ICT 2026 Smart Money Concepts Lecture \ January 29, 2026

[02:15] Oh, hello, hello, audio check. Hello, let's see if we can get somebody to confirm they can hear the old man. I'm looking at X and I have no idea if you can hear me or not. So if you could, it'd be wonderful if you said something back, whether if you can hear me. Felt Trigger, thank you. Badgen, thank you. Thank you, Diamond Heaven. Thank you, Michael Davis. Thank you— or Davies, rather, excuse me. All right, all right. A little bit of opposition here setting this thing up, but, uh, you know, we'll see what we can do here.

[03:30] All right, let's go over to a live chart. And bear with me one second, please. A little frustrated here trying to get it set up. It's got a little bit of a delay on it, so nothing I say here today should be all that important in terms of need to know right now. We're really just looking at some things that were selling into yesterday and how it like transfers over to today. In a moment or so, they'll have— I believe it's employment data, 8:30— unemployment claims, labor costs, and whatnot.

[04:41] Trade balance is Canadian dollars. So yeah, let's see, uh, let's see what they want to do here at, uh, 8:30. So you may be wondering what these lines are. Uh, this is classic support resistance or Himalayan salt levels, and I gotta stick it in there when I can, guys. All right, this is simply just the opening range. Gap on the 8th, and, uh, all of it is shown here as being useful overnight. And I want to see if these, these here look a little suspect. Okay, they look a little bit suspect in there.

[05:35] So I think there may be, uh, if you guys use like Bookmap or Heatmap or whatever it is, there might be a bubble up there on your chart. I don't have that information, um, but I like the idea that that right there, and then we have the minor sell side below here in the unfilled levels from yesterday's opening range gap. I'll hang out with you today till around 10 o'clock in the morning. And then I'm going to escape. I have some things I take care of.

[06:32] Let's watch some, uh, some price action together. I bore the socks out of most of you. That's okay. I gotta get in practice here because we'll be live streaming a little bit more frequently in February, and I hope it doesn't give me this much of a headache connecting. I may have to start setting up a lot earlier than my actual start time. All right, just for the folks that are wondering what this is again, if you go to regular trading hours, here is the opening range gap.

[07:12] I— whoa, it's a little off, isn't it? It's old eyes of mine. I have an appointment next week for my eyeglasses, so usually it's a week after that I'll get my new lenses. But that's the business there. You can see it's kind of random there, and that's kind of random there, and that's kind of random. Using it here, look at the bodies. See the wicks here, and then this is an overshoot on all of that opening range gap below. It took out a previous session low in here, sent this up here, and then back into electronic trading hours today.

[08:11] All right, so that's why these levels are here. Since it's such a large gap and because we had news yesterday that is usually high impact at the time of release, it was deferred until after session. So there was some heavy news on earnings, and then they held obviously for, uh, For everyone that doesn't pay with cash accounts and they're in prop firm accounts, they denied a lot of you. I think they've gone to a strategy of victimizing all of you now. How about that? How's that make you feel?

[08:54] You feel loved? Neglected? ICT, what side of the bed did you wake up on? The bright side. The bright side of the bed is what I woke up on. I came here all Mr. Rogers and ready to talk to you. So here's that level I was talking about before I showed you where this levels are coming from. This is the, uh, buy side. I've already said this to you before. You complain about the delay, right? So there's buy-side liquidity, and there's a minor buy-side liquidity resting right above that 0.375 level.

[09:56] They're getting ready to engage that now. And then right in here See all this inefficiency there? There's a volume imbalance and a continuation of a sell-side imbalance, buy-side inefficiency. So whenever you see that— this is actually another PD array where you have a candlestick low, it sells off, volume imbalance, and then we continue this sell-side imbalance, buy-side inefficiency, or SIBI. And then it would be shown here. So normally you would do it like this. This is what it might look like, and it's not technically wrong if you do it this way.

[10:33] You could do it like this, okay? You could have that, or you could have drawn it like this. Reinclude the volume imbalance here. But if you have it as it leaves— pardon me— it leaves this candlestick low, comes down, creates a sell-side imbalance, buy-side inefficiency, that candlestick there, and then it creates a volume imbalance and then starts another downside close candle, you have to encapsulate the entire thing to get the full range and the precision aspects that's afforded to you by having it. So I just wanna make sure this is the same color because it's going to drive me nuts otherwise.

[11:27] All right, so this is a draw in here, and you can do your classic split right there. So there's your mid-range. So how it trades into this range, if at all— I could be wrong Phil could be up here sitting there thinking, watch this, guys, twist the knife. But, uh, we had a nice attempt to go lower here— 1, 2, 3, 4— and it's shifted gears higher. We've taken out sell side, we've taken out buy side. Uh, the cleanest level obviously is this here, but if it fails to get there, this is where I would like to see it try to trade up into here.

[12:08] Kind of like to set the tone for the the market before the 9:30 opening. I want to see how it uses this range, specifically this high right here, this high, and this low. Okay, so since we're looking at pre-session time before 9:30 opening bell Eastern Time, the range that would be useful to me in observance is what I'm defining here. So it's this Hello. Come on now, this high here. So all the details that would be pertinent inside of that range is all that I'm concerning myself with at the moment.

[13:10] Now, the things I'd be looking at leading up to the 9:30 opening is how are we using these individual levels here? Are we using them in a defensive manner on all the sell-off, or are we aggressively running on these individuals that were already short overnight? And if there isn't a quick sudden urge to get up into this inefficiency here, and if it gets to it and through it, does it treat it as an inversion? In other words, this level would turn orange. I would change the color to orange if it trades up in the upper half of it.

[13:46] Does it trade and go completely through it and not even come back down that midpoint and just use the 8th level here? Again, these levels, these horizontal lines, are just simply me carrying over the opening range gap from yesterday, the regular trading hours opening range gap. And should we take out this high, obviously it's this relative equal high to that one. Okay, that's, that's the level. But then we have this high here. So whenever I'm looking at like pre-session times before 9:30 opening, you might look at this and say, well, why wouldn't you have this high and this high, because this one would be lower, right, than this one, and that should act as a draw on liquidity.

[14:34] Not, not when the level is so obvious like this. This is real, real close proximity, and they might just take it up here to bump that, stay inside the range, and never clear this. So when it's set up like this, I have to watch and observe because these are the very things I'm looking for, how they're going to implement delivery during 9:30 to 10 o'clock in the morning. Said in a simple or simpler way is because of the way these relative equal highs here are laid just below that high, and that high's bodies— look at where it's at— they're converging on the 8th, which is 0.125.

[15:17] So it's halfway between the, the high of the gap, and it's the first quadrant. But between those 2 points is 0.125, so it's an 8th. So since it's formed here, they may keep this high intact and just simply use the range with these relative equal highs, if at all. But if they can't even get to this level here That indicates to me it's, it's decidedly weak, and they may just seek to completely run lower during the 9:30 to 10 o'clock opening range, which is the first 30 minutes of trading, electronic trading hours, which we haven't started yet until 9:30.

[16:01] I'm sorry, regular trading hours, which you haven't started until, uh, 9:30. Rather, I said that backwards. So levels on the downside that could still be utilized if they want to sell off and be weak today, we have these down here. That's the low of yesterday's regular trading hours opening range gap. We've already done enough on the downside to warrant a run at least up into here, and then see if there's any interest in this before we get into, uh, close session time of 9:30. Just want to take a quick peek over at ES real quick.

[17:03] A little muddy. Look at that, look at that. So you know it's there, right? Candyland. And just for the sake of, yeah, going down in the unsavory parts of town, let's go see what the hooker Dow Jones Industrial Average is. Dirty Diana. And as you would expect, That's wild. So that creates a little bit of an issue because there's a decoupling when it's this wide in terms of disparity between that and that of like ES. This would still be the sober-minded expectation for price to try to draw to that.

[18:14] And then NQ. So this is definitely the weaker of the 3. This one is weaker because it's had an ability to get to lower lows, and that right there helps. Also, it needs to draw up into this inefficiency, and how we use this inefficiency after it gets into it or trades to it will be indicative of what we can utilize. Going forward with the range. If you're brand new, like, like you just started watching my stuff, or you're brand new to trading and someone just, you know, just casually went through YouTube and saw that there's somebody live streaming like myself here, um, What I like to teach students when they're brand new— there you go, trading up into the inefficiency.

[19:20] So when you're brand new and you've never watched something as simple as that, which is— I'm not, I'm not trying to say anything spectacular or, you know, pat myself on the back because you've all seen better than this, but the point is, is when you first sit down in front of the charts and you're trying to decipher what these things are trying to do what these candlesticks are trying to indicate or tell a story, you know, where is it going to next, why should it go somewhere, and how should it behave.

[19:48] You have to make it very simple in the beginning, okay? And I get railed against for overcomplicating things, and that's not true. I have very simple models, I have very simple things, and it always started with this premise here: knowing where the market should draw to inside the range. Okay, so trading inside the range. I don't necessarily, and you don't necessarily need it to trade to this high to get into these relative equal highs. You won't— you don't need that. You don't need it to trade below that low.

[20:21] You don't need that. So inside of this low and this high, that is your range. That's your dealing range. So inside of this range What you're trying to teach yourself is— and yes, there's a whole lot of that going on when you're learning— inside of that range, which I'll show now as an ugly yellow, in that range what you're looking for is where did it, where did it reject pricing and not say I'm not interested, but to simply say no, I'm not going any further And the bodies and wicks show a clear indication that it has no interest in exploring lower or discovering price lower.

[21:07] That's seen here. We have it here, here, here, and then here. So news at 8:30 sets the stage for these individuals that saw this little rally up. Anyone that went long on this— and there's always someone buying and there's always someone going short. It's all— it's always like that. Okay, then coming down before 8:30, taking out that liquidity and failing to get to that 8th level. See that blue line right there? It didn't even get to that, and then it turned gears and then dropped back down into an inversion fair value gap, which is this right there.

[21:46] This is not inefficiency because we have this wick laid over top of it and it cleared this candlestick's high. If This candlestick's wick— let me widen it up just a little bit so you can see. See this green candle here, the one immediately after the lowest down close black close candle? That candle right there, its wick, it goes just above the previous candle's high. If it had not done this, okay, if it had not done that and it stayed inside of this candlestick's low, the lowest value that being 26,161.25.

[22:23] If this candlestick's wick would have been lower than that, this wick, I would have looked past it and considered this as a different type of PD array. That would be a discount array. I don't want to go into it here because it's not like, well, it's, you know, it's a blue light special. I'm going to give you all kinds of new things to talk about and worry yourself over. I'm just telling you these are some of the things that I'm looking for when I look at price action, and not all of it's always something I've always taught openly.

[22:53] Sometimes there are things that I haven't taught and probably never will. And I, I say these things because I want to be honest, because I don't want you to expect that I'm going to give you all 82 of them, because I never promised I was going to do that. In fact, I said I would never do that. But the fact that we went below these lows here and we failed to even touch that lower 8th down here, that line right there. It changed gears, came back up, and dropped down into this inversion fair value gap.

[23:21] Keeping in mind, when we started talking, or when I started talking during the stream where you can actually finally hear me— here, I think let me put this on here, right? This inversion fair value gap is part of this breaker. So these lows create the liquidity pool. This is the fulcrum point right here. Then we drive down, take the liquidity out below there, there, and then this right there, that is your inversion fair value gap. These young men Guy comes on X, starts taking shots at my students saying he's got a model that's victimizing ICT traders.

[24:11] You got to learn how I trade first before you can start using my name to draw people's, uh, in terms of a crowd. But this is an A+ setup because you have several things here. You have liquidity that's left in the marketplace. They come down ahead of news, they take that liquidity They don't go to a level that if it was weak, it should have came down here at that time. It didn't do it. And then it rallied back above the SIBI, the lowest portion of a bullish breaker.

[24:42] That right there, we trade above it, come right back down. Yes, we have a little bit of a wick that goes through that. That's fine. It's not a big deal. Where's the body stopping at? That right there is indicative of seeing how price is being held. It's being held in a way where you can see that's, that's not buying and selling pressure. Because the question would be is, why would everybody stop wanting to go short here at that level that's dotted here? Why would they want to stop going short there and only go long?

[25:16] And how does that shift in buying overtake the selling when it's a net sum zero game where every buy and sell is equal? Because the The algorithm is going to keep offering higher prices whether there's buyers or sellers or not, and it's going to take a run into that liquidity, which I told you we're going to watch. This, that's a minor buy-side liquidity pool, and this inefficiency, which it just so happened to trade right up into. And I said, when we have to watch and see how it trades when it trades to this inefficiency.

[25:43] So far it's already lending premium sensitivity. That means it's not willing to press that hard up into it. And we have to sit and wait. We have to watch. But this run from here to there as a partial and to this inefficiency's low, which it hits it there, that in and of itself is a model. You could be done. You could be completely done. I didn't talk about going short. I didn't say come down here and look at this level, we're going to wait. I said looking at this range, what I like to do is I look for price that shows relative equal highs and relative equal lows.

[26:19] We've already made this jagged on the downside. I've already, I've already taught this this year and previous years, but I'm looking for where it's smooth and the market's going to gravitate towards that. But when you're brand new— let me get this yellow box off here because it's ugly. If you like yellow, don't, don't shoot me, hate me. Okay, the, uh, dude, you always laugh at your own jokes. It's a dad thing, man. When you get kids and you've been raising them for 30 years, you'll do it too.

[26:47] But the, uh, the levels that are smooth after levels that have been made jagged, okay? And if your first time hearing that, what that means is where the market has ripped lower, lower, lower, lower, there's nothing smooth down here. In other words, nothing in terms of a relative equal low. They just keep taking it lower, lower, lower, lower, lower, and then there's a shift in market structure. And then by keying off of this sell side imbalance, buy side inefficiency as an inversion fair value gap— Dodgy, you can start including this now— the 8th, you can see it's also laying right on top of that as well.

[27:30] So again, this level here, this line, that is part of the regular trading hours opening range gap from yesterday. Okay, so It forms right there. So you're going to tell me now everybody's trading the eighths on an opening range gap from a previous day after the gap closes? See, it doesn't hold water, does it? See, this isn't other people's stuff. This is just me simply telling you this is the technical science behind why markets are doing what they're doing, when they're going to do it, how they're going to do it, why it's important for you, and how you can make a model.

[28:02] But starting very, very simple, very, very simple, looking for very simple things. Where's the market going to go? Because if you don't know how to determine that, it doesn't matter where you're going to buy or sell, where your, where your stop loss is going to be, where's your target going to be. Those questions are not even important yet. You have to know where the market's likely to go to next, because by knowing that, you know how you can frame risk, which is the first real measure of understanding what you're doing as a trader.

[28:30] If you don't know how to measure risk and define it, that means if I enter the market Where am I going to limit my exposure to risk? That means where's your stop loss going to be based on your assumptions on where the price is going to go higher or lower? You already remove 90% of the struggle if you can define the range that price is trading inside of, which is what I did here— that low and that high. By having that range defined, all you have to do— and I also want Baby Pips, and I don't honestly remember what year it was.

[29:03] I think, I think it was 2012, but don't hold me to that. Don't hold me to that. But I did a live stream, and the whole range, uh, the whole premise was trading inside the range. And I was teaching how you can trade a market and it never needs to leave the range that you're defined as where we're trading at now, which is what I have outlined here. That low and that high. So inside of that range here, if you have doubts about holding on to a trade too long, or you're brand new, or you're afraid that the market's going to reverse— which you can do in these current conditions because it's extremely volatile.

[29:43] Like, there's so many stellar runs that start off and they look so good, and they peter out and they go the other direction. And it's like, it's real, real hard to hold on to something overnight or for the whole session because they keep coming back for the liquidity. They keep coming back for anything that's trailed as a stop loss. So which is again another supporting facet to why I teach intraday trading, because it gives you lots of setups. Not that that's a lot of benefit to someone that's brand new for the sake of trying to make money, because they equate that as, well, there's lots of setups, he just said I can trade a lot and make a lot of money.

[30:18] That's not what I said. You have lots of setups to practice with, but you have to learn how to frame a range and then get comfortable trading inside that range and not needing it to do anything more than trade inside 2 reference points, which is that one here and this one here. And you can make all the money you'd ever need trading just in that, but that doesn't satisfy a lot of you. You want to be able to take 500-handle runs. You want to be able to get in something like silver from last fall, hold on to it to where it's at now today.

[30:55] That takes time to get to that. It takes a lot of things to come together, and plus your personality has to match that. Bear with me one second, I gotta grab another Fiji here. But by having a defined range or a dealing range that you're operating inside of, number one, it frees up the necessity for you to know where the next big run is going to be. That's not important when you first start. What you're learning is to define where price can stay inside the lines, okay?

[31:32] When the markets create these big runs, they're always coloring outside the lines to do that. And in the beginning, you are not— I don't care who tells you otherwise— you are not equipped to know that right away. I don't care if they taught you a system, whether it's my stuff rebranded, if it's something else. I don't care what they tell you, okay? I'm telling you the truth. This is the honesty that everybody should be telling you. If you're brand new, you need to get this out of your head that you're going to know how to find the big moves all the time.

[32:01] It's not going to happen. In fact, you're going to get slammed upside the head like a brick And it's going to be like, where did that come from? And if you're new, if you're relatively new, that's a normal happenstance. That happens more times than you probably expected or anticipated. But I want to let you know, for someone that's been doing for 34 years, that is a normal occurrence. That doesn't mean that you're stupid. It doesn't mean that you don't have the aptitude to learn how to do this.

[32:23] It doesn't mean you can't eventually get it, okay? It just means that in the beginning, try not to hit grand slam home runs. You just need base hits, okay? Base hits. I promise you, I promise you, base hits make millionaires. I'll say it again, base hits make millionaires. You know, the people that don't have to go to work. Like, I'm sitting around here talking to you today on a normal work day, 9-to-5 type kind of time of day. I'm sitting here for free talking to you and selling into you.

[32:56] What over 3 decades of experience have taught me. What's a base hit? Buying that inversion fair value gap and just getting out at that high right there. But that's not really a lot of— if that's what you're thinking, you already are showcasing you are not ready to learn. You know better. If you know better, don't watch anybody else's stuff, and let me be the top of that list. Don't come back and watch anything from me. Because if you know how you, you should be taught, you're the teacher.

[33:27] Teach yourself and see how far you get with it. And I mean that. I don't mean that'd be condescending, because you need to feel the pain of being wrong about yourself and discover you aren't so hot shit as much as you think you are. You think you know everything, you just need to have the secrets given to you. No, you need to learn how to listen, be teachable, And lower your expectations. In the beginning, everybody has these extrapolated expectations. They want to see, you know, big money, big payouts, you break records, and we do all these things.

[34:00] And that's fine, that's great, I have students doing it, but they didn't just start trading either. You— I'm talking to you as the, the brand new person or someone that sees all those videos. You're like, man, what do I do with all that? Well, first realize that those videos aren't coming down, so you can take your time with it, okay? Just take your time. Watch a video a day. That's all you have to do. Just one video per day and maybe 2 on the weekend, you know, on a Saturday or Sunday, whatever, you know, whatever.

[34:27] You might be able to squeeze 2 of them in, and you'll be able to get through all of it in a year. I ain't got time to wait a whole year. What do you think trading is going to be for you when you start making money? You think you're just going to do it one day and then stop because you made enough money? It isn't going to work like that, folks. Once you make money, once you get a taste of that and that venom enters your bloodstream— because that's what it is, you're like Peter Parker getting bit by that radioactive spider— and nothing and no one is going to tell you that you can't do this and you don't want to do it the rest of your life because you're going to want it.

[34:59] And it's terrible when you can't rein yourself in and define something as simple as where are we at dealing range-wise. If you can't define the range that we're inside of right now, you're lost. That's why I taught that on my first live stream, right out of Baby Pips days, okay? The first time I went out on a live stream, I said this is what you should learn right now, which is this premise here. Where are we at? No, what benefits do you derive from having determined a range that we're trading inside of?

[35:33] Well, it limits your need to be right about how far the market's going to go. You're only looking for something that's very simple inside of the range. Now watch, I told you this high here because it's the lower of the relative equal highs. The buy side's sitting right there, but that's a minor buy side too. And this is the most reactionary between the 2 highs, whereas this one we dropped down, we went into consolidation just to come back to that. So this more energy, energy and more energetic sell-off from here down to there.

[36:07] But liquidity-wise, if it's going to take that high, it wouldn't be a far stretch of the imagination to see it want to clear that as well. So to make things very simple and also to reduce the necessity about being right, just use that lower high as the higher range. And then because we traded down to that low ahead of the 8:30 news— and if you go to forexfactory.com or if you use EconoDays economic calendar, you'll see at 8:30 today, as I mentioned the moments before it happened this morning, we had the unemployment claims for jobs in the U.S.

[36:48] So that's a red folder, or what we call a high-impact news driver. Whether you're trading with real money, whether you're trading with a prop firm account, whether you're trading with a demo account, whether you're just tape reading you need to study what price is doing around the high-impact or medium-impact news drivers. You're going to learn more about price action by doing that than looking at them and thinking, I don't want to trade around them. Because there's a misnomer in the industry that people say, I don't, I don't like to trade around news.

[37:18] Well, news is an injection of volatility, so it also kind of like forces the market to show its hand to you, meaning that Who's it, who's it victimizing? Who's it, who's it going after with the news or shortly after the news? Okay, and that gives you a kind of like an x-ray view. Or like, perfect example, you're sitting at a poker table and you're playing with players you don't know, but one of the players, you know, makes a point of always coughing to the right because he's a smoker.

[37:48] And when he coughs, his hand is flashing to you. Now he doesn't know he's doing that, but now you just saw that he's holding a hand that you don't want to go up against. So now you can fold and save yourself the pain because he's probably waiting for the pot to build up, leading them on. Well, the market does that kind of thing around the, uh, the high impact or medium impact news drivers. And 8:30, whether there's news there or not on the calendar, always is an algorithmic time to anticipate some kind of a measurable price run.

[38:17] So by having that determined that this is when you want to be watching price action. You'll see these signatures. That means these things that repeat over and over and over again. They're not patterns, they're signatures, things that generally repeat. That means it runs for liquidity or it runs for inefficiency above and below the marketplace. That's it. That's, that's all that's going on, folks. That's it. That's all that's going on. It is not your buying and selling pressure, okay? It's not your indicators. It's not these things that you put on your, on your chart that look like bubbles and whatnot.

[38:50] It's none of those things. It's going to inefficiencies or it's going to liquidity. I mapped out in the range that I defined for you here— that was the high of the range, that was the low. I said there was a minor buy side here and then this inefficiency right here. And I taught you that PD array, which is 2 SIBIs connected with the volume imbalance in the middle. So you have to do the entire thing. It trades right up to it, bumps the bottom of it.

[39:16] And I said we had to watch and see because why? If you look at the high to that low That's in the upper quadrant, or OTE, optimal trade entry. So you have to see if it can go up there and trade into it. And if it does, we wait for it to trade the upper half and then stay outside the lower half, and then you would expect it to run higher. But it didn't even do that, did it? Where'd it trade to? Right to the low of it.

[39:39] And now we're seeing what sensitivity it trades from the low. Why is it so sharp selling off? Because we had In the inability to get to this 8th on the opening range gap from yesterday's regular trading hours opening range gap. So it hit the low of it, had no interest at all putting a body inside the range, traded lower, broke through another 8th down to another 8th. Liquidity is resting right below here with an 8th level down here on— what is that price? 26,144 quarter. So now by having a very realistic— here, here's what— if you're brand new, this is what you're thinking right now.

[40:21] I can see how you outlined that, you outlined that right there, and yeah, it went there, okay? But look how nice and hard they're dropping here. That's the move I want to have. You already are proving that you don't want to learn. You, you want the greener grass on the other side of the fence. You want the prettier girl across the room that you just started dating, a really nice lady tonight, okay? And then you, you show up to your venue and you're getting ready to have dinner and you look across the room and you see somebody else that's beautiful, and now you're already acting like a dog, you know, sniffing around in somebody else's yard because you can't be content with what you have.

[40:56] I promise you, if you have that mentality— that's why young men, they fail a lot at this. They fail a lot at this because they don't understand how they can be content If you can find the ability in, in yourself to frame a measurable outcome that doesn't have moving parts that change and morph and to do all these different things all the time where it's always impossible for you to know what you're doing— in other words, you frame a model that's useful, it's simple. How is this simple?

[41:30] It was jagged. By dropping, dropping, dropping, and nothing relative equal low down here. At 8:30, news driver came up. I took your attention to this high here, minor buy side. I said this inefficiency and these relative equal highs, but then I aimed right to that high there. Okay, so the dealing range is high to low. 3/4 of that range is optimal trade entry. That was the flagship thing I taught for years on Baby Pips and on my YouTube channel before I started teaching any of the higher level technical stuff, PD Arrays and whatnot, which I started revealing in 2016 behind a paywall.

[42:13] Now all those lectures are up on my YouTube channel for free in the playlists, so just go find it if you want to study all that stuff. The PD Arrays that were taught in there are very specific things that I'd like to look for, for timing and stop management and targeting. Okay, so PD means premium and discount array, very specific price points in price action that's limiting your focus between this high down to that low. 3/4 of the range is here. So if you see an inefficiency around that same— I just eyeball it If it's high and that low, 3/4 of that is right about in here.

[42:54] So what do you have? You have a short-term high there, but we don't need to mention that because it's already part of this PD array. So this is the inefficiency, this is the liquidity. This was a minor buy-side liquidity pool. The attention was focused to the upside. It went lower, lower, lower. It was made jagged. Inversion fair value gap lays over top of an 8th on the regular trading hours. Opening range gap, that's what these lines are, these vertical— I'm sorry, these horizontal lines. And then it rallies up to minor buy side.

[43:29] That in and of itself, if you're brand new, that is what is realistic for you. That's realistic. That's something that will repeat every single trading day. Not this overall thing, but looking for a very simple run to a minor buy side or a minor sell side liquidity pool. They repeat every single day. You do that for a couple weeks, maybe a month or 2, okay? When you get real comfortable seeing it and on the tape, that means you're not pressing a demo entry, you're not even trading a prop firm, you're not trying to risk with real money, okay?

[44:02] The easiest thing for you to do in terms of failure is trying to hurry up and try to make money because you think it's only going to feel real to you if you make money. That's not true. Okay, that's just you lying to yourself because you want instant gratification, and that is a Western mindset that prevails, you know, over most of the youth in terms of trading. And it's usually the male side because we think we got to go out there like a caveman, got our stick in our hand, go out there and club it over the head and drag it back to our cave.

[44:33] It's mine now. Okay, well, try that in the marketplace with real money, especially in the market environments that we're in right now with the volatility off the charts. You're going to have your behinder parts handed to you expediently. So to avoid that, as an educator, when I tell you to look for very simple, small price runs that are predictable, little cookie cutters where you can take this little cookie cutter— cookie cutter is the market's in a discount, the nearest premium liquidity is that high right here, which is what I outlined to you.

[45:05] And then I said the next one is here But that's inefficiency. It's not liquidity, it's inefficiency. But above that short-term high here, that is liquidity. And it did both— bump, hit that, and that was it. But we did not see any exploration into that inefficiency on the upside. It just touched the low of it here and then gave up the ghost, went lower here to here. Low-hanging fruit objective, very easy type trading, very cookie cutter. It's not hard, it's not complicated, it's not com— it's not complex, it's not a lot of moving parts.

[45:43] It's very, very simple things. It's low in price and it's going to reach for a higher price. Which is easier to find, the short-term high here or an inefficiency? The short-term high. Why? Because look, when it came up to that high, look how energetic it was when it dropped. So as it dropped, anyone that was short here or anywhere back here, what's, what's their mindset when they see this big sell-off and it creates another lower low? They're going to lower their stop loss protecting their short position to just above that high.

[46:16] And what's that— what's it going to be? It's going to be a buy stop, because to get out of a short position you have to buy it back. And protecting your short, you're going to place a buy stop above some kind of an old high. Every discipline teaches that. Every discipline teaches that. So that's how I know I don't need a Bookmap, I don't need a heatmap, I don't need all kinds of other maps, okay? I have an understanding of where liquidity is going to pull and build up, and it's based on this idea because I understand how traders are going to be doing the very thing I just said.

[46:46] As, as they're short, they're trailing their stop loss down because they don't want to have this type of run here and knock them out and have a larger loss. For the people that had their short position protected with just the short-term high here, they didn't see this idea as a viable level to put their protective buy stop on when they're short. They were thinking it's probably too close, give it some room, so they kept their stop up here. I outlined to you when we first started the stream that it's jagged down here.

[47:14] Here's your relative equal highs. I like that as a draw, staying inside the range, needing it not to trade there. Go back and listen to these things, folks, because there's going to be assholes on the internet and say, look, it didn't even go up He said, but you're omitting all the things I actually said. You don't need it to trade there. That was the whole time— the whole time of me talking here is for brand new students, for someone that is struggling. They've been watching my videos, they just don't know what to do.

[47:40] Like, what do I— what do I do? Like, what should I be doing? Where do I start? This— this is how you start. You don't need to watch videos to do this. This is something you just do every single day. Every single day, do these types of things. Look where the market's jagged and where it's left smooth levels. Wait till a time of like 8:30 and 9:30. They're like, they're starting points, okay? Imagine a race. Everybody lines up. Everybody's lined up at the beginning of the start race.

[48:08] Boom, the gun goes off, everybody starts running. That's what happens at 8:30. The same thing happens at 9:30. And at 3 o'clock, the race has been ran all day long. And then you wait and you see which one's the strongest one that finishes the best. And there's a flurry of little action that goes in the last hour trading, 3 o'clock and the 4 o'clock closing. That, that's the simplest way of describing what goes on in the marketplace every single day. You don't have to have a whole lot of things out of my toolbox.

[48:38] You don't need a lot of that stuff, but you do need to know when prices generally create some kind of volatility and where it runs. Not, not directionally yet. You're going to learn that. But when it starts to run, that's 8:30, 9:30. Okay, so because of those opening times, one's related to the news, which is 8:30, whether there's any news event on, on the economic calendar or not. 8:30 in the morning Eastern Time always is a time where the market will— it's like You'll be surprised if you start studying it.

[49:14] When there's no news on the economic calendar, all of a sudden it creates these runs exactly at 8:30, but they're going to tell you there's no algorithm. It's, it's hilarious. But anyway, buying here and getting out here, that's the lowest hanging fruit, easy objective. Just get in there and do those every single day. Find the smallest little price run from one point of entry to a pool of liquidity or an inefficiency. Now, an inefficiency in here would be like this. Okay, but if it's going to go from here to here, that's not really enough.

[49:46] It doesn't do it for me. Like, if it's going to run from here, it's going to run to this short-term high, which is why I told you in the stream before it went there, there's a minor buy side there. And then I like this inefficiency here, and it need not even trade up to the relative equal highs because this is 3/4 of the run from low to high. Okay, so 3/4 of that run is this. And by having an expectation of— let's say you had 3 micros on, and that's what you should be trading with, a micro, not a mini.

[50:19] There's too much volatility in the marketplace right now. And if you think that you only can do— there you go, trading down to the lower 8th right there in that liquidity now. So if you think you have to trade a mini or it's not worth your time, again, you're doing it wrong. If you can't respect the measure of risk the market's having right now and the level of manipulation and holding it in a very large range on the daily chart, you're asking to fail quickly. Like, you're going to fail quick.

[50:50] And one micro will teach you everything you need to learn, and you can make money with one micro. One micro contract in the hands of someone that knows what they're doing— I don't care where you are in the work field, okay, unless you are running your own company, because then it changes things, okay— but even a surgeon's salary, you can make a surgeon's salary With one micro contract a year. Doesn't sound right, does it? Doesn't sound like it can't be. It's not plausible. It can't, it can't be like it, but yet it is.

[51:34] See, you think you have to have a lot of contracts on because you want that real fast payout. Otherwise you're not satisfied. Otherwise you're not successful. Otherwise you're not doing as good as the next guys or gals on the internet. But you're looking at price, as I mentioned this morning. It hit me because I'm reading other people's posts and they're not, not necessarily my students. I like just tapping into other people's retail mindset and how they teach their, their followers and what they spout out, which is bullshit basically.

[52:06] By having so much emphasis on being loved Which I could care less if you like me. That's why I, that's why I remain polarized, because I know I'm not going to make everyone happy. And that's in fact how I grew. I was divisive. I was the Moses, okay, in trading, like Tom Hougaard referred to me as. I divide my audience because I want you to be critically thinking about what I'm teaching. Does it make sense? If it doesn't make sense, then don't bother with it. But if you're weak-minded, you're going to come at me as the person, and then you fell for the trap.

[52:49] You're proving that you're not disciplined. You're proving that you get caught up in drama. How could you possibly be equipped to be consistently profitable, wildly profitable, if you get so derailed by something like this? It's an easy tell. I'm playing poker with all of you, and I can pull your tell out by the way I teach And as a student, when you first come to me, you don't know what you're doing. You don't know what to do. And I'm telling you here, like I've done dozens of other times, how to start.

[53:18] Simple. Very, very simple. You only need a small little cookie-cutter move, something that repeats over and over and over again. What is that? A run from an inefficiency to a liquidity pool, or from an inefficiency to a liquidity pool moving lower, or Once you learn, you can trade a liquidity pool to an inefficiency, or from one liquidity pool to another liquidity pool. That's a little bit higher in terms of trust in what you're doing. That means like trading a false breakout above an old high down to a false breakout below an old low.

[53:52] In other words, it would look like this. That high we traded to here, and then expect that low to be taken out. That takes a little bit more experience to do that. That's the highest form of what I teach. That, that's, that's the highest one. And even that's not all that complex. But when you first look at it and you're thinking, but, but yeah, but where's the propulsion block fit in all this? See what you're doing? You're trying to find— like, when you watch Bob Ross paint, he has all kinds of paintbrushes he could reach for, but he's using a fan brush and a simple little, you know, line brush where he can do small details.

[54:30] Predominantly that's what he's doing. Or he uses that big, big wide brush when he's making, uh, his backgrounds and smoothing out things for the canvas. So there's only like 3 brushes he's working, but when he's done, it's like, what in the world, man? Like, where'd you get that from? He has a little picture off to the side he looks at as he's painting, and he paints that picture. He's— it's not in his mind. I used to think he was imagining it, but he's looking at a picture.

[54:53] So I tossed that in there for extra credit just to let you know that, uh, you know, I still like Bob Ross. Some of you younger cats don't even know who I'm talking about, but, uh, he's the white guy with the afro that does oil painting. But the, uh, the tools that he uses, he has a lot of them. He has a huge toolbox of tools and things, but he only grabs what he needs for that function, that, that thing. So when you're looking at the range, you simply got to say, okay, I'm only interested in previous hour and a half, previous hour, the previous 30 minutes.

[55:35] Okay, if you're looking at less than 1-minute time frames, you can do this all day long, by the way. By having the range defined as we outlined here, knowing an initial expectation of wanting to run against those individuals that were short overnight during the pre-market session. 7 o'clock, the market's dropping down. We're going into news at 8:30. So what is it going to do? If it's jagged down on the lows, look for where it's smooth. When you haven't determined where it's smooth, then define the range.

[56:06] And to keep things very, very simple, use the smaller reference point when you're defining the range, which is what I did here. What would happen if you, by your error because you're new, what if you were to use something like this high here? I've seen students do some simple things like this, and it's not, it's not grossly out of spec. It just means that your experience hasn't led you to understanding how that would be a better high. If you would have used that, it still would have been fine because below that high you still have this inefficiency.

[56:36] This was the, this was the focal point. This was the high of the range. I said we'll see if it wants to reach up in here, but I don't need it. You don't need it. Go back and listen to the stream. You don't need that, which means what? I'm disarming you. Don't expect it. Look for something simpler. What was that? This minor buy side and this inefficiency. It trades right up into it. So as you graduate and you start watching the tape from here to here, then you start thinking, okay, I'm expecting a run from here to here.

[57:10] And then let's play devil's advocate and say I have 2 micros on. Then I can see if I can tag that low of that shaded box, which is an inefficiency. And that could be my final close or terminus on the trade. So you have 2 states: exit, enter partial at the high, exit there. If you were able to do that as I outlined this morning, that was a setup, that was a framework. If you can't see that as advantageous, there's no hope for you. You need to change your, your mindset about yourself and pull your head out of your own ass because you're literally proving that you know something better, there's no one that's going to teach you.

[57:47] Not me, not anybody else, because you know how you should be taught. So just go out there and scour the internet and try to figure out what you want to do and find yourself in that. Fail, and then come back to somebody that knows what they're doing and teach them and teach you. It doesn't have to be me, but you have to determine in the beginning whether you're teachable or not. And I've had so many students, so many students over the last 3 decades that came to me, talked a good talk.

[58:10] Yeah, whatever you put me through, I'll, I'll do it. And you give them a couple things to do for a week and they can't even do it for one day and they're bitching and complaining. Man, I just want to know how to make money, right? And that's what I'm teaching you. I'm teaching you exactly how to make money. First step is don't lose it. And how do you not lose money? You have to know where it's likely to go to next and not be on the wrong side.

[58:36] That's the first lesson in trading, folks. You have to know where it's going first. Where is it going? Sit down on the chart. Boom. Where's it going next? If you don't clearly know where it's going to go to, as outlined this morning, again, live streamed, you have no chance of being profitable. Zero chance. And you wonder why you can't make money. You think magically because you do a prop firm that you're somehow going to get lucky and then you're going to make money, and that equates to you knowing how to trade.

[59:06] It doesn't work like that, folks. You have to have a very boring skill set that simply sits you down, sits you down in front of the charts and and say, okay, I believe the market's going to go to this level and this is the reason why. Because it's already shown its willingness to not go any lower here. It's a time when the market's going to start running, 8:30 news, and it's going to run against the range that was defined on overnight, on pre-session, 7 o'clock shorts.

[59:29] Where's the range high and low? Where's 3 quarters of it? Why am I talking about 3 quarters of it? Because with the market maker sell model It can go up into 3/4 of the range and not come back to the original consolidation. And that's what you saw here. And then it fails there. It never even goes back to the original consolidation. Go watch my mentorship, you'll see me teach that. That's why I taught that way. You won't know when the market maker buy-sell model's complete. You'll get tripped up and you'll be in a trade that's making money And you'll be like, I gotta— it's so easy, it's so easy.

[01:00:08] And then it does these types of things here and it reverses on you. It's like, oh, they're changing the algorithm, that son of a bitch ICT. That's what you're gonna do. You're gonna cuss me, you're gonna create little sock puppet accounts, gonna come in and say, bro, you don't know anything, SHTFU, or something like that, shut the fuck up type thing. And, uh, I'm laughing at you because you're, you're there, you're your own problem. I taught all this stuff on the YouTube channel, and yes, there's lots of videos, but if you really want to learn it and you want to be skilled with lots of tools, and you determine which, which of these tools are going to work well in your hands, if you don't spend time with them, you're not going to know.

[01:00:48] But you don't even want to give yourself a chance to determine what that is. Some of you have to do a breaker or you're not going to be successful. Why? I have to do the Silver Bullet because, you know, I've seen so many people making money with it, and that's— I'm gonna, I'm gonna do that. If you can't do it, do something else. Don't try to force yourself into a mold. Don't do that. I've given you the freedom to, to choose how you're going to use these tools.

[01:01:14] I can get out here all day long and do things all day long and none of them repeat. I can use one PD Array at one setup, one PD Array at another setup. I can do this, that model, everything, and not repeat the same thing all day long on a 15 or 30-second chart. Buy and sell all day long. And smoke every one of you fucking jackleg bitches out there. They got all kinds of lip service. I would whip your fucking candy asses. But when you're learning from me, you don't want to do those types of things as much as you really, really want to.

[01:01:42] You don't want to do that with risk because you don't know what you're doing. You can't replicate that. So you start simple, very, very simple things. Look for where you're at in terms of the range. Look for very simplistic entry models. Not a lot of moving parts, very simple things. Jagged time when the market's going to do what? It's going to run against positions because it's an 8:30 opening. Whether it's news on the calendar or not, it's going to do it at 9:30. It's going to do the same thing.

[01:02:16] Okay, it's just, it's a mechanism that it does it. So Give me one second here. The idea of determining your range gives you a canvas, like Bob Ross the painter. The canvas was this high to that low. So what am I going to do? I'm going to paint a masterpiece and tell you where the market's going to draw to. It's going to go up, and to what levels? That inefficiency. And it hit it perfectly and then sold off. So now we're below here. Now the range is now defined to this, and we're getting ready to go to 9:30 opening.

[01:02:53] And if you give me a moment, I have to go grab my power cord because I usually leave the battery as my time. When the battery starts to tell me it's, it's low, then I usually close the, you know, the conversation or whatnot. But there we go, we just pierced a little bit lower. Give me one second, let me get my power. Right, you guys can, uh, if you guys can hear me, I just muted my, uh, microphone.

[01:04:43] I don't know if I can be heard again yet. Give me audio check, please. Give me a 5 by 5. You guys can hear me? 30 seconds, the opening bell. So much. All right, so here's where we have— now we've entered regular trading hours time frame. This liquidity pool is still a factor. Okay, so inside of the pre-market session, we had this range Down to that low, and we worked inside that. Now we just dip down into— look at that low. Look at the low. Look at the low of that candle up here, 26,122.5.

[01:06:00] That's exactly the price level here that's referenced from yesterday's regular trading hours opening range gap. Okay, all you guys out there trying to pick a fight with me and doing so much harm to your own brand, listen to what I'm teaching. It will make your shit work. It'll make it better, okay? It makes it more precise. I'm teaching all of you, okay? I don't care if you like me, but you're wasting so much time and energy, you know, trying to do things that if your brand was good, if your stuff was good, you wouldn't need to talk about anybody else.

[01:06:29] It would sell itself like I did. No advertising. So, uh, let's go over to Regular trading hours view. Okay, and this is the gap that is running the closing. Here is the 9:30 opening, that price right there. So I'm gonna drop that there so you can see it. And then we have the regular trading hours settlement price on that candlestick right there. Okay, so that would be this and go back into, uh, electronic— I'm sorry, regular trading hours, electronic trading hours. So here's Settlement from yesterday, regular trading hours.

[01:07:35] We came up into that by how much? Open up to here. So there's your gradient levels. I'm going to take these off from yesterday just for a moment so you can see it. Okay, so we went up, traded into 0.375 level. So far gave up the ghost a little bit. Remaining portion of the opening range gap is here, so they would look like this. This is what you have remaining on the day for gap closure. I don't like that color because it looks like an inversion level.

[01:08:15] I want to illustrate that. I want to be like this. Okay, and then from regular trading hours, again, what pool of liquidity or inefficiency? We have this one and we have this one here. Regular trading hours— I'm sorry, electronic trading hours. So if it continues to drop lower, I'd want to see sensitivity in either one of these. No initial first one to break back up yet. Because we're outside of the opening range, meaning that here's where we opened and that's where we opened from. In other words, we have a discount gap opening.

[01:09:31] We're below it now, so we're in exploration. So we're inside of that first fair value gap. Upper quadrant of it now. Half would be here, lower quadrant here, full closure and pierce through it. And then if it starts to sell off more, this is the one that it would have to— if, if it wants to come back for this during the session, it would need to show sensitivity down here. But that was the— that's a draw when we're outside of the opening range gap. As soon as we break out of that— and it doesn't need to be 15 minutes, okay, it doesn't need to be 30 minutes— it just means that once we have the opening price, if we have a partial fill, which is what we have here, it's almost like a 3/4 of a closure on it, then it rips lower, you have to anticipate it reaching for deeper discounts and simply going to regular trading hours, in the old regular trading hours price action.

[01:10:35] Don't just simply look at electronic trading hours, look at regular trading hours and see what they're going to reference, because it's— and there's, there's your trading into that. Okay, so this is your first skill set. You have to know these types of things. Where is it going to draw to? Why should it draw? Knowing what it's reaching for, they're the beginning basis points of how you're going to find trade setups. If you can't pick the right direction, if you can't do that You have no chance.

[01:11:04] You have zero chance. I promise you, most live streamers out there probably are like sitting on their hand, sitting on hands thinking, I wonder what it's going to do. They have no idea where they're— where it's going to reach to. They're just waiting for something like a billboard sign to pop up and say, okay, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna chase this or chase that. You have to know what you're looking for. If it goes right through here on the downside and just keeps on running, I would have no interest in having this at all for the session in the morning, and I would just simply move to wait until the afternoon, get through lunch, and come around 1:30, sit down and watch the price action and see if there's anything smooth that needs to run after.

[01:11:54] Where's the sell side or buy side that they left intact? And I would use that for the PM session. Looking at the, uh, the initial run here, 9:30, 9:31 candle. Bumps the high there just enough to clear these little tweezer highs. Isn't that pretty? Right there, clips it, rejects it, comes back to the opening price. Here we open, trade up to it there, sell off, then reach for the PD arrays outline. But now this is really heavy. Let's go to regular trading hours again. And right below here is the liquidity for anyone that was long.

[01:12:51] That's what they're going to type— they're going to target that right there. Very, very, very complicated, uh, market environments for a brand new startup student. Anyone tells you it's easy as a brand new student right now in any discipline, they're liars. The, uh, this range here on the upside, buy side imbalance, sell side inefficiency, we traded down to it and through it. So if they want this low, I would like to see them respect the upper half of this. Don't come back up into it with any bodies.

[01:13:50] It can come back to the halfway point and wick into it. I'd prefer it not to do that, but keeping its bodies in the lower half or under it is even all the better. And that's supportive of a run into that liquidity. If it can run up and start laying bodies down in the upper half of that blue box That makes it far less likely that they're going to reach for that liquidity before a deeper retracement. So in essence, what I'm teaching you is how to anticipate inversion fair value gap and how to categorize and classify when they should be implemented, when they shouldn't be implemented, and what are problems that arise when you anticipate them behaving as such.

[01:14:27] What would negate it? What are you looking for to support the idea? I had a guy ask me in email, do I think that the market's going to stay ugly all year? And no. Remember, this is the reason why I sit on the sidelines for the first month of January. Like, I generally am not participating in the first month of the year. I'll work with my kids, you know, close friend of mine or brother-in-law. I'll sit down with them over price action like that, but I'm not actively trying to get in here and try to whip up on anybody.

[01:15:15] It's just I'm waiting for the first week to get through in February, and it's usually the first Tuesday of every February. That's when I'm I go in there. Now, why that? It's just something I've always done. It's just that's— I set myself a parameter, said, okay, I'm not going to start on a Monday, I'm going to start on a Tuesday, and it's going to be in February. So that's, that's what I've always been doing. It allows that first month— because there's so many people they're eager to get out here and try to make a lot of money, so they're willing to put down some heavy bets, like heavy-handed bets.

[01:15:56] And they get sitting over the holidays and they think to themselves, yeah, I really think the market's going to do this or that. So they, they form this opinion, this sentiment really builds up, and market makers know this. They know there's a huge shift in market sentiment and big bets are going to be placed because you're starting the brand new year off. Everybody has a lot of energy, the most energy in the beginning of the year, especially if you're impatient, you're greedy. You're going to do what?

[01:16:24] You're going to go out there and just start plunking down trades and put down big risk. And that equates to what you see here on the regular. Now, in the last couple years, we've had some pretty good Januarys where the market delivery has been pretty, pretty handsome actually, but This year we've seen why I have done this for 3 decades. It's just something that I don't want to be a heavy-handed participant in during the first month of the year. I, I don't— I'm not worried about giving up what goes on in January.

[01:16:56] I've never looked at a January that moved so well, so big, and said I'm changing what I do every year because it moved really good this year. I, I don't— I see it fail to deliver on a very good or efficient means on the regular than it does sporadically a good January. In other words, it's more likely to deliver what you're seeing this year— sloppy, choppy, indecisive, weird, wild opening range gaps where you open way far away from previous day's settlement, which causes, you know, wonderful volatility.

[01:17:30] But when you add to the geopolitical things that's going around the world, it just makes it a lot more complex. Excuse me. A lot more complex for very short-term, higher time frame— I'm sorry, lower time frame precision. It spends a lot of time back and forth over previous candles, and I don't like that. I like to have low resistance liquidity runs where it leaves things. There's your liquidity, okay, where it leaves pools of inefficiency here. That's the type of price action I'm looking for when I'm trading.

[01:18:05] So if the market is not like— it's not leaving a porous wake behind it when it's running up or down, that means leaving inefficiencies like this, chances are I'm not, I'm not betting my heaviest hand, that's for certain. But if we're spending a lot of time back and forth over top of previous candles, that, that's what I refer to as fuzzy. It's like fuzzy, it like shares— it's sharing the same space with previous ranges. So to me, that— I don't want that. That's not algorithmic. That is intervention.

[01:18:38] That is them working previous ranges, constantly going after orders because they're greedy. They're trying to knock everybody out. And when they're knocking these individuals out, they're accumulating that. And because of the uncertainty around the world— we're going to bomb this one, we're not going to bomb that one, we're going to invade this person's country, we're going to take that person's country, we're going to take their resources and sell it for personal profit in a bank account they have and call it legal. Like, there's so much nonsense that's going on right now, like, it's, it's bewildering.

[01:19:06] So I just think that if any time in history that you wanted to have a very simple approach to trading, it needs to be right now, because making it complex or complicated is the worst thing you can do. You just need to know where is it going to go next, okay? If you don't know where that is Well, you're in trouble. So I think that's about it for today. I think I covered, uh, a really good sound approach. That's where you start, what you're looking for, how to transition from regular trading hours, electronic trading hours, what information you're trying to derive from that, developing the range, um, determining what that range is going to be.

[01:19:51] In pre-session and how it's used. And using the opening range, when we get it at 9:30, we opened, we immediately went outside of it here after almost 3/4 of a run to it, then use the opening price, which is very sensitive, just like the midnight Eastern Time opening price. That is many times a, like a magnet. It's very sensitive. It also helps with the daily directional bias. Here we have the open, it trades up, there's your Judas, it breaks down, hits it there. And then breaks lower.

[01:20:22] Your first presented fair value gap would be here. Yes, there's a small little gap there. I would not— and I would not use that because we had this box here I highlighted. It displaced into that there. So this candlestick's low, this candlestick's high. Let me show it to you like this. Let's go Purple Rain today. That's such a good song, man. Don't you miss Prince? That man was a genius. 11 instruments, musician, singer. What can you say bad about the guy except that he ain't here anymore?

[01:21:07] So there's, there's my election for, uh, first presented fair value gap. And it's because I told you the inefficiency from regular trading hours, it displaced into that. And this would be just viewed as a regular old breakaway common gap. That's why I wouldn't use it. And it doesn't have that much of a range versus this one. Okay, so I taught you a whole bunch of stuff today, told you where the market was going to go before it did it, why it would do it, and how it was going to handle it.

[01:21:32] And then there you go, there's your chart, there's your delivery. First step is this: if you can't see where it's going, why it's going there, you can't do entries, you can't place stops, you can't profit, you can't keep an account. You become insolvent. That means you blow the account. That means you have to reset or stay in demo in misery and just complain on the internet about everybody doesn't make money, it's all fake, because you can't do it. Okay, so there's a right way of doing it and there's a wrong way of doing it.

[01:22:07] And this is my answer to the people that have been leaving comments in my emails. And some of them have been very clever about what they title— they title their emails to get my attention. But, uh, this is what you start with, okay? You start with this. And in the beginning, you'll still feel like you're lost, but show up every day, go through the charts, do the same thing every day, every single day, the same thing every single day. And then over time How much time?

[01:22:36] I don't know. It's how much time are you placing in the study of it? Because if you're only in here trying to do it for a couple minutes a day and you think it should be just like that, you're not teachable. You're not being— you're not being realistic. And I can tell you that if I did one-on-one, which I would never do again, ever, ever, ever, ever— the level of entitlement in today's world is crazy. But back then, when people were you know, better sober-minded individuals and decent folks, they would stay with me for a week and I would work with them.

[01:23:10] And sometimes they would come off with a little aggression in the beginning, like, you know, do you think I can make this much money by next week? I'm like, no. And they'd be like, well, you know, one guy literally come out and say, well, if you came out with that and told me right away, I don't think I want to do this now. I said, that's great that you think that. That's actually a good thing. And we parted ways, and that's the way it was. Um, he later came back because he tried to do other stuff, but, uh, he admitted that he wasn't ready and he was being impatient.

[01:23:39] He thought he knew everything. And I told him, I said, it was good that you did that because you became teachable, much like that Jade Master parable where the guy comes up and keeps interrupting the, the teacher. The teacher knows what you, you're supposed to learn. But you can't appreciate the lesson until you feel it. And that's what this is. You got to be in here watching the candlesticks form, where they're going to reach for. Now you're going to do it, you're going to pick the wrong inefficiencies, you're going to pick the wrong high and low, it's not going to do what you think it's going to do, and you're going to get frustrated in the beginning.

[01:24:13] That's okay, that's part of it, that's normal. You're not going to come out here on a live stream and say this is what it's going to do and it does it, okay? And not in the beginning, you won't be able to do that. But in the beginning You want to submit yourself to the process that, you know, it's normal for you not to know what you're doing, but you're going to discover things that repeat over and over and over again. And you have to give yourself the time, give yourself the permission, allow yourself to discover what it is that you don't know.

[01:24:39] You'll hear my words in lectures that you swore I did not say when I said them. I don't edit those videos. They're up there. Some of them are almost a decade old now. In August they will be. Think about that. Mentorship 2016, in August I started that, and all those lectures were being recorded that summer. All those things that people listen to— I get emails all the time. Every month I get emails. I swore I thought I did a good job of taking notes, and I listened to this video and it's something I, I thought I discovered on my own.

[01:25:17] I was like, I want to come back and talk to you, Michael. And I've heard it, you said it. And it's like, I don't remember you saying that. It's like you put it in there after the fact, like, like you edited it, right? These lectures are very, very, very dense. I'm com— I'm compressing 30 years into hours, and you can't appreciate those lessons until you go through the process of listening to what I teach. Go through that process of saying, I'm not interested in making money right now because once I learn a skill set, I can make as much money as I want.

[01:25:49] That's the sober mentality. That's a mature aptitude about what it is you're trying to take on as an endeavor. You're not trying to make money real quick and then quit. You're trying to have a skill set that feeds you and your family and changes the landscape of your family tree. You want to be able to teach this to your children. You want to be able to teach it to their children. If you're fortunate enough to live long enough. But you can't get there unless you submit yourself to a process.

[01:26:18] And the process is don't try to pick entries yet, just try to pick the direction. Where is it drawing to? And then once you have that, then you can go back through in hindsight and say, what do I see in here that makes sense? Do you see a fair value gap? Do you see them running back to a breaker before it runs? Do you see a silver bullet? Do you see, uh, the market maker models in price action? In the beginning you won't because you just started looking at it.

[01:26:51] Are you going to give yourself a fair chance? Because if you're not, you can't blame me. You can't blame the other people out there. You know, I'm not scamming you. They're not lying for me. I'm not, you know, I'm not selling anything. I'm teaching everything on this YouTube channel and telling you not to buy my books because it's already here. It's already on this YouTube channel. Don't buy my books. Find one author that tells you to do that. There ain't one. I don't know what else to tell you.

[01:27:24] I mean, either you want to listen or you're not going to listen, but if you don't know how to see where the price is going to go you have no chance in any discipline in trading. Zero. Absolutely zero. Now, if you are a student of another discipline and you start implementing these types of things I'm teaching, they're very simplistic things. They're, they're elementary in the beginning, but they don't feel elementary because you equate the outcome of being right or wrong about what you think is going to happen in price, and then you vilify yourself you ridicule yourself, you beat yourself up and say, I don't know how to do this, you know, I'm probably wasting my time.

[01:28:03] If you're thinking that, your subconscious is remembering it and it's feeling the symptoms of what you're doing to yourself. You're, you're beating yourself up with negative self-talk, whether you vocalize it from your mouth or you're just thinking it. You're feeling it as you tell yourself. Imagine if your mother and father got in your face and said You are a worthless piece of shit. You never do anything right. But later in the day, after you do a good chore, they say, all right, good boy. I love you, son.

[01:28:36] I love you, daughter. Are you gonna feel warm and fuzzy with that? No. Your subconscious is going to say, don't trust that, because remember what he said to you earlier? We hold on to negative. That's why horror movies are the one of the highest genre watched. The biggest box office— horror, horror. There's more horror movies produced over the course of a year than any other genre. Why? Because the human psyche, we cling to negativity. Look at, look at what's spewed out on social media every day by everybody.

[01:29:07] And the average person has over 300 negative thoughts enter their mind. That's the average. If you're chronic about it, it's probably double. So if you're whipping yourself up in the beginning because you think you should do it quicker, learn it faster, I'm telling you, I'm probably the oldest guy out here that's gone through all of the terrible things in the beginning. I tried to do the self-teaching, I tried to do all that stuff, I tried everybody else's stuff, okay? And I promise you, there was no troll out there ever and never will be that's ever been harder on me than I was on myself.

[01:29:51] And I still carry the scar tissue. I did it to myself. And I can tell you, when you do it for a length of time, it's hard to get rid of it. So you don't want to begin with that. Find the positive. Say, I, I didn't do too many things wrong today, and I learned something from this experience. That's how you would say it if you didn't do it right, if it didn't come to an outcome that you expected, or it distinctly did everything contrary to what you expected.

[01:30:20] Find a way to tell yourself internally and vocally, and then record it in your journal, that it was a positive expectation— because I'm not expecting experience— even though it didn't meet your expectation. Find a way to talk positive about it because you will tear your shit up from Jump Street. You will do it wrong if you do anything negative. If you do it negative-wise in the beginning, fill yourself up with negative toxic thinking, you literally are giving yourself no chance in the beginning. But you're feeding your mind toxicity and you'll be fearful of putting up any real effort after that, because why should you bother?

[01:31:06] And by default, what will happen is your subconscious will demand that it becomes easier, or you disconnect and you stop doing it. You don't hear Mark Douglas talk like that. No other person with a psychological book in trading teaches you that. But this is coming from someone that's lost fortunes trying to do something that had no outcome at all doing toxic thinking along the process. The first thing you have to fix is how you think. How you think changes everything. And if you think that you knew everything, if you think you knew how you're going to be taught, you're going to fail.

[01:31:48] I promise you, there has never been a trader that came up and said, this is how I should be taught, and I'm going to learn it this way, that way, this way, that way, and, uh, that's it. No, they had to submit to a process. They had to give up their expectations. They had to suppress their desires, their immediate gratification. They had to defer all that, and they had to change the way they think. That means they had to adopt patience. And by not having the concern of being right or wrong in the beginning, it frees you up to discover, wow, I am learning.

[01:32:23] It doesn't feel like it the first few times you sit down and you start doing these things. Just watching price action, what's the benefit of that? Really? Look at anything. When you watch doctors, you go to medical school, you're watching real doctors do it before you— they put a scalpel in your hand. Would you leave your toy alone? I'm on here live streaming. Nobody wants to hear your piggy. Not now. Scott ran up on me with her little, uh, it's a blue rubber pig. You squeeze it, it oinks.

[01:33:02] She runs up against, you know, then presses against my leg like, okay, it's time to play, Dad, you've been on here too long. When Bailey was here, as soon as I would start talking in the microphone, she would just get up and walk into the bedroom. She would give me, you know, privacy. These little ones, they're like They're impatient. They're like what I'm describing to you not to be like. Don't be impatient. Give yourself time. But anyway, I told you I'd hang out till, uh, 10 o'clock.

[01:33:24] It is what it is. What I've shared today, if I would have had this given to me when I first started, it would have saved me a lot of heartache. It would have gave me direction. It would have gave me a procedure to do every single day, go through the, the motions of determining where it's going to reach for, and then after the day completes or the session completes. Okay, what do I mean by that? Around noon, go back and look at the morning session from 7 o'clock in the morning to 9:30 and from 9:30 to noon and go back through and see how the market reached for inefficiency, how it reached for liquidity, how it expanded in its daily range, what side of the marketplace was it working towards most, how fast was it easy giving up the desire to go higher or lower.

[01:34:10] Like, all these things, you need to log that stuff. And then because you're doing it every day, you're implementing a process that you don't see the benefit of in the beginning, but time doing it will yield the experience that you don't appreciate by me saying this is how you get here. How do you know where it's going to go there next? How do you know? How did you know that? Because I submitted myself to these things, and it wasn't fun in the beginning. It was very, very boring.

[01:34:40] It was no promise of anything of usefulness at the end of it. I just submitted myself to— I'm gonna, I'm gonna study what price does and what it's looking to do and how it does it and what does it behave like and how does it look when it does it. And then I noticed that there was repeating things. And look here and look here, and that's how it happened. And maybe he'll do the same thing for you. I believe he can do it. Do you believe it?

[01:35:08] But if you're not going to make an attempt to try to do it at all, why should he? So with that, I'm going to wish you all a very pleasant day. I'm sure I didn't tickle the fancy of most of you, but for your, um, for the groups that are brand new Looking for what you're supposed to do in the beginning. It's all you're doing, trying to get a feel for where it's reaching for. That's the first lesson I ever taught, and that's what you're doing now.

[01:35:34] The draw on liquidity, where should it reach? And then you fill in the gaps, go back and look at how the PD arrays formed. And then the ones that jump off the chart at you in hindsight study, not live— some of you want, you want the silver bullet to appear and be able to spot it right away because you understand the idea but you don't know how to implement it real time, and you're getting frustrated because you can't enter a trade based on it, and you equate that as it doesn't work or you can't ever do it, and you're just simply jumping ahead of several steps.

[01:36:03] You can't do that, okay? Just because you signed up for medical school and you, you have your own scalpel, they don't say, oh, look at this, okay, look at— hey Todd, we're glad you came today. You got your scalpel on you? Yeah, grab it. Reach in your backpack right now, grab that. Come up here and cut this guy's ass up because look He needs to have something removed, and it's a growth. So we're going to give you a crash course. Get out here and do your best job.

[01:36:29] Just do it. How you feel about that? You feel confident today? Come on, Todd. Come on, let's give it up for Todd. Come on. Nobody's doing that. Nobody's expecting that. And you— but you expect that. You expect that you're going to sit down and be able to read it all. No, it's not gonna happen like that. So you have to submit yourself to it. Okay, in closing, When we have the opening range from where we open at 9:30, difference between where we settled the previous day at regular trading hours— that was this line here.

[01:36:58] Okay, let me go back to regular trading hours. There's the opening this morning at 9:30, and that's the settlement price yesterday, the close of that green candle. That's these 2, these 2 lines here. Okay, I'm gonna just shade it in the blue blocks just to highlight that. And then we'll go back to electronic trading hours. You will find that when I was teaching on opening range on indices, that when we open and we create the gap, trade up into half gap, 3/4 gap, 1/4 gap, if it breaks outside of the, the gap, the open, and starts to run then you have to respect the fact that it's probably going to leave that open.

[01:37:45] And as I mentioned, I said if we go through here, then I would abandon the idea. And I said this during this live stream, by the way, if it went through here and sliced through that on a closing basis, then I would abandon this gap closure portion up here during the morning session and it would remain heavy. And you can see that happening here. So again, I'm not trying to pat myself on the back. I'm not trying to— I'm not trying to brag because believe me, I could be doing a whole lot of things here today.

[01:38:10] And brag. That's not what I'm doing. I'm trying to teach you as if you were sitting right next to me. This is how I talked to the guys and the gals that came to me in the '90s when they spent the whole week with me. I did this the first day and watched their eyes just be like, I don't know what— I don't know what you're telling me to do, right? Because it's the first time we're sitting down. And then the next day we'd sit down and say, okay, now you tell me where the settlement price is Where's the opening price at today's regular trading hours?

[01:38:39] And mark up on where is it, where's the range, and where's half of it, where's the 3/4 of it, where's the lower quadrant of it. And then we watch. Do you think it's going to do a full closure of that? If it doesn't do a full closure of that, where's it going to go to next? That's what I just did here. But then the next day, the 3rd day, when they're doing it, I'm incorporating a entry mechanism, an order block, something to that effect. Okay, selling short on a stop, so selling weakness.

[01:39:09] Buying on a stop, buying strength. That was my entry mechanism for them. I was not teaching them what you're learning from me today, but directionally wise, it all stems from that same stuff. Where is it drawing to? There's, there's your secret. That's the secret ingredient. Where is it drawing to? If you know that You can trade retail concepts if you get the draw right. Think about what I just said there. If you know where the market's going, you can trade any old thing. Flip a quarter and put a realistic stop loss on it, okay?

[01:39:43] And there it is. Look at it. Opening price hits it and never came back. Never came back. So barring some crazy sell-off where it just doesn't want to come back at all and it just melts today, I would expect, you know, gravitating back into this eventually before, um, the close of the week. That doesn't mean it gets to that level, but gravitating back to first presented fair value gap because they're a magnet. They're like new week opening gaps. They're like new day opening gaps. And please stop emailing me asking me about what are you going to do when NASDAQ goes 24 hours trading, you're going to see new weapons.

[01:40:28] I have stuff, folks, I promise you. They have nothing that's going to thwart me. Nothing. They have nothing. Trust me, okay? I don't run out of tools. I like Bob Ross. He has that whole toolbox of paintbrushes behind him, but he's only using 3 because he can make a whole world exist from his hands with just 3 paintbrushes. You need to draw on liquidity. You need to be able to frame risk. That means where a stop loss is. And you need an entry mechanism. There's your 3 paintbrushes.

[01:40:55] Which paintbrush are you going to use? You're all going to use the same canvas. We're all looking at the same chart, the same amount of time, the reference of where price has been, where is it likely to go. Everybody has that. It's not hiding from anyone. We all have the same information, but knowing what to do with that separates profitability and unprofitability. There's a process, there's a procedure, there's protocols you have to implement in the beginning, and then you will find what PD Array that you like best that's easy for you to notice in price action.

[01:41:31] And when it doesn't exist in price action while you're watching price deliver, you do nothing and you're content with doing nothing because your model did not tell you to do anything. That's the problem with my community, because I have so many models, I have so many applications, so many PD Arrays, you get asked her because you maybe used a PD Array and then you made a decision to consciously change from using Silver Bullet or an order block to breaker or Model 2022 or whatever else I come up with or whatever I've, I've said, okay, a Reaper, you know, um, then you abandon that and you're looking for one specific thing that you think that you feel led to do.

[01:42:15] A new entry model, a new PD Array, okay, or a trading routine that this is what I'm going to look for. But the one you stopped using delivered, and the one you waited for didn't deliver, and you missed the trade, and it runs like this. And then what are you going to do? You're going to find fault with me. I, I blame ICT. No, you have to be— you have to be responsible. You have to take the responsibility. You want all the credit when you do it right.

[01:42:45] You want all the credit. But when you make the mistakes, you want to be able to fault my system, my concepts, my teaching, my personality. You don't see a fault with that? It's you. You're the problem. I'm not the problem. My system, my concepts are not the problem. It's you, the operator, using them incorrectly or just simply not knowing what to do. And you have to be responsible because I'm quick to respond to anybody that talks out their ass about it because I will be able to show you that you're the problem.

[01:43:17] But if you want to come at me and just talk nonsense, you know, I'll have fun with you a little while, but if there's nothing beyond that, then I'm going to mute you. You can still watch what I'm doing, but I'm not going to listen to your bullshit. So that's it. I'll give you 8 more minutes past time I told you I would stay. And then you can go on YouTube comment section, or you can go on Twitter and tell me you didn't learn anything, it was a waste of time, and whatever.

[01:43:43] Until I talk to you next time, enjoy your Thursday, be safe, and I'll probably talk to you again on