings for Part 1 and Part 2. The idea was to show him what most of you are probably doing: you have so many things on your chart that it becomes difficult to navigate. What’s the most important thing to be concerned with right now? How do you use this information? More specifically, what information are we referring to? I’m going to go through that now and explain what matters most first.

[02:50] ICT: We’re going to this little tab up here. You should be able to see everything within the border. I’m using TradingView, but you can do the same thing on whatever platform you use. You don’t have to use TradingView. Preferably, though, you want some means of creating separate workspaces or layouts and keeping them individually separated. Otherwise, you’ll end up dealing with a chart like this.

[03:22] ICT: I can navigate this, but it’s cumbersome and gets on my nerves because there are so many things annotated here competing for my attention. Everything on this chart is exactly what’s on my notepad. So to answer the question people always ask—“Can you show us what’s on your notepad?”—yes. Every time I mention having a notepad next to me, invariably somebody asks what I have written down.

[03:56] ICT: It’s everything you see on this chart, with the exception of what I’m going to show you now. Go up here to Layouts and open the tab. These are all specific layouts I use. Some are for particular series, where I want to preserve the notes and information related to a specific topical study. I’ll save it as its own workspace so I can return to it later and everything from the previous video or continuing series remains germane. That way, I don’t lose anything.

Building Monthly Macro Keys

[04:50] ICT: What you want to do is create a workspace like this. It’s very simple. We’ll go up to the monthly chart. When I zoom in, you can immediately see how simplistic it is. The only thing I’m doing is highlighting the last three months. Right now we’re in September. Man, did this year fly by already? Here’s August’s highest high, annotated as August 2026 Monthly High, and here is the Monthly Closing Price.

[05:51] ICT: It’s an up-close candle for August, so we have the August 2026 Closing Price, the August Opening Price, and the August 2026 Monthly Low. We do the same thing going back to July: July’s lowest low, July’s closing price, July’s opening price, and July’s high. Then go back to June. You want three months of data—the high, low, open, and close for each month. So for June, we have the June high, June open, June close, and June low.

[06:44] ICT: Now, what’s the importance of having this information? Where are you in deference to that entire range over the last three months? We have June’s high and July’s low, so where are we relative to that range? This is how you manage the information. Notice I have nothing else on this chart. I have no Fair Value Gaps, Order Blocks, Breakers, First Presented Fair Value Gaps, New Week Opening Gaps, or New Day Opening Gaps.

[07:20] ICT: None of that is here. You want a higher-time-frame macro perspective where you can simply look at where we are relative to the last three months, the previous month, and the year. If you want the full calendar-year perspective, go back 12 months and ask the same question: where are we within that range? Are we in discount or premium?

[07:49] ICT: In the 2016–2017 Mentorship playlists, I eventually teach Quarterly Shifts. Quarterly Shifts are heavily linked to seasonal tendencies. These are the big moves—the very large swing-trader perspectives. They’re not about the 1-minute charts you see me working with every day. I’ve already proven there’s something you can do every day.

By understanding seasonal tendencies and what the next Quarterly Shift is likely to do—in other words, where price is likely to go over the next one to three months—you establish that macro perspective. That’s why this layout is labeled Monthly Macro Keys. We’re determining where price is in deference to a specific range over the last three months within the calendar year.

[08:52] ICT: If we measure this, it’s very easy to work with on the monthly time frame. Right now we’re sitting around the 50% level of the last three-month range. Obviously, the month isn’t closing—we’ve only completed the second trading day of September 2026—but at the moment we’re basically at equilibrium of the last three months. Because we’re sitting around equilibrium, we need the weekly and daily charts to give us more information and more directional insight.

[09:33] ICT: When price is in the upper half of that range, it’s in premium. When it’s below 50%, it’s in discount. If you’re approaching the market as a short-term trader—holding for a day, two days, three days, maybe looking for a one-shot, one-kill type of trade—you can use that logic to help frame the trade. Very simple, isn’t it? Most of you probably didn’t write that down, and then months or years from now you’ll wonder why you forgot it.

[10:07] ICT: You’ll watch this video again and say, “Oh, he did say that.” Yes, I did. So that’s the short-and-sweet version. There are several ways to work through this, but I like to go to the monthly chart and mark the actual key levels: open, high, low, and close. If you look closely, you’ll also see the previous week’s high and previous week’s low. I keep those visible on the monthly chart because I want to see where they sit relative to the monthly structure.

[10:43] ICT: I keep the weekly highs and monthly highs in blue. Opening prices are in black with dashed lines. For the previous week’s high and low, you only keep one reference for each. You don’t need a bunch of them. Just mark the highest high and lowest low from the previous Monday through Friday. If you want to be more precise, you can include Sunday as well if your platform separates Sunday data instead of compressing it into Monday.

[11:25] ICT: Some platforms omit Sunday, so you’ll have to account for that yourself. What I want is the previous week’s range. That’s all you’re tracking here: the monthly open, high, low, and close for each month, plus the previous week’s high and previous week’s low. That alone should remove a lot of confusion about how much information you need on the monthly and weekly charts. Those are the keys. Now the next question is: where are we relative to the previous week’s high and low?

Weekly Range and Seasonal Context

[12:05] ICT: We’re in the lower portion of the range, or in discount. Now we go to the weekly chart. Here’s the previous week, with the previous week’s low and high respectively. We opened in the premium side of that range. How do we know? Simply measure it. Here’s equilibrium. We opened in premium during a time when I told you, seasonally, we’re entering a period where index futures are usually weak. September is typically a weak month, and we generally see lower prices.

[12:51] ICT: That doesn’t mean they can’t turn this thing around and go against the grain, but as a general rule of thumb, September is usually bearish. We typically trade down into some low during September or October. On rare occasions, the seasonal low forms in November, and then we get a flurry of activity toward the end of the year, generally trading higher into the first week of February. That’s usually the seasonal tendency that takes place.

[13:21] ICT: But it’s not a panacea or a be-all and end-all. It doesn’t have to happen that way because ICT said so. It’s simply a general rule. So when you’re doing your annotations, just collect the information. Write down your key levels by measuring the previous week’s range. What levels are they? Your gradient levels and octants. Okay, take that off. Actually, I took off the wrong one, didn’t I? Yeah, I want to remove the Fib, not the previous week’s high and low.

[13:57] ICT: All right, that’s it. You’re finished with this specific layout. You’ve collected the key information regarding premium and discount relative to the previous week’s high and low, last month’s high and low, and the last three-month range. That gives you an overview—a macro perspective—which is why I call these the Macro Keys. You know what you’re looking for relative to the real dealing range and relative to time. The key time frames are monthly, weekly, and daily. That brings us down into the daily chart.

[14:31] ICT: We’ll zoom in here. Right now we’re sitting around an equilibrium price point just by measuring from here to here. We’re at the halfway point. You don’t need all this detail forever, but if you’re learning how to do this, this is where you start. If you’re lazy—and I don’t mean that condescendingly—you’re going to struggle. So many people come to me saying they want to learn and they’re willing to put the work in, but you have to exercise due diligence and care about information management.

[15:15] ICT: It doesn’t take much work to do these things, but if you’re not interested in knowing these reference points, you’re not going to learn well here. You’ll struggle and blame me or something outside yourself when really you’re simply being lazy. Over the last 34 years, I’ve had plenty of students who simply couldn’t follow rules consistently. You have to condition yourself to become disciplined and learn to do certain things routinely.

[15:46] ICT: It’s a day-by-day procedure. Once you have the monthly open, high, low, and close, along with the previous week’s high and low, the only thing you need to manage from that point forward is your day-to-day analysis. I want to bring this in because it’s part of what we’ve done recently. If you recall, I was watching how price was using this SIBI and the Consequent Encroachment of that wick. That was expected to support continuation higher, but it failed.

[16:20] ICT: This was the high of that gap right there. I’m not going to annotate this chart, but you can do these things yourself and scribble all over it if you want. Price reached the high of that gap and then closed outside of it, giving us confirmation that we were probably going lower.

Grading Volume Imbalance Ranges

[16:50] ICT: We’re entering a seasonal tendency that can begin as early as the last week or so of August. I told you we were going to use this reference point here, including the Volume Imbalance down here up to that level, and shade the range like this. See that?

I told you I wanted to see price try to get down to that Volume Imbalance. It failed to do it that day, but while we were up here, I told you we were likely to go lower.

[17:21] ICT: We had this area in here, which is kind of like a Volume Imbalance. If you really want to be a stickler about defining it, this is a slightly up-close candle. The open is 288 even, and the close is 289.5, so that’s 1.5 handles, or six ticks, to the upside. Technically, it’s still an up-close candle, but if you factor that in, there’s a small Volume Imbalance below it and another Volume Imbalance up to its high.

[17:55] ICT: When it’s like this, I’m just going to call that whole range an entire Volume Imbalance. You can annotate it like this, up to the body, draw it out, and turn the extension off. We want to see all the levels graded inside this fail to support price. Why? Because we’re looking for sell side here. Go back and watch the last two lectures and last week’s lectures too. You’ll hear me say it: “This is the sell side. We’re likely to draw down into it.” The Volume Imbalance has been the target for over a week now.

[18:40] ICT: With that information, what should price do when it’s trading down through this area on a daily chart? Should it be staggered—go down a little, struggle, go down a little more, struggle again? No, absolutely not. We have a wick here from Monday, and then we have all of this open space on the daily chart.

[19:28] ICT: There isn’t much opposition or obstruction here, so price should be able to travel quickly and easily through that range. On Monday, we opened and traded down through it once, then a lot of manipulation came in. On Tuesday, we gave up the entire thing overnight and ran straight through it. Let me put this portion in here so I’ve reviewed what we’ve done today, Tuesday, and Monday in reference to this information.

Projecting Daily Levels Lower

[20:09] ICT: Then I’ll finish explaining what you’re supposed to be doing as a new student. This brings everything together. When we drop down to a 1-minute time frame, look at what we see. Look how powerful this becomes when you take data from specific higher time frames and transpose those ideas onto the lower time frames. You get clarity that’s unrivaled. You don’t need heat maps, liquidity maps, or all these other things.

[20:53] ICT: Open, high, low, and close in reference to time will give you everything you need. It gives you the highest degree of insight into where the big moves are going to come from. That’s the importance of this lecture. Everything I teach as an educator using my conceptual ideas has to be used the way I designed it. Look at that daily Fair Value Gap I shaded blue. Remember, it’s inside that large gray area on the daily chart. The bottom of this blue area is the bottom of the Volume Imbalance, and this is its high.

[21:35] ICT: Now, there’s a Volume Imbalance up there too—well, no, there actually isn’t. Look at this shaded area. Watch what happens when we start breaking lower on Tuesday at 3:00 a.m. Price cascades straight through it. Was there any real opposition? What about the support-and-resistance guys? This should’ve been support, but it wasn’t. How about this? Did it support price? Nope. How about that? Nope. Nope. Price just went right through it. Notice that?

Then we came right back up into that same area. But what is it trading to?

[22:06] ICT: It’s trading to an octant relative to this blue-shaded area. When these levels become salient to what you believe price is utilizing right now, you simply go out to the daily chart, identify the range of the PD Array it’s interacting with, take your Fib, and grade it from low to high.

[22:47] ICT: Why am I using these two levels here? Because there are no bodies except for this tiny piece here. So there’s a Volume Imbalance there, and then there’s another one extending all the way down to that candlestick’s close. It’s a huge Volume Imbalance. Now we have that range graded, and these levels are all inside this gray box.

I already know some of your heads are spinning, thinking, “This is complex. This is complicated.” If you sincerely believe what I’ve shown you so far is complicated, do yourself—and me—the biggest favor: unsubscribe.

[23:21] ICT: Don’t ever watch any of my videos again. I don’t mean that arrogantly. I want you to understand that you’re the problem. You’re not trainable or teachable. Your interest is limited. If you can’t do this much or follow along with just this much, you’ll never make it using my stuff. I mean that sincerely and wholeheartedly. Go do something else. Find somebody else to teach you, and I hope you do very, very well.

[23:47] ICT: It’s as simple as that, folks. Now, because we have it graded, remember the seasonal tendency I told you about last week. If price is going to sell off during that seasonal tendency, we’re sitting inside this big open-air space where there shouldn’t be much opposition on the way down. See that?

Now look at every one of these graded levels here and make a mental note of them. Then we’ll drop back down to the 1-minute chart.

Look what’s occurring.

[24:28] ICT: We break lower. This is the highest octant, and this is the highest percentile. In other words, for that blue-shaded area I marked on the daily chart, this is the high and this is the low. So we have the highest percentile, highest octant, upper quadrant, second octant between the upper quadrant and Consequent Encroachment or midpoint, lower octant below the midpoint, lower quadrant, lowest octant, and finally the lowest percentile. Price breaks through, trades down to the upper quadrant, then comes back up to the upper octant.

[25:17] ICT: It sells off, trades down to the lower octant, comes back up to the upper quadrant, then breaks lower to and through Consequent Encroachment, exactly as you would expect. Why? Because we’re inside a daily area where there are essentially no candlesticks available to build support on. None whatsoever.

Price slices through it and comes down to the lower octant. At this point, if it’s weak, it won’t return back to Consequent Encroachment. Is that not what I teach with real order flow? Yes. Then price breaks again, trades down to the lower quadrant, and comes right back up to what level?

[25:57] ICT: The octant. And you’re looking at floor pivots, pivot numbers. Listen, there are other things going on that the market actually uses. It uses these levels because it’s algorithmic. It’s scripted. You’re going to tell me that all the buying and selling pressure just happens to agree with the logic I use to grade a very specific range? Come on now, seriously.

We break lower, and look how it’s using the lowest quadrant there. We break lower to the lowest octant—I’m sorry, quadrant rather. No, okay, I’m sorry, my eyes are failing me.

[26:36] ICT: I’m tired. Then we get down here, come back up to the lowest octant, and finally leave it. Now we’re using the low of that Fair Value Gap on the daily chart.

Then what does price do? It trades down into the middle. This dashed—or dotted—line right here is the halfway point of that large gray buy-side imbalance, sell-side inefficiency on the daily chart.

It's this range, this full big green or gray area here, and the low of that blue box. This blue box is that volume imbalance on the daily time frame.

[27:07] ICT: I told you last week it was likely to go there. Price got very close to it, shied away, and then ran up aggressively. Since then, we’ve been selling off. Look at how price is behaving around the halfway point of that range.

Then we drop down and come right back up. Look where we are right here. Remember what I asked earlier, before going back up to the daily chart: what is price trading to? It’s trading to its lowest octant. It hits it right here.

[27:33] ICT: It sells off—bang—there’s your lowest Volume Imbalance on the daily time frame, inside that buy-side imbalance, sell-side inefficiency. Then price trades right back up to the midpoint of that daily buy-side imbalance, sell-side inefficiency. That’s the dotted line right there.

Look what it’s doing. Hits it again, hits it again. It’s gyrating around in here in no man’s land.

ICT: Why? Because it’s hit the objective I told you we would hit for Non-Farm Payroll week. If you’re a brand-new trader, be done trading on Wednesday.

[28:17] ICT: A brand-new trader needs to be done by 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday of Non-Farm Payroll week. That doesn’t mean an experienced trader using other methodologies—or using my stuff—can’t take trades after that. It simply means that I take my responsibility as an educator sincerely and seriously. I could come out here and promise you profitability without meaning it, because nobody can promise that you’re going to be profitable. I could do that and be a liar.

[28:58] ICT: I could do that. We’re all human and capable of making those kinds of errors. I don’t do that. I’ve never promised you profitability. What I have promised—and delivered—is a unique way of reading price action. It’s unlike anything else, despite what you might think. It gives you a greater degree of clarity and a methodology to follow so you’re not lost among all the different time frames. What I’m doing in this video is condensing the major focus points from the entire 2016–2017 Mentorship.

[29:33] ICT: Because I taught those things conceptually as we progressed through that mentorship, you probably weren’t paying attention to everything I was saying. But all of this was taught during those 12 months. You take the higher-time-frame information and transpose it onto the lower time frames. You think in terms of premium and discount. You grade the levels and inefficiencies, and then you look for price to interact with them.

These are your key levels. Key levels.

[30:03] ICT: Then there’s time. Time is the most important aspect. So if you’ll permit me, I’m going back up to the daily chart and removing these annotations so I can keep my chart fresh. I say that facetiously—it’s always fresh at ICT.

We’ll take this off here and remove the Volume Imbalance there. All right, so we made our way down into Tuesday’s—I’m sorry, Wednesday’s trading, taking out the previous week’s low. See that? That’s how we traded there.

[30:42] ICT: Very important information. We have a small inefficiency between Wednesday’s high and Monday’s low, so be mindful of that.

Now we can resume with the final portion of this video because I don’t want it going over an hour. We’ve already covered the Monthly Macro Keys, which are all the levels I’ve shown here, and how you can use that chart to gather information, draw your annotations, and then clean everything back off so you’re left with only the key levels.

[31:19] ICT: You have all your information and all your gradient levels. The next order of business is the inefficiencies related to New Week Opening Gaps and New Day Opening Gaps. So we’re going to switch over to the New Week Opening Gap Matrix. We don’t want to save any of these changes.

Right away, we have another chart. “This is too complex, Michael. I’m not doing this.” Then you’re going to fail trying to make my stuff work in your hands if you refuse to do it.

[32:00] ICT: Simple as that. You want to know why it isn’t working for you? Because you’re lazy. Yes, I’m going to be a little bit of a drill sergeant here because I’m reminding you that you are the problem, not me. I taught these things, they still work, and here you go.

So what are we looking for with New Week Opening Gaps? We’re looking at the difference between the 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time opening price on Sunday and where the market settled on the previous Friday.

[32:34] ICT: If there’s a holiday that prevents trading on Friday, then you simply use Thursday’s settlement instead. Sunday is always the beginning of the new week. That’s not going to change.

I teach all of you to keep at least the previous five weeks’ New Week Opening Gaps on your chart. If we scroll through, there they are: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. You want to label them. And notice something else: there’s nothing else on this chart.

[33:15] ICT: I have no additional information on here. It’s just the specific areas where there’s a New Week Opening Gap, and we want to maintain a rotating display of the last five weeks. It doesn’t take long to create this. Put some music on, headphones on, get a drink next to you, and work through it. To set it up, go to Electronic Trading Hours and use the calendar search. Right now it’s Wednesday, September 2nd, my local time, so we want to find the previous Sunday.

[34:10] ICT: The previous Sunday takes us back into August. Go to the 31st and select 18:00, which is 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Hit Go To, and it’ll take you right there to Sunday.

[35:06] ICT: So the 30th is the previous Sunday for the present week because we’re now on September 2nd, 2026. Select the 30th, make sure the time is 18:00, and hit Go To. Then zoom in and find Friday. See 4:59 p.m.? You’re anchoring to Friday’s final print at 4:59 p.m.

[35:44] ICT: That’s the last print. Then take it to Sunday’s opening price. Since Friday’s candle is a down-close candle, you’re anchoring to its close. So anchor to Friday’s 4:59 p.m. close, drag it to Sunday’s 6:00 p.m. opening price, and annotate it with the date: NWOG—New Week Opening Gap—August 30th. Use whatever date format you prefer.

[36:27] ICT: Label it however you want, just make sure it’s identified as a New Week Opening Gap and keep your colors consistent. I also have the First Presented Fair Value Gaps on this chart. Then you go back and do the next one. It’s simple. Click here, keep 18:00 selected, go to the previous Sunday, and zoom in.

[36:59] ICT: There’s the business. Friday the 21st at 4:59 p.m. is a down-close candle, so anchor to the close. Then Sunday opens up here, so draw from Friday’s closing price up to Sunday’s opening price. Same thing. Label it August 23rd. Do this for at least the last five NWOGs and keep rolling them forward. If you ever want to remove one from view, use your Object Tree.

[37:41] ICT: If you’re going to be really diligent with this, you can organize everything there. I don’t personally care as much about doing it electronically because I know what I’m looking for. I manage most of my data through my journals rather than on-screen. I annotate my charts primarily so you as students can follow my logic and understand what I’m thinking. Honestly, 99% of the time I work from a piece of paper.

But say you want to organize this NWOG. Hover over the middle of it until it highlights on the chart.

[38:12] ICT: See those little dots appear? If you want to be even more organized—which you should as a brand-new student—select it, right-click in the Object Tree, choose Rename, and name it something like NWOG August 08/23. That becomes useful as you continuously add more of them and organize them by quarter.

[38:56] ICT: When a new quarter begins, you can create a copy of the layout, carry over the most recent gaps, and delete the older ones. That way, you manage them by quarter. Or, if you prefer, you can maintain one enormous list and manage everything there.

[39:24] ICT: I think separating them makes it more user-friendly if you’re doing this electronically. If one of these NWOGs becomes the sixth, seventh, or eighth one looking back and you no longer want it displayed, simply hide it. It remains in your Object Tree, so you can repopulate it whenever you want. See how easy that is? It’s extremely important to become a good manager of your data, because if you mishandle the data, you’re not going to do well.

[39:58] ICT: We’re talking about something very simple, but 99% of you don’t want to do it. You’re already kicking and screaming: “Man, I just want to buy the Fair Value Gap, sell the Breaker, trade my model, do this, do that.” All of that becomes easier when you have this information properly organized on your charts. You know what you’re looking for because you have the information available.

[40:24] ICT: So let’s zoom back out. We’re still on the New Week Opening Gap chart. What is price doing right now? It’s simply meandering around in empty space between key PD Arrays: a previous Monday First Presented Fair Value Gap, Tuesday’s First Presented Fair Value Gap, and today’s—Wednesday’s—First Presented Fair Value Gap.

Yes, I have First Presented Fair Value Gaps on the same chart as the NWOGs. If you want to be a purist and keep them separate, that’s fine.

[41:18] ICT: Create another layout. Have one called New Week Opening Gap Matrix and another called First Presented Fair Value Gap Matrix. Instead of mixing First Presented Fair Value Gaps into your NWOG chart, keep each category in its own layout.

A matrix is where these reference points are laid over price action and you read them in deference to premium, discount, and equilibrium, determining which key levels price is likely to reach for. If you’re bearish, for example, price could trade up into one of these key PD Arrays and then sell off.

[42:34] ICT: It gives you an idea of where the next significant price run or reaction is likely to occur. You’re not trying to figure out which support-and-resistance level, supply-and-demand zone, trend line, or arbitrary high-to-low measurement to use.

My concepts give you the core framework for why the market should book price, why it should do it, when it should do it, and at what price level. That removes the ambiguity, even though it may still feel ambiguous to you right now.

[43:00] ICT: It’s okay because you’re learning—purely learning for the first time. With a First Presented Fair Value Gap, what we’re looking for is simply the first inefficiency that forms after 9:30. This candlestick here is 9:38. Here’s 9:30. If you go through all of this, there isn’t a Fair Value Gap until this one right here.

You can keep that in a separate layout or workspace, depending on your platform—somewhere you collect only that specific information.

[43:41] ICT: Same idea. You’re creating a place where only that category of information appears on the chart. Here on TradingView, I’m using the NWOG Matrix, and I just happen to keep my First Presented Fair Value Gaps on the same layout.

You can also use the First Presented Fair Value Gap that causes displacement, and I’ve shown examples of that before. But if you want the pure form of how I originally taught it, it’s simply this: the very first Fair Value Gap that forms after 9:30.

[44:21] ICT: Then you collect them. Over time, they populate your chart and give you information like this. Right now we’re sitting between two significant First Presented Fair Value Gaps. We’re a great distance away from this NWOG, and there’s another NWOG way down here.

So we’re basically in limbo. Couple that with the fact that it’s now after 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday of Non-Farm Payroll week.

[45:03] ICT: Now you understand why I tell brand-new students to stop trying to find setups at this point. If you’re practicing, tape reading, demo trading, or—worse—chasing real money before you know what you’re doing, you’re probably going to have a rough time.

Look at what the market has been doing. I’m not surprised by this. To quote Nate Diaz, the UFC fighter: I ain’t surprised.

[45:38] ICT: The long and short of it is, I know what I’m looking for, and these key PD Arrays help me navigate it. They help me navigate troubled waters. They tell me when I should be participating and when I should simply sit still and do nothing.

Look where we are. What school of thought is going to tell you, “Yeah, we need to trade this right here”? A gambler. Gambler Mentorship 101. Copy-me Traders 101. They’re all going to be in here trying to force something.

[46:11] ICT: They’re going to get beat up, chopped up, and sliced up. Down here, it’s easy to see things that could support an expansion higher because we’ve already done so much on the downside, reaching for this liquidity and this liquidity. You saw that happen this morning.

I can trade in this environment, but it’s important for me to illustrate why you, as a brand-new student, shouldn’t. If I abstain from actively participating, and that encourages you to abstain too, then I’ve done the job of a good teacher.

RTH Opening Range Gap Matrix

[47:05] ICT: That’s my focus on it. All right, let’s finish this up. The other bit of business is logging. These are all things you’re logging and tracking on your charts. This is not backtesting, by the way. Backtesting is what you do after you’ve collected and managed these information points I’m showing you. Now we’re going to look at the Regular Trading Hours Opening Range Gap Matrix. Click here—no, I don’t want to save any changes.

[47:34] ICT: Here is the Regular Trading Hours Opening Range Gap Matrix. Right away, it can look confusing: “What is this? What am I supposed to do with it?” It’s actually very useful whenever you’re in doubt. In a consolidating market, you’re going to see a lot of RTH Opening Range Gaps nesting together. The same thing can happen with First Presented Fair Value Gaps, NDOGs, and even NWOGs during prolonged consolidation.

[48:13] ICT: You may start seeing these key PD Arrays blend together or overlap, especially when you’re marking ranges like this. We have a huge Opening Range Gap here from Tuesday’s trading—that’s the one shaded in pink. Then we have another one here, another here, one up here from last Wednesday, and another here. The main thing I want you to notice is that the largest and widest one we’re currently inside is this pink-shaded range.

[49:03] ICT: If you’re ever in doubt about which one to use, I’ve said this before in X Spaces, Twitter Spaces, and in the long portions of my videos. When you have nested PD Arrays, like NWOGs or RTH Opening Range Gaps, you want to pay attention to the broader range. Regular Trading Hours Opening Range Gaps are based on where Regular Trading Hours stopped trading and where the next RTH session opened, so make sure you’re looking at RTH data, not Electronic Trading Hours.

[49:36] ICT: Let’s zoom in. This candlestick here is the last one on Monday at 4:14 p.m. Eastern Time. That’s the final print for Regular Trading Hours on the 1-minute chart. The closing price of that candle is what you want. That just happens to be the high of Wednesday’s RTH Opening Range Gap. What makes it that? Because Wednesday morning at 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time, we opened all the way down here. That 9:30 opening price, viewed through RTH, gives you the full Regular Trading Hours Opening Range Gap for Tuesday, September 1st, 2026.

[50:45] ICT: If we take that range and split it in half, this level here is the equilibrium of the gap, or because it’s an inefficiency, what we call Consequent Encroachment. I don’t care if you don’t like the name. Later, when we get into more advanced concepts, you’ll understand why it was named that. We opened down here, meandered around, and then traded up into a portion of last Wednesday’s RTH Opening Range Gap.

[51:27] ICT: You can grade these gaps out very easily on a chart like this. Say we want to grade Wednesday, August 26th’s RTH Opening Range Gap. Go to your RTH Opening Range Gap Matrix layout, where nothing else is cluttering the chart, and use the date. Since the gap is from August 26th, go to the calendar and select that date.

[51:56] ICT: Go to August 26th at 9:30 a.m. Watch what happens. Boom, it takes us right to that day and minute. We opened down here at 9:30, while the previous day’s RTH settlement was up here at 4:14 p.m. Eastern Time. See how we’re managing the data? Everything stays consistent. Nothing changes. Now we can grade it.

[52:40] ICT: Take the close of the previous day’s 4:14 p.m. candle and drag it down to the first tick of the 9:30 opening price. Drop it there. Now the gap is graded. Then scrub forward to current price action and look at how price interacts with those levels. Look at that. Look at that. And then price reaches the Consequent Encroachment of Tuesday’s RTH Opening Range Gap.

[53:19] ICT: If we’re in a bearish seasonal tendency and we’re inside an area where the daily chart had that large open Volume Imbalance—the area shaded blue on the daily chart, remember—all of this free fall that occurred overnight may look like price simply gapped down. But during Electronic Trading Hours, price actually traded down through that entire area. We already saw that.

Then, when price retraced, it only made it back up to half of Tuesday, September 1st’s Regular Trading Hours Opening Range Gap.

[53:49] ICT: Look at that—beautiful. Look at the bodies. What’s it telling you? It’s bearish. So that low is going to be taken. Price trades lower, then comes right back up into the lowest octant of Wednesday, August 26th’s Regular Trading Hours Opening Range Gap. Look at that. It hits it, takes out the low here, then goes lower. And now look at what we’ve been doing—chopping wood—but price is still reacting off key levels. This is a shadow. Look how price respects this little area here, and look how it respected that level there.

[54:39] ICT: For the Order Block lovers, when you see a shadow, what is it? The pink area here is the large Tuesday, September 1st, 2026 RTH Opening Range Gap. This is the low of it, and the high is up there. Now notice how the Wednesday, September 2nd RTH Opening Range Gap overlaps with Tuesday’s and creates this slightly different color. See that? This one formed inside the pink-shaded area.

[55:23] ICT: That’s shared space. It’s nesting. The area where those two shaded ranges bleed over into each other and create a different hue is what I call a shadow. Notice how it changes right here and anchors to a down-close candle, which is an Order Block.

That’s how you know the Order Block is valid there. Then price rallies right back up into the lowest octant and lower quadrant of Wednesday, August 26th’s RTH Opening Range Gap.

When you know what you’re looking for, even in what looks like slop to somebody else, I can still find setups using the information I’m teaching you here.

[56:09] ICT: But you have to be very nimble, and I’m teaching you not to require these kinds of setups. This type of environment only feeds the gambler, the action hound—the person who feels like they need to be doing something right now or they’re not progressing as a trader.

Most of your time should be spent in analysis: doing what I’ve been doing throughout this video, showing you where the data is, how to get it, what to do with it, which PD Arrays matter, and what the point of all of it is.

Five Pillars of Delivery

[56:41] ICT: When you blend all of this together, you begin to see what I call the five pillars of algorithmic price delivery. You start with the monthly, weekly, and daily macro perspective, using the key open, high, low, and close levels on those time frames. Then you have the New Week Opening Gap Matrix and its gradient levels.

Once you’ve graded those levels, remember that for journaling purposes you don’t necessarily have to leave every gradient on the chart. The point is to keep enough information visible so that when you’re studying something—say, why price was consolidating—you retain the proper context.

[57:19] ICT: For example, this is Wednesday, August 26th’s RTH Opening Range Gap, and this is Wednesday, September 2nd’s RTH Opening Range Gap. By labeling them, you have reference points when you take screenshots. If you want to capture the chart, go up here, select it, and download the image.

Then annotate the screenshot yourself. For instance: “That Order Block was supported by a shadow created by two RTH Opening Range Gaps overlapping.” That creates a very strong support or resistance level, and you don’t need a trend line.

[57:56] ICT: If you were using classical support and resistance, be honest—you probably would’ve used this high here. You would’ve drawn the level like this, and price would’ve gone right through it.

How are you supposed to know when to trust that supposed support level and buy the bounce? Compare that with the actual bleed-over zone, where these two Opening Range Gaps overlap. Look at the difference.

Much more precise. Much, much more precise.

And the same thing applies here. We have consecutive down-close candles, which together form one Order Block.

[59:13] ICT: The Change in State of Delivery is this opening price right here. Extend that across, and there’s the Order Block being used. Price doesn’t touch it here, so now it’s bullish. That gives it the ability to send price higher, right up into the lower quadrant of Wednesday’s RTH Opening Range Gap.

Everything I’ve shown you tonight can be used across every style of trading: swing trading on daily, weekly, or monthly charts; short-term trading; one-shot, one-kill position trades held for one to five days; intraday swing trading; scalping; intraday trading; even high-frequency trading.

[59:56] ICT: Everything can work from the framework I just gave you. If you had gone through the Mentorship properly and listened to what I said about how you’re supposed to use the information, you’d understand that simply finding the information isn’t enough.

You have to manage the information. And by managing it, recording it, and knowing where everything is in relation to current price, that’s trading, folks.

I’ve taken the key levels off here now, and I need to make sure I turn this off as well.

[01:00:27] ICT: Going back to my working chart, all of those pieces of information are available here, with the exception of the monthly, weekly, and daily open, high, low, and close levels and the previous week’s range. But I can access those anytime by switching back to my Monthly Keys layout.

There we are. And look—we’re punching down below the previous week’s low right there during the 7:00 a.m. macro, 6:50 to 7:10 a.m. Interesting how that converges, isn’t it?

Oh my goodness. It’s almost like it works the way I’ve described it.

[01:01:08] ICT: It’s almost like I wrote—oh, almost said it. He’s listening, isn’t he?

Hope you found it insightful. Until I talk to you next time, be safe.