NQ Futures Review & 1st Presented Reflection FVG

Date: 2026-09-08

[00:02] ICT: Welcome back, folks. So we’re going to do a review of today. I’ll try to be swift and straight to the point. I saw some questions, and hopefully I’ll clarify a few things and also introduce you to a PD Array that I talked about in a Trader Roundup Space with Kit and the gang. So if you’d lend me your attention for just a few minutes.

Displacement distinguishes first-presented FVGs

[00:43] ICT: So we’re looking at last Friday’s trading. In my annotations during the Part 4 lecture, you can see this gap here labeled as a First Presented Fair Value Gap, and it is a First Presented Fair Value Gap. But there’s a distinction between a First Presented Fair Value Gap and a First Presented Fair Value Gap with Displacement.

I’ve taught both of them, and they’re each an individual PD Array. The distinction is that one has displacement. This gap here has no displacement. Displacement occurs when the Fair Value Gap is part of a price run that takes out a high or low, and that’s not happening here.

[01:34] ICT: Okay, this candlestick did not clear this high. This candlestick did not clear that low. But this candlestick is a First Presented Fair Value Gap with Displacement.

Now, if you extend this into the future, there’s inherently nothing wrong with that. It’s a usable PD Array. But if you recall how I explained these things, I’m going to place more emphasis on the first one that has displacement after 9:30 Eastern Time.

For the folks who were in the Trader Roundup Spaces, you’ll all know this, and I expect some of you who were in attendance to corroborate my story here. I know there are going to be people out there saying this wasn’t something I taught, when in fact it was.

Defining the opposing Reflection FVG

[02:24] ICT: It came by way of a Charter Member asking me a question about the First Presented Fair Value Gap. For instance, this here is a buy-side imbalance, sell-side inefficiency. Its characteristic is buy-side delivery with inefficiency on the sell side—in other words, an up-close candle.

The Charter Member asked whether there was any significance in looking at the first opposing Fair Value Gap. So if the First Presented Fair Value Gap here is a buy-side imbalance, sell-side inefficiency, then we would look for the very first SIBI that forms opposite to it.

[03:06] ICT: The opposite of that would be a SIBI—sell-side imbalance, buy-side inefficiency, or a down-close inefficiency candle. The First Presented Fair Value Gap with Displacement here is much more significant because it clears this high and this high.

So I’m going to place more emphasis on this one than on that one.

*But this gap here doesn’t lose its importance. In fact, it’s very crucial, because this is what helps me trade today’s high of the day. *

The very first SIBI that forms is right here.

ICT: That’s what’s being annotated there. Then we have a sell-side imbalance, buy-side inefficiency extending to this candlestick’s high. That’s what’s being shaded here.

If the very first presented Fair Value Gap after 9:30 is a buy-side imbalance, sell-side inefficiency, it’s crucial to go through price action after 9:30 and identify the very first opposing characteristic to that initial Fair Value Gap.

[04:45] ICT: In other words, if the first Fair Value Gap after 9:30 Eastern Time is created by an up-close candle, then you want to find the very first candle that creates a down-close inefficiency. That’s this one right here.

Now, by having that, notice it’s also forming during a macro time. See the timestamp? It’s 10:01 a.m. Eastern Time on Friday. So if we extend that PD Array into the future, we’re going to see several things. I’m going to walk you through it the long way because I want you to see all the little reactions and how price has used these PD Arrays.

ICT: You can see how price eventually gets up into the First Presented Reflection Fair Value Gap.

[06:00] ICT: What is a Reflection? It’s the reflection of Friday’s First Presented Fair Value Gap—the one a couple of you were complaining about. “Why did my First Presented Fair Value Gap change from what I showed last Friday?” Because I’m giving you more detail. I’m showing you the distinction between them.

*There are three PD Arrays being discussed here: the First Presented Fair Value Gap, the First Presented Fair Value Gap with Displacement and the First Presented Reflection Fair Value Gap. *I’m going to care more about the one with displacement.

But if the very first presented Fair Value Gap is a BISI, I’m going to look for the very first SIBI that forms after it. That’s the Reflection.

Why? Because when you look in a mirror, you think that’s what you look like to everyone else, but it isn’t. You’re seeing a reflection, and the reflection is opposite. Write a word on a piece of paper and hold it up to a mirror. When you try to read it in the reflection, it’s backwards, right?

[07:04] ICT: That’s why it’s called Reflection. It’s the mirror image of the very first presented Fair Value Gap.

Otherwise, if the First Presented Fair Value Gap is not a BISI, then there’s no significance to simply taking the first SIBI that forms. So it’s crucial that you understand this. I’m teaching three specific PD Arrays here, with context.

Macro-delivered Reflection FVG context

[07:38] ICT: ***It becomes even stronger when it’s a macro-delivered inefficiency. In this case, as we saw Friday, that’s what this First Presented Reflection Fair Value Gap was. ***Find that in my call too, by the way.

Then we have Monday’s trading. Price meanders around, goes through all this price action, trades down into the New Week Opening Gap, works through nested New Week Opening Gaps, and eventually comes right back up into that First Presented Reflection Fair Value Gap and trades inside it. On Tuesday at 1:00 a.m., price overshoots it slightly, but that’s okay.

RTH wick rejection and bias

[08:28] ICT: That’s a dead time—1:00 in the morning Eastern Time. Now we get into the nitty-gritty. This morning, which you watched me lecture on live with my son as price opened at 9:30, we opened here, traded up, and wicked above the Reflection Fair Value Gap.

That’s permissible. Price can wick above it and do the damage. But where does the candlestick close? It closes back down here.

There were two pieces of information I acted on. Number one, overnight we had already traded above previous week’s high, so previous week’s high was no longer important here.

[09:21] ICT: This line right here is something I used during Asia last night, and I was referring to this little piece of price action right there. I did a trade just trying to get in sync with price action. That’s all I was trying to do. You can see the executions here,

trading inside Friday, August 28th’s First Presented Fair Value Gap, and then aiming for these relative equal highs. Even though there was a higher high to the left, I was more concerned with these because they’re too smooth.

[10:11] ICT: You can see the exit right there, just above those highs, as I showed in today’s video recording. Right underneath my cursor, you’ll see it populate there. It’s simply me taking that liquidity out as a target. No big deal, nothing to go crazy about.

Now over here, we’re trading back up into that First Presented Reflection Fair Value Gap. Yes, it’s a lot of words to describe something, but now you know what it is, the distinction, and why that gap is there.

[10:52] ICT: If you extend Friday’s First Presented Fair Value Gap to the right, there’s nothing wrong with that. You’ll see price respect it. But you’ll see much more emphasis placed on the First Presented Fair Value Gap with Displacement. Why? Because it’s based on the logic I’ve taught and authored: an imbalance accompanied by displacement is much more significant to future price action than something that’s important simply because it was the first gap.

That original First Presented Fair Value Gap is still useful because it determines the Reflection Fair Value Gap, which is the first immediate opposing imbalance to whatever classification the original First Presented Fair Value Gap has.

[11:35] ICT: Some of you are scratching your heads saying, “Man, it just never ends.” I told you I have 81, so stop complaining. I warned you ahead of time. You do not need to know all of these things. But if you want to understand what I’m doing when I’m acting on them, this is what you get.

You don’t need them all. I just happen to know them all because I authored them. Now, if we look at what price was doing, it’ll make much more sense.

[12:01] ICT: Price opens at 9:30 here. We rally up and wick through last Friday’s First Presented Reflection Fair Value Gap. Then price comes down and closes below that smooth area from Asia that I traded toward and used as my target.

That gave me a lot of conviction to watch the midpoint of this wick right here. As long as we don’t put a candle body close above that midpoint, I’m going to try to be short.

ICT: We’re only concerned with the middle of that wick. Okay, and yes, extend it to the right. So there it is. We open here on the very next 1-minute candle, trade up through it, but we’re trading just to the Consequent Encroachment of last Friday’s First Presented Reflection Fair Value Gap.

[13:29] ICT: This requires some thought. It requires a great deal of independent effort on your part and me not holding your hand. But I told you, anything worth doing—if you want to be superior to everything else out there—is going to require a little effort on your part. You have to do your own due diligence.

You don’t need to know everything I know. You don’t need to know everything I teach. You just need to know what you’re going to use as a trader and limit it to the minimum number of moving parts.

[15:04] ICT: Okay, so now we’ve covered that and got the housekeeping out of the way. When the market rallied up there, I was changing my platform from six contracts down to one. As price came back down into this area, I entered right here. You can see the fill, and it’s part of this Bearish Fair Value Gap. There’s also a small Volume Imbalance at the high.

I knew that once price had moved that far away from this area—and I’ll show you in a second—this was my last opportunity to get in.

[15:43] ICT: Otherwise, it was going to tear off without me. Once price did this and then came back down below this candle’s close, it was done. Absolutely done.

The reason is that price had retraced half of this wick’s run-up and traded right to the midpoint level I had written on my notepad. Yeah, here’s my notepad right here. That’s what this is up here. That’s what’s written on it.

What I’m showing is where I ideally would’ve wanted to enter. At the same time, I was trying to change the contract size in the upper-left corner of the platform.

[16:21] ICT: It was set to six contracts, and you’ll see that in the recording I uploaded to YouTube this morning.

ICT: When price went up there, I wanted it in close proximity to that level, or at the very least in the lower half of last Friday’s First Presented Reflection Fair Value Gap, because that’s where the sensitivity is going to be with the bodies.

[16:55] ICT: If there’s going to be a body in there at all, I want it at the halfway point or lower. In this case, we opened, traded up, and then came all the way back down below this candle’s close. That is absolutely one of the strongest reversal patterns there is, and that’s what’s occurring here. I’ll get to that in a moment when we switch to the other chart.

Inside here, I saw this gap and said, “Okay, I’ll just take it here.”

[17:17] ICT: You’ll hear me say that, and then I point out that my entry is right inside that gap. I knew that as long as I’m inside it, I’m okay.

Then I’ll use this wick’s high as the stop because, once price has validated this wick and traded to half of it, the likelihood of coming back up here is low.

That’s one of the sweetest little things when you have the context, draw on liquidity, and directional bias correct. If you’re predicting rather than reacting—anticipating these things being there—you can get in very close to the high.

ICT: I wanted to teach Caleb and also share the lecture with you that post-holiday trading—yesterday was Labor Day Monday in the United States, and I live in the United States—can be a little different. The holiday had abbreviated trading hours, so trading stopped at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time, and the rest of the day we weren’t able to participate. That’s holiday volume.

[18:28] ICT: To me, that can skew the first trading day after the holiday. Price delivery can be a little weird. Sometimes it can be great, but most times it can be a little funky. So I elected to approach it that way, trade with one contract, and teach by practicing what I tell you to do in your own hands.

The market then rolls through Friday, September 4th’s First Presented Fair Value Gap with Displacement. That’s what this is here.

Weak retracement and downside delivery

[18:59] ICT: The next candle opens and trades up into its Consequent Encroachment, but fails to reach the 9:30 opening price. That’s weakness because it very well should’ve touched that level, and it didn’t. Then we get strong displacement lower.

I stated that if we had any retracement, I didn’t want to see the upper half of this entire range even tested. Listen to the recording; you’ll hear me say it as it’s happening. The market creates two little wicks here, then comes back up here and here.

[19:33] ICT: I stated that if we closed above the midpoint of this SIBI—from here to there, those two reference points creating the Fib 50% level—then price would go back to the 9:30 opening price. That was the if-then logic.

But because it didn’t do that, and the bodies stayed in the lower half of the lower half of this SIBI, that’s extremely weak—really, really weak. The market then trades lower, and there’s my exit right there at the Consequent Encroachment of the Suspension Block, which is shown over here and is part of the 7:00–9:00 a.m. Pre-Market Session.

[20:19] ICT: We’re going to switch charts in a second, and I’ll show you what else was there and why I liked that as my low-hanging-fruit objective. I saw comments asking, “Why did you close early?” Because you didn’t listen to the video. Come on. The whole context was how to trade—or engage with price action—after holiday volume.

You don’t want to go in with heavy leverage. You don’t want to go in thinking you know everything. And you don’t want to demand the best possible exit.

[20:48] ICT: So **half the gap—the Consequent Encroachment of the Regular Trading Hours Opening Range Gap **was 29,593.25. By having that level, we know price could trade to half the gap, which was up here. That’s what this level is right here.

[21:42] ICT: So we get a full gap closure, the market breaks down aggressively, clears out the 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. pre-market range low, takes out the London low, and then the lowest low overnight in Globex right there. It clears all of that out, and then even takes another lower low at 29,468 even.

I don’t regret showing you exactly what I’m teaching you to do. I never said this lecture was about how to engage price action after a holiday-volume day and extract the maximum possible trade.

[22:36] ICT: That’s not the title. The title was how to engage after holiday volume. That means how a developing student—especially a new student—should think about approaching price action so you don’t hurt yourself, build unrealistic expectations, and then feel like you’ve failed when the market doesn’t deliver.

Beautiful delivery there. Now let’s go over to another chart. We’re inside another layout that I taught you how to create, and here we’re looking at the relationship between the London session, a key overnight high, and then the 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. pre-market session.

London-to-New York session phases

[23:25] ICT: So we have trending in London, then we go into consolidation, then expansion, and then reversal during the New York session.

There are your four phases that I teach in the first lecture of the 2016 Mentorship playlist on YouTube. That’s where I’m getting that information from.

We bump that overnight high here, and all the things I talked about on the other chart are occurring here as well. Price is trading into last Friday’s First Presented Reflection Fair Value Gap, and the bodies stay completely outside the entire thing.

[24:17] ICT: They can’t even put a body inside of it. So is that bullish or bearish according to how I teach order flow? It’s bearish.

Again, here’s what I’m saying: we couldn’t leave a body up inside this gap. It’s only wick. Then half of the previous wick gets touched, and price only reaches the Consequent Encroachment of Friday’s First Presented Reflection Fair Value Gap.

I get it, folks. I get it. This is making your head spin. It feels like there are a lot of things going on and that it’s hard and complex.

[24:47] ICT: It’s complicated. Anything worth doing that’s superior to everything else is going to feel like that, and I don’t apologize for it.

[25:26] ICT: So there you go. Look at the upper half of the wick. It’s not being permitted to trade above it, and it shouldn’t. It shouldn’t even test the upper half. That came true.

[26:05] ICT: Price came down and traded into the Suspension Block I identified during the lecture with my son, and I used that as my exit strategy. I knew it could very easily continue lower and take out the 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. pre-market low, but it could also run right back up and overlap the area where I was already short because this was the day after a holiday. That’s why I taught what I taught this morning.

[26:36] ICT: The entire preface of that lecture—which you’re not privy to—came from a conversation with my son: “Okay, Dad, we had an abbreviated trading day. What do we do the next day?” Perfect. That’s a great lecture. Then you watched me demonstrate it this morning.

The market then goes through the process of moving even lower and taking out the London low.

[27:31] ICT: Nice delivery there. Then we come right back up into these gradient levels over here. Now look at the low between 7:00 and 9:00 and the high. These two candles here have the exact same high: 29,654.75.

All of these levels confirm and validate the PD Arrays that form on the downside after price drops.

You can see that this SIBI is absolutely valid, and this inefficiency here is anchored to these two levels, so it’s valid as well. You carry it forward by extending it to the right, the market breaks lower, and then we clear out the liquidity.

[28:26] ICT: As we moved into the latter portion of the day, this is where I said things can get wonky. It tends to happen in the morning session right out of the gate, so I was expecting more of this kind of behavior around the open. That’s why I was looking for a very easy low-hanging-fruit objective. The exit strategy I chose was the easiest objective to reach, and if price continued beyond where I exited, I was still completely fine with what I did.

[29:02] ICT: That’s low-hanging fruit. It’s also a protocol designed to prevent you from becoming greedy. If you’re uncertain about how price will book after a holiday, you don’t know, I don’t know, nobody knows. Everybody has pent-up aggression, fear, anxiety, whatever it might be, and you don’t know what the real market maker is going to do. They could simply keep price inside a tight little range and drive everybody nuts.

[29:48] ICT: They know everybody’s eager to get back in and start making money again—or at least try to. We just happened to get a reversal that traded lower, and then price came right back up into the First Presented Reflection Fair Value Gap of the day. Look at the levels it’s working from—the 7:00 to 9:00 gradient levels. Carry them forward. We’re also inside today’s First Presented Fair Value Gap. Price works inside it and then comes right back down. Look at this dive here.

Pre-market low sweep and drift

[30:27] ICT: Look at that. That’s an octant from the 7:00 to 9:00 Pre-Market Session grading that SIBI. Price trades up into it, and look at the bodies—stopping dead in their tracks.

Dead in their tracks. Then price drops aggressively, trades down into the 7:00 to 9:00 range low, sweeps it, and after that we go into crud. Price starts drifting a little lower, and here’s where we are right now. That’s what I mean when I say days after holidays can be a little funky. That’s not a day I want to participate in.

[31:15] ICT: I’m not trying to push aggressively in a market condition that isn’t likely to be conducive to low-resistance liquidity run conditions. Hopefully this lecture provides a better amplification of what you watched me do this morning and clears up any confusion I may have caused. Teaching requires patience. I’ve told everybody from the beginning, even back when I was on BabyPips, that most of your questions will be answered if you simply continue studying and keep notes.

ICT: The wonderful thing about the way I teach is that if you’re keeping a study journal, you can write your questions down. You don’t need to rush to the comment section or jump on X and ask me immediately. Write the question down and keep studying.

[31:56] ICT: Keep a separate section in your journal specifically for questions. That way you have a record of them, and when you eventually find the answers, you can write them there and then transpose those answers back into the areas of your study journal where the questions originally arose.

[32:24] ICT: But you have to exercise due diligence when studying something highly technical. It isn’t easy. I’ve told you it’s not going to be easy to put yourself through this, but this is the cost. This is the tuition.

You might look at this and say, “There are easier ways to do all this.” Great. I hope they work for you. I sincerely, absolutely hope they work for you. I just don’t believe anything else out there comes close to my stuff.

[32:54] ICT: And I have the rest of the year to prove that too. So until I talk to you next time, Lord willing, be safe.