ICT Price Action Chronicles - MOC Crushing The Buying & Selling Pressure Myth

Date: 2026-08-05

We’re looking at the E-mini S&P because some of you still can’t accept that these concepts work beyond the NASDAQ.

I know a lot of you prefer the smoother price action of the E-mini S&P, and that’s fine. To each their own.

But in keeping with what I covered in yesterday’s Market on Close Macro lecture, if you haven’t watched that video yet, go watch it first.

This one will make much more sense afterward.

Together, the two lectures are roughly an hour at normal speed.

Yesterday’s lecture gives you the context, the rules, what to measure, which range matters, and how price should behave.

Now I’m going to apply that framework directly to yesterday’s Market on Close.

And I know some of you are thinking:

“Bro, you’re showing me a tiny afternoon move while the market is moving all over the place.”

I don't think you need to write a PhD-level thesis.

Just document what stands out to you and reflects your understanding.

As you get better, your journaling will naturally become more refined.

Could I turn these slides into an encyclopedia?

Absolutely.

But I'm trying to show you how simple the process can be.

Save your journal entries and review them at the end of the week, at the end of the month, or whenever the market feels sloppy and doesn't seem to be moving cleanly from one algorithmic level to another.

Looking back through your own examples will remind you that those conditions are temporary.

The market will eventually return to the type of price action where predictive analysis becomes much clearer.

This is again for Tuesday’s New York PM session.

I’m reviewing the final hour of Regular Trading Hours from August 4th, 2026.

And obviously, today is Wednesday, August 5th.

Here we go.

That’s the entire range.

And I’m showing you this measurement because it’s important.

We’re going to come back to it later.

For now, take a mental snapshot of it.

The low right here is the 9:30 a.m. Eastern opening price from Tuesday's Regular Trading Hours.

Measure that range from the 9:30 a.m. open all the way to the 4:00 p.m. close.

These are the two levels I want you to focus on.

Take out your phone, zoom in, and take a screenshot of this level and this level.

This range is measured from the low to the highest high.

And I already know some of you are going to say,

"But you wouldn't have known that in advance."

I'm going to show you how to check yourself before you wreck yourself.

Just keep those levels in mind.

They'll become important when I show you how I measure the full daily range from the high to the low.

I'm going to bring those levels down to the 1-minute chart.

So don't get confused or discombobulated.

This higher-timeframe information is the framework I'm working from.

And in a moment, I'm going to talk about that high—to the tick.

Now, this small section here is the last hour of trading, from 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time to 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time.

That's the final hour of Regular Trading Hours.

Just like we did with Monday, we're going to zoom into that section.

Here we are.

The area is shaded in light yellow.

Over here is the beginning of the PM session—1:30 p.m. Eastern Time.

Always set your charts to New York local time.

The trading session begins at 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time.

At 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time, the two-hour lunch period begins.

It ends at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Time, which is right here.

This is the same session structure we annotated yesterday.

It’s going to be important in a moment.

With those stripped away, we no longer have the daily range high and low levels on the chart.

They're not visible right now.

But I'm going to bring them back in shortly.

I added that vertical line so we can focus on this specific point.

See it right there?

That marks the beginning of the PM session—the 30-minute opening window from 1:30 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time.

Just like Regular Trading Hours has an opening range from 9:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m., the PM session has its own opening range.

So this is where your analysis should begin.

Okay, now watch—this is important.

Once you identify that starting point, your job is to determine how price is likely to behave from that moment forward.

If you’re brand new, have very little experience, or you’re just checking out the material for the first time, some of this may not make sense yet.

But we’ve been studying sessions, specific macros, and very specific times of day where price tends to follow a repeatable script.

So when this time arrives, I’m thinking:

How is everything that happens after this point going to influence those final 10 minutes?

That’s the framework.

And for those who haven’t seen it yet, I already had a large NASDAQ short earlier this morning.

I’ll cover that in the next video.

3:00 p.m. marks the beginning of the final hour of Regular Trading Hours.

That’s the entire shaded area here—from 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time.

Notice the buy-side liquidity pool sitting right here.

Price rallied up and then started hovering just below that high.

As we get closer to 3:50 p.m., it becomes reasonable to anticipate that price may push higher and take that buy-side liquidity.

But Tuesday had already been an all-day rally.

When the market has been moving in one direction for that long, it’s considered long in the tooth—meaning the move may be getting tired.

At that point, it becomes reasonable to expect either consolidation or, in this case, a retracement.

So as I was watching this area, price dropped directly into this small buy-side imbalance, sell-side inefficiency right around the beginning of the 3:00 p.m. hour.

That little high, to the tick, isn't random.

There's science behind it.

We'll come back to that.

For now, focus on this dealing range low and dealing range high.

Why are those the dealing range?

Because this is the low established at 1:30 p.m., and this is the highest high of the day.

It's that simple.

By the time we reach 3:00 p.m., those two levels are already known.

This low is lower than this one, this one, and this one.

So it clearly defines the dealing range low.

There’s only one high above us at this point, and it’s the current intraday high.

It hasn’t been confirmed as the final daily high yet, but we’re already in the last hour of trading.

So where is price smooth?

Up here.

Where is it jagged?

Down here.

The expectation is to take out that high and run the buy-side liquidity.

But because price has been rallying all day, we then anticipate it coming off the high and settling lower.

So we’re looking for a rally above these highs first.

I teach that all the time.

But again, how far should price rally?

That’s where we bring in the grid.

We measure and grade the dealing range from the low to the high and project those levels forward across the rest of the session.

Now, why am I using this particular small dealing range?

Because price pulled back into a buy-side imbalance, sell-side inefficiency and traded almost exactly to equilibrium of this high-to-low range.

That makes this dealing range relevant for projecting the closing-session move.

See that?

Price traded down into discount, getting as close to equilibrium as possible without breaching the midpoint, while still respecting the buy-side imbalance, sell-side inefficiency.

So when price pulls back like this and leaves these highs intact, I’m anticipating a rally to clear the buy-side liquidity, followed by rejection and a move lower.

That would be the Market on Close script.

And I already know what you’re thinking:

“How do you know that?”

I don’t know it yet.

I want to see price begin running toward that high first.

Until then, I don’t want to short it, and I don’t want to go long.

I want price to trade up into this high.

Now look at the measurement from this low to this high.

If you add the -0.5 level to the Fib, as I’ve been teaching, it projects this level here.

What you’re going to do is take that old intraday high and grade it.

There are two ranges there.

You’ll see me do this in the recording at the end of the video.

Now we’re breaking it down so you understand what I was doing, why I was doing it, and how it relates directly to yesterday’s logic.

This isn’t a reinvention or a distortion of the framework.

It’s simply the same process carried forward.

So in the final portion of the day, we define the relevant dealing range and use that measurement here.

That gives you this level right here. 7,786 even.

Once price did this—and I identified that as the halfway point in the trade—I entered short right inside this gap.

That gap is a buy-side imbalance, sell-side inefficiency, with a small volume imbalance inside it, so you need to account for that as well.

If we're expecting prices to move lower during the final 10 minutes, remember, these are surgical strikes.

That's what the Market on Close setup is about.

It's not about saying, "Look how smart I am," or comparing yourself to someone who happened to catch a 200-handle move.

That's not the point.

I'm showing you the precision—the timing, the script the market follows, and the same Market on Close logic I've been teaching for years.

The market starts pulling back and trades below this level.

At that point, anything between this high and that high becomes a viable area to look for a short.

You could use this wick here—anything from its midpoint and above would be ideal.

Now here’s where it gets interesting.

Price smashes down through this fair value gap and closes below it.

According to ICT’s visual order flow rules, that close is significant.

No gimmicks.

No special software, heat maps, Level 2, or exotic charting required.

Look at this volume imbalance.

If price violates its low and closes below it, that helps validate the bearish bias.

That means you have to know the direction.

Otherwise, these concepts are going to fail in your hands.

In the beginning, when you can’t determine bias consistently, that’s normal.

It doesn’t mean the concepts failed.

It doesn’t mean the logic is inferior.

It doesn’t mean the algorithm changed.

It simply means you, as the operator, don’t know what you’re doing yet.

And that’s okay.

It takes time to learn this.

Now, this validates the bearish idea.

This candlestick opens, trades up into the volume imbalance, and fails to reach consequent encroachment of the gap.

That gap is defined by this candlestick’s low and this candlestick’s close because there’s a volume imbalance.

According to the candlestick rules I teach, what does that tell you?

Bullish or bearish?

Bearish.

So that strengthens the idea that price already took the high and is now setting up for the move lower as we approach the 3:50–4:00 p.m. Market on Close window.

And on this very candle that starts the 3:50 macro, the algorithm starts running.

Is price doing all those things, or is it doing exactly what I’m telling you it should be doing?

The run starts.

This candlestick opens, trades directly up into the inversion fair value gap, and reacts.

See that?

I entered short on this candlestick while price was trading inside this small area.

Price opens, rallies into the inversion fair value gap, fails to reach consequent encroachment, and then breaks lower aggressively.

All of that happens within the first minute of the 3:50 p.m. Market on Close Macro.

Now look to the left.

We have a small sell-side liquidity pool here.

Then another here.

Relative equal lows.

More sell-side here.

And more sell-side here.

Finally, we have the PM session dealing range low, established from the 1:30–2:00 p.m. opening range.

That's the lowest low of the range extending from the PM session open to the intraday high—which we just swept over here.

Now, what if I had been stopped out?

If price had continued higher, then once it broke back below this level, I would simply use this fair value gap to enter short again.

That's the process.

You're never going to eliminate imperfection.

You're always operating in an imperfect environment, even while aiming for perfect execution.

As I've said before, perfection is a target—not a destination.

You'll never arrive at it.

Price delivery, however, can be remarkably precise.

And in this case, it was.

Our objective is simply to take the lowest-hanging fruit.

Now let’s go back to this high-to-low range.

Equilibrium is right here.

To reach for a discount PD Array, price could draw to this sell-side liquidity, this one, or this one.

But before it reaches the deeper sell-side liquidity, look at what sits right here.

A clean buy-side imbalance, sell-side inefficiency.

If we expect price to continue lower and take out these relative equal lows—all resting around the same price—then this inefficiency could become an inversion fair value gap.

And that’s exactly what we want to see.

Price starts rolling aggressively down through it.

This candle opens near the low, trades up, but fails to leave a body in the upper half.

According to the order flow rules I teach, that’s bearish behavior represented directly in the candlesticks.

Price then breaks lower aggressively, trades through this liquidity pool, then this one, and finally takes out the low right here.

Now let’s get into the science behind it a little more deeply.

Remember the range I showed you at the beginning—the one measuring the day’s high and low?

If this is going to become the high of the day, and price begins breaking down with that qualifying reaction from the inversion fair value gap, then you can use this as your reference.

My experience allowed me to anticipate the reversal earlier.

But if this were your entry instead, that would still be perfectly valid.

We’ll use that.

Once price starts breaking down and takes out that low, you can begin treating this as the high of the day and that morning low as the daily range low.

From that daily range, you get the upper octant and upper quadrant levels.

Now we’re getting into sixteenths.

Split the full daily range in half.

From there, the octant represents an eighth of the range.

And halfway between an octant and a quadrant gives you a sixteenth.

That sixteenth level comes in at 7,761.75.

The actual low prints at 7,761.25.

That’s a difference of just 2 ticks.

Two ticks, baby.

While the trade is open, you don’t see me moving my stop back once I’ve adjusted it.

That’s a good habit.

Once you commit to a tighter trailing stop, stick with it.

If it stops you out, that’s fine.

When price eventually came back up and knocked me out, who cares?

I had already captured the lion’s share of the move.

Price did exactly what I had taught, recorded, and demonstrated.

The sweet spot inside this fair value gap, combined with this specific time window, is where that multiplication analogy comes into play.

From above this high down toward this high, I didn’t capture the absolute extreme because I was focused on showing you the measurements in real time.

That way, it isn’t just polished hindsight after the fact.

I teach price action.

Price action is not trading.

Price action is the study of repeating phenomena, measured through time and price, without monetary risk or reward.

Over time, if you conclude that these concepts work often enough to risk money on them, that decision is yours.

If you lose money, that responsibility is yours.

If you make money, that is also the result of your own execution.

I’m not licensed to give trading advice, and I have no interest in doing that.

What I’ve done for decades is teach people how to read price action.

Some students have become very successful.

Others never developed the ability to apply it consistently.

That does not necessarily mean the concepts failed.

Many times, the operator simply never developed the required skill.

I went through the same thing during my first few years.

I wanted to learn everything quickly.

But you cannot accelerate this process.

You may want to sit beside an experienced trader and simply watch every entry, stop loss, partial, and target.

But ultimately, you have to develop the ability to recognize and execute these ideas yourself.

The real edge is strongest in the hands of the trader who understands the concepts, recognizes the correct time, and knows how to execute them.

Hypothetically, say 10,000 people are all trying to short inside this tiny range.

They’re not all going to get filled.

So as a teacher, the best thing I can do is focus on the process and the rules.

Then you judge for yourself whether those rules consistently hold up in the market.

If they don’t, move on.

I only want people here who are willing to listen, study, and take responsibility for their own results, because I cannot be responsible for your trading outcome.

That’s why I teach the way I do.

In the United States, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission regulates this space.

Back in the 1990s, when I was posting market opinions on America Online, I wasn’t using proper risk disclaimers.

They contacted me, explained the requirements, and essentially gave me a warning.

I never wanted that issue again.

So the distinction is always clear:

You’re never entering a trade because I told you to.