Trader Round Up (X Space) — ICT only

Date: 2026-08-28

ICT audio archive

Trader Round Up (X Space) — ICT only

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[02:30:27] ICT: Hello, gentlemen.

[02:30:38] ICT: They were kind of asking indirectly, and you’re here now. When I signed in, I heard a bunch of noise, like somebody was moving something around. Nobody was talking. Then another gentleman said he likes to take breaks every 20 minutes. That’s what I’ve heard so far.

[02:31:00] Speaker 1: Yeah, we can hear you, buddy. Michael’s just stepping in right now, so let’s get tapped back into the conversation. You were talking about three PD Arrays, and very specifically about these octants.

[02:31:13] Speaker 11: I’d love to jump in again and ask the same question. I was kind of indirect before.

[02:31:17] Speaker 1: Pretty please.

[02:31:18] ICT: Pretty please.

[02:31:20] Speaker 11: So basically, I’m just going to repeat what I said. I actually tweeted at you the other day asking: is it salient to project a wick -0.5 standard deviations and key off that level to anticipate a Turtle Soup, provided you have the underlying narrative?

[02:31:37] Speaker 11: Then you replied, #ChapStick, and when you said ChapStick, I was so confused. I honestly had no clue what that meant. Then you mentioned in your video that it’s from the 2002 movie The Mothman Prophecies, so I started looking into the film.

The amount of references in that movie that can be related to the markets and the analogies you use is mental. The whole film revolves around information being known before events occur, and I feel like that’s extremely salient to what’s happening in the market.

[02:32:15] ICT: You’re on the right path. That’s my acknowledgment to you. I don’t want to drive you, push you, or steer you. But you’re onto something, and if you dig into it, you’re going to be blown away.

[02:32:26] Speaker 11: I love it. I absolutely love it. Thank you. Because during the ChapStick test, Cole tells John, “Why ask me what you already know?” That’s what kept me digging deeper into it.

[02:33:27] ICT: Oh no, I responded. I gave him his answer. It was a nod acknowledging that what he’s doing and what he’s considering will yield something I’m not going to teach. But if you dig it out yourself, you’re going to see something that is absolutely mind-numbing.

[02:33:46] Speaker 11: Michael, thank you for everything you do as well. I appreciate it. I’m going to keep digging into it, brother.

[02:33:51] ICT: Thank you for being a dude. Well, you heard what he’s doing. Just start exploring it.

[02:33:56] Speaker 11: It’s interesting. It’s very, very interesting because I’m seeing it happen, and I’m blown away by it.

[02:34:04] Speaker 1: The layers of the onion just keep peeling back. And for those who want to find what they’re looking for, who knows? They might just find it.

[02:34:17] Speaker 11: And you start figuring something out, then he drops another 10 layers of sauce on top of it. It’s mind-blowing. That also ties into having to ask yourself: when is enough enough? When is what you’ve already learned enough?

[02:34:37] Speaker 7: He’s got 81, bro. Michael, can I ask you a question?

[02:34:43] ICT: Certainly.

[02:34:45] Speaker 7: Concerning Rejection Blocks, I’ve only recognized them a few times, maybe two or three. I think it happened last week. How do I know something is a Rejection Block, maybe just a couple of minutes after it forms?

[02:35:04] ICT: Could you say that one more time? You broke up unless somebody else heard what you said. I didn’t hear everything. I’m sorry.

[02:35:09] Speaker 1: No, you broke up a little bit, buddy.

[02:35:11] Speaker 7: How can I confirm it’s a Rejection Block, say 5 to 10 minutes after it forms?

Validating Rejection Blocks

[02:35:18] ICT: It comes down to your understanding of the underlying narrative—what price is doing and why it’s there. Did it take liquidity? Did it really take the liquidity, or did it only get there shallow and potentially require another run higher to put a body above it?

Any little snubby wick that merely pierces a previous high makes me very suspicious, especially in the market climate we’ve had over the last couple of years. It’s more likely they’ll come back for that liquidity in a more meaningful way. In that context, the Rejection Block won’t be all that useful because price is likely going to make a higher high.

But if you have a run that takes out an old high and taps into a significant pool of liquidity, then forms the high with a candle body above that old high—in other words, it buries the body above the liquidity—and subsequently breaks down, that’s much more meaningful as a Rejection Block.

That’s one you can trust more.

[02:36:21] Speaker 7: Okay. One last question. We’re still in really bad conditions when it comes to trading. How long do you think this is going to last? It’s been going on for a while.

[02:36:33] ICT: Well, I don’t know.

[02:36:38] Speaker 7: You wouldn’t?

[02:36:39] ICT: I wish I knew. I really do wish I knew.

[02:36:47] Speaker 7: Michael made a lot—

[02:36:48] ICT: Yeah, I don’t have that subscription.

[02:36:50] Speaker 7: Michael made a lot of predictions in the past. That’s the only reason I’m asking.

[02:36:56] ICT: Well, I mean, how many things have you heard in the past, and how many of those things actually panned out?

[02:37:02] Speaker 7: A lot of them. I’ve studied all your content since 2020, and they all came true.

[02:37:13] Speaker 1: He’s got a point.

[02:37:18] ICT: I think, honestly, we have some really concerning times ahead. And like I’ve said before, I believe that as traders, we’re going to see periods where we’re not going to be permitted to trade.

[02:37:32] ICT: And I don’t know what that really means. It’s like an unction—something that was pressed on me. When I felt it, I said it. And when I said it, I thought, “Man, if this happens, wow.” But that’s how I get it. Just look around, folks. I don’t want to take the conversation in that direction, but you brought it up, so I’ll make a couple comments and then we can move on. Things are a little squirrely. The economy is wrecked. We’re in really bad straits.

[02:38:09] Speaker 8: Yes, sir.

ICT: And we’re not doing anything to correct it. We’re spending money like crazy. I’ve told people to study Venezuela because we’re going to become Venezuela 2.0. They’re hyperinflating everything before your eyes. Food costs are outrageous, gas is being suppressed right now, and the quality of the things we’re getting is subpar. You’re paying a premium for things, and they’re expensive.

Yeah, we have markets moving around, and that’s wonderful. But what happens if we move in a more totalitarian direction? They’ve tossed around ideas like taxing unrealized gains. I’m thinking, “What in the world are you doing?” They’re getting crazy with this stuff.

If you get to the point where you can sustain yourself and your family—and there are many of us around the world choosing that direction in life—we won’t necessarily be left alone because they want subservience to the things they want to do. So I don’t know. I don’t know when or if it ends. Until it does, I’m simply taking signals and setups based on what I teach.

[02:39:31] Speaker 1: Just take it one day at a time. That’s really all we can do, right?

[02:39:38] ICT: That’s all you can do.

[02:39:40] Speaker 1: And to your point, I really loved that analogy you used yesterday about the monthly candle and how, to diagnose what’s happening, you have to zoom into the lower time frames. I’d apply that to where we are right now. There’s this larger higher-time-frame picture, but if we really want to diagnose what we can do right now, we have to zoom in: what can we do today? What can we do tomorrow? What can we do right now? That’s how I’m looking at the world we’re in right now, from the perspective of this community.

[02:40:20] ICT: If you’re going to sit back and consider how bad things are right now and how bad they could become, I want to be wrong. This is one time I really want to be wrong. I want everybody to laugh at me and say, “Man, remember when you said the world was coming to a halt?” I want to be laughed at.

[02:40:38] Speaker 6: I wanna—

ICT: I want that to happen to me here. But when you look at the trajectory of everything, it doesn’t look promising.

[02:40:47] Speaker 7: How did you know that?

ICT: We have the last bastion—I’m sorry?

[02:40:50] Speaker 7: Oh, you heard me. How did you know when you predicted we’d have something like a mini World War? I heard that while studying your material and thought, “No, that’s not going to happen.” Guess what? It’s here.

[02:41:06] ICT: Let me finish my point and then I’ll answer you. We really have the last bastion of free enterprise. We have the world’s perfect business. We have the perfect entrepreneurial path for carving out whatever you want from life. If you’re successful at trading, who’s to say you can’t do whatever you want with it? What’s the limit on how much you can earn? There isn’t one. You basically make your own schedule. You choose when you’re going to do something and when you’re not. You’re in control.

I look at the people doing these things as globalists. They’re not elitists, and I wish people would stop calling them elites because they’re not. I want nothing to do with what they’re trying to do. The more people I can empower with something like this, the better.

To answer your question, I was never political. I had no interest in politics. I thought it was boring and didn’t understand it. I couldn’t care less because politics didn’t really affect how much things cost for me. I was independent from all that, so it wasn’t a factor.

If you had asked me how I would’ve voted back then, I would’ve said Republican because I didn’t recognize what the Democratic Party had become. The Democrats of the 1980s were completely different. I was raised in a family that didn’t vote much. My uncle who taught me about trading was really the only one who voted, and he was a Democrat. He tried to teach me his political views, and I told him, “Uncle Stan, with all respect, I have no interest in what you’re talking about, and I’m never going to vote.” And I never have voted.

In the spring of 2016, I was simply talking about markets when Trump became the hot ticket. I said I wanted to see him win because he was a businessman and I viewed our country as essentially a corporation. The more you study the history of the country, you’ll see where, in my view, it stopped functioning as a nation and became a corporation, with citizens functioning like commodities within it.

I wanted to see whether Trump would come in as a businessman and break that up—whether he’d try to return the country to its original intent. I felt strongly that he was going to win, and obviously he did. I’m not trying to take credit for that.

Once he got in, though, I wasn’t excited about everything he did, and I didn’t see him accomplish as much as I expected. Things were already in motion, and politicians tend to take credit for things they didn’t really cause.

Back in 2016, I said Trump was going to be used as the fall guy for a crash in the U.S. economy. People laughed at me, especially Trump supporters. I lost a lot of subscribers over it.

Then in July 2019, I started telling everybody that I felt something really bad was coming. One day I was sitting in the house and couldn’t think about anything else. It wasn’t fear or anxiety. It felt like a heaviness pressing on me: “You need to get ready, and you need to tell them to get ready.”

I thought, “Who’s them?” I didn’t get a response.

So I told my family, friends, employees, associates, and people I knew: “You might want to stock up. Get yourself ready. Winter’s coming.” Understand, I had never been the kind of person who talked like that.

Then in October 2019, the feeling came back even stronger. I had another Twitter account at the time where I talked about trading and posted videos. I started telling people, “You need to get your house ready because what’s coming is worse than 9/11, and it’s going to touch every country, not just the United States. Get food and prepare yourself because they’re going to do something globally.”

I didn’t know exactly what that meant. By December, people I knew around the world started contacting me and telling me about an illness spreading and saying it would eventually reach the United States. I didn’t want to speak specifically about that, so I kept saying, “Get your house ready.”

I felt intimidated saying those things because I was basically the only person around me talking like that. But the feeling wouldn’t leave me alone. My wife kept saying, “Stop talking about it. Don’t go online talking about that stuff.” And I told her, “I can’t not talk about it. I don’t know why. I feel like I have to warn them.”

Then in January, while I was out stocking up for friends and family who couldn’t afford to do it themselves, I became extremely sick. The next day I could barely move. I slept for 17 hours straight, woke up, drank two bottles of water, went to the bathroom, and slept another 15 hours. I believed I had what later became known as COVID.

I decided I wasn’t going to take the vaccine and warned people against it. One of my friends, who worked in nursing and was very healthy, took it. She died shortly afterward. That experience reinforced my belief that what I had felt beforehand was real, so I kept telling people.

In March 2020, while I was behind the paywall talking with my students, I felt another strong urge to talk about Iran, Israel, the Middle East, and Russia going into Ukraine. I didn’t follow those subjects and had little interest in them, but I felt compelled to mention them.

That same month, the world shut down. You couldn’t attend funerals normally. People stood six feet apart, wore masks, and in some cases faced workplace vaccination requirements. Everything changed very quickly.

I’m telling you what I felt back then. And the feeling I have about what’s coming next is that it could be worse than that. I’ve already said enough about it, though. If you’re concerned, prepare yourself as best you can. Having a lot of money alone isn’t going to protect me either. I’ve focused on securing things that can provide for my family and helping friends and relatives who can’t afford to do the same.

I’m not trying to scare you. But pay attention to what governments and institutions openly say they intend to change, including targets associated with 2030, and watch the pace of events.

We also have an interesting real-world test ahead of us: will elections occur as expected? Will the presidential election occur normally? If political power changes hands, will there be a peaceful transfer? Those events will give us information about how serious the situation actually is.

[02:51:32] ICT: That’s how it was. There’s really nothing more to it than that. I can’t explain the experience of feeling like I had to talk about those things while simultaneously being scared as a human being because I’d never talked about anything like that before. I didn’t understand politics. I didn’t care who won. It wasn’t something I was concerned about.

I lost a lot of students that month and the following month because they thought I was crazy. They thought I was nuts. They were saying, “Dude, you’re a crackpot.” And I was like, “I don’t know what to tell you. Just sit back and watch what happens.” Then you saw what happened.

[02:52:08] Speaker 1: It’s wild, bro.

[02:52:23] ICT: Yep.

[02:52:25] Speaker 1: So real quick, what about AI humanoids? What about all these robots?

[02:52:33] Speaker 7: Bingo.

[02:52:35] Speaker 1: Have you seen the robots? I’m kind of floored by all of this stuff. The rate of innovation right now is borderline breakneck and scary. I think this Optimus thing is a good example of that.

[02:52:55] ICT: Well, if you believe what Elon said, he said that in a few years there are going to be more robots than people on Earth.

[02:53:03] Speaker 3: Yeah.

[02:53:04] ICT: And look at what they’re doing with them. I’m not talking about the AI slop with little robots running around with guns in fake training scenarios. I’m talking about these four-legged robots they’re strapping artillery to.

[02:53:23] Speaker 4: Yeah, lasers.

[02:53:28] ICT: I’m concerned about my kids being drafted because I’m not letting my kids go anywhere. My kids don’t spill blood for pedophiles. It’s not happening. I don’t give a shit what anybody thinks about it.

But this whole mechanism of automation and robotics—they don’t want to rely on us. They want to rely on things that are programmed. Robots can kill and operate however they’re instructed, or they can be remotely controlled like drones. Drones are the future of warfare right now. You can accomplish more with an army of relatively inexpensive drones compared with what we spend on stealth fighters, bombers, and everything else.

I’ve read things from people who work in that industry, and I have friends in the industry who tell me, “Listen, you might want to get yourself some cargo nets because if you throw them down in front of these things, they don’t do well walking through them.” I’m just throwing that out there free of charge as something to think about.

But if it ever turns into Terminator and they start sending these things through neighborhoods, I have all kinds of stuff, but if 20 or 30 of those things are coming through the neighborhood, I’m not sure I have anything that’s going to work against that. I just don’t.

[02:55:11] Speaker 1: It’s crazy times. What’s even crazier is that the powers that be keep talking about hyperscaling. Everything is about hyperscale right now. They’re taking whatever it is—compute, robots, trips to outer space—and scaling the number of units massively.

This term hyperscale keeps coming up everywhere. It almost feels out of touch with reality. I think it’s intimidating because the rate of change is so rapid.

[02:56:02] ICT: Well, not to get biblical on you, but Daniel mentions that in the last days there’s going to be an explosion in knowledge, and people are going to go to and fro all over the world. That’s technology.

No one can deny that the 20th century sparked that whole scripture and started propelling us into it. And now look at what we have.

My son said to me the other day, *“Watch this, Dad. Make a song about ICT.” *And in, I don’t know, 30 seconds—

[02:56:37] ICT: This thing came out and sounded like a real person singing it. Then he says, “No, watch. I can change it from rock to country.” And I’m thinking, that’s nuts. That’s crazy. We’re getting to the point where we won’t even need movie stars. They can save all that money on production costs, but they’ll still charge us the same amount, if not more. Everything is becoming less dependent on people.

And that’s why I want to bring the conversation back to trading. I said earlier—and I’ve said this for years—that if you’re a trader or a business owner doing this, you have to prepare. What’s your response plan for a disruption in your trading? Some of us make so much money and become so accustomed to having that income constantly coming in that we don’t put anything away. “I don’t need to save. I can make as much as I want. I can just make more trading.”

Then there’s no preparation and no plan for what happens if that income stops. If you lose access to the market, it doesn’t matter how good a trader you are. It doesn’t matter how good your plan is or how consistent you’ve been. If you can’t participate, you can’t make money.

I know that sounds like a stretch, but I experienced that in September 2001. It wasn’t a long disruption, but it happened. So what do you do in that situation? As a trader, what are you doing each day, each week, and each month with the money you’re making? Do you ever prepare for the possibility of a disruption?

It doesn’t have to be conspiratorial. It could simply be an injury or illness. What could prevent you from participating at the same level and degree that you do today? I don’t see many people talking about these things. They don’t prepare. They put on their rose-colored glasses and say, “I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.”

But when something actually happens, you’re caught off guard. Suddenly there’s no revenue coming in and no trading profits coming in. Think about how scary and unsettling that could be if you’re essentially living paycheck to paycheck on your trading income and haven’t saved or positioned any of it in ways that can sustain you.

[02:59:24] Speaker 7: Can you hear me?

[02:59:26] ICT: Sure.

[02:59:28] Speaker 7: Concerning Bitcoin—you don’t trade Bitcoin. I’m a big believer in the Bible. I’m a Christian. Is that the main reason you don’t even mess with Bitcoin?

[02:59:43] ICT: I’m going to be very straight with you and tell you why I never wanted to touch it. I believed, before it was brought out, that it was being used to pay for human trafficking, and I never wanted anything to do with that. Ever.

So those of you who trade it, that’s on you. But you’ve never heard me tell anybody to trade Bitcoin. I’ve always been one-sided about it. I’ve always resisted it because I believed that it was being used to circumvent tracking mechanisms in connection with human trafficking.

[03:00:39] ICT: Feels like the oxygen got sucked out of the room, doesn’t it?

[03:00:42] Speaker 1: I mean, Pip Daddy just came in with some pretty heavy questions, so that’s fair. They were good questions. They were burning questions he wanted answered, and it was nice of you to entertain them and give him an answer. I’m sure a lot of people have wondered about those things. So thanks for the answer, thanks for the question, and we’ll keep it going. Mauricio, I saw you were up next, bro.

[03:01:08] Speaker 12: Yeah. I was listening to what Michael was saying, and I agree that we need to be prepared for this new wave of technology that’s coming. I was actually reading the Nvidia report, and it was absolutely mind-blowing. Just the quarterly net income of that company alone was $59.7 billion. I was sitting there thinking, “Am I reading this correctly?”

To put that into perspective, Kit, you’re talking about numbers comparable to major companies like Apple, Walmart, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, Disney—I have three kids, so Disney is a big one for me—McDonald’s, Costco, Nike. This thing is absolutely real.

All these companies are investing heavily in AI, and we really need to learn how to use it. I don’t see this as simply an AI bubble. These companies have already reported their results, and this is cash they’re generating. This isn’t like the dot-com era where much of it was based on projections. These companies are printing money left and right with this technology.

So I’m studying it and trying to figure out how to apply it to my business and, obviously, to trading. It’s important that we understand it. Now, am I in the camp that believes we’re all going to vanish or starve? That’s difficult for me. I don’t have the same vision Michael has. I don’t dispute it, and I respect his position, but it’s difficult for me to believe we’re going to experience something that extreme. Still, I think his broader point is very good: we need to get on top of this technology.

[03:03:40] Speaker 1: Do you want to add anything to that, Michael?

[03:03:42] ICT: No. I was listening to what he said, and I respect his opinion. Everybody has an opinion. Like I said, when it comes to the darker stuff, I hope I’m absolutely wrong. That’s really all I can say.

[03:04:02] Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s a good conversation. We have a lot of people here, so we can keep it going.

[03:04:08] Speaker 12: Going back to the charts, I want to ask Michael a question. This is actually something Kit and I were talking about this afternoon when price was around the 800 level.

Michael, today when NQ was reaching that 800 level, I happened to be on the phone with Kit. I told him, “Listen, we’re reaching into the liquidity void I have marked here, and we’re trading into the daily CE. I think we should be looking for shorts.” At the time, he was saying, “Man, I’m looking at that gap around 30,000. I think we’re going to—” And I said, “I don’t know. Let’s see how it plays out.” We didn’t actually do anything, but—

[03:04:59] Speaker 1: Yeah, the monthly candle didn’t extend that far.

[03:05:04] Speaker 12: On the RTH chart, I’ve become really intrigued by all these gaps we have above and below price. What I’ve noticed is that the liquidity voids behave like magnets that price wants to fill.

Using today as an example, I had the liquidity void completing at around 29,818.50. Then around 11:50, price rejected, and that’s when we got the retracement and displacement lower.

Do those roughly seven points that remain between price and the completion of the liquidity void carry any weight for you? Usually, I see these voids filled all the way through to completely rebalance the inefficiency. So I’m wondering how you interpret that in this particular example.

[03:06:13] ICT: I don’t have any charts in front of me, so I can’t answer that fairly. But if it’s going to be weak—and if I’m understanding you correctly—are you talking about a SIBI that didn’t completely close in?

[03:06:27] Speaker 12: No, not a SIBI. We did trade into the daily SIBI today, obviously, but I’m referring specifically to the liquidity void.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the way I understand liquidity voids is this: take an RTH gap, for example. On Sunday you might have the New Week Opening Gap, then on Monday you have the Regular Trading Hours gap. But on certain days, price can jump over two or three gaps from previous sessions, so we leave—

[03:07:13] Speaker 1: So you’re saying the overnight session prints over previous RTH gaps?

[03:07:20] Speaker 3: Correct.

[03:07:21] Speaker 12: Right. It essentially leaves an entire area without trading and jumps over it. So, for instance—

[03:07:33] Speaker 1: Wait real quick, Mauricio. Michael, are you following?

[03:07:37] ICT: To be honest with you, I’m trying my best to visualize what he’s describing, and I can’t see it.

[03:07:42] Speaker 1: Yeah, Mauricio, it’s probably best if you provide some kind of visual representation. I don’t mean to interrupt, but we’re going through a painstaking verbal description of something that’s still going to be difficult to understand without visual assistance. If you don’t mind, put something in the Purple Pill.

[03:08:02] Speaker 12: I’m doing it right now.

[03:08:04] Speaker 1: Rock on, brother. That’ll help. He’s trying to make a point about these liquidity voids, RTH gaps, and the way the overnight sessions overlay them. It’s all salient to what you teach. I’m just not sure he’s referring to it using exactly the same terminology you would.

That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s wrong. It’s more about properly conveying the concept. That’s one of the beautiful things about this community: the language you’ve provided makes it much easier to communicate very difficult concepts.

Mauricio, did you get it up? My Purple Pill isn’t loading, so I can’t see it. X is undefeated. I have my own limitations sometimes. Michael, can you see anything in the Purple Pill?

[03:09:13] Speaker 12: Hold on, I’m sending it. I haven’t posted it yet. I’m putting it up now.

[03:09:22] Speaker 1: RTH Org, Heisenlow, Trader Telly—oh, Boss Lady. I’d love to get Boss Lady up here. She’s writing some good comments. Mauricio, whatever you’re sending, I still can’t see it in the Purple Pill.

[03:09:53] ICT: Yeah, I don’t see it either.

[03:09:55] Speaker 1: Okay. You’ll probably have to tag me or something. I know it’s a good question, and I think the visual will make it much easier for Michael to provide clarity.

[03:10:12] ICT: Okay, hold up. Can we keep it moving and come back to this?

[03:10:21] Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. I’m kind of disabled here too. X isn’t letting me view things clearly, so I’ve got one hand tied behind my back.

[03:10:32] ICT: Is his profile Trader Telly?

[03:10:39] Speaker 5: No.

[03:10:41] Speaker 1: No, Trader Telly is somebody else who’s active in the conversation. Mauricio is Red Road FL. So, yeah, I don’t know what to say.

[03:11:39] Speaker 6: Michael, I have a question. My understanding is that 3:15 to 3:45 is one of your macro times, right? Am I correct?

[03:11:51] ICT: It’s the second one of the four in the last hour.

[03:11:53] Speaker 6: Okay. Is it a coincidence that this is also the time frame in which the CME does its basis trade calculations?

[03:12:04] ICT: I don’t do anything with that.

[03:12:07] Speaker 6: You don’t do anything with that?

[03:12:08] ICT: No. I don’t do anything with it. I don’t give it any consideration at all. A lot of people have asked me similar questions, but it’s not something I use.

[03:12:19] Speaker 6: Okay. I was curious because of a phenomenon I’ve been tracking for several years. It happened today as well, where price ping-ponged between two levels. It relates to your 3:15 to 3:45 macro. If we get two of those—

[03:12:49] ICT: Two of what?

[03:12:50] Speaker 6: Two subsequent 3:15 to 3:45 price ranges—the range bounded by that macro.

[03:13:01] Speaker 1: So we’re giving it a time-based range.

Speaker 6: Right. Say we have subsequent days. Monday—

[03:13:08] Speaker 1: Are you saying they’re at the same price, or—

[03:13:10] Speaker 6: No. Let’s say Monday prints an arbitrary range from 29,850 to 29,880, a 30-point range. Then Tuesday prints another 30-point range, maybe 100 points higher. Now we have a distance between those two ranges on subsequent days.

What I’ve noticed is that price tends to return to the equilibrium between those two ranges before moving on. If it doesn’t return immediately, it’ll often come back at a later date.

If you go back through price and look at some of these unmitigated midpoints between 3:15 and 3:45 macro ranges, they become targets on large-range days where New York opens and dumps hundreds of points. Price seems to find equilibrium around those midpoints, and I’ve seen it happen over and over again.

So I was curious whether that’s something you take into account when discussing the 3:15 to 3:45 macro.

[03:14:48] ICT: I’ve never mentioned that, and it’s not something I’ve done before. But I’m not saying there’s nothing to it. I’d be interested in seeing examples of what you’re referring to.

[03:14:58] Speaker 6: Yeah. I’m in transit right now, so I don’t have access to a device that would let me go back far enough and give you a clear presentation. But it’s something I’ve noticed for quite a while. I was curious because of the coincidental timing between the two.

[03:15:25] Speaker 1: I understand.

[03:15:27] Speaker 6: This is something I really applaud you for instilling in me: the spirit of curiosity, finding things that work for me. It doesn’t necessarily have to be something you’ve specifically taught because you teach us algorithmic principles. If I can find something grounded in those algorithmic principles, I can investigate it independently.

I think there’s sometimes an attitude in the community that, “If Michael didn’t say it, it isn’t true.” I don’t see it that way. You’re still one of the quintessential voices in my head every day when I trade. Everything I do is based on what I’ve learned from you.

But at some point, we also have to allow ourselves to venture out of the nest, find our own way, and discover what works for us. This is one of those things for me. I check it daily: Where is there an unmitigated midpoint? Then I watch whether price gives evidence that it may be trying to reach that level, using the algorithmic principles we’ve learned from you.

I don’t want to get too heavy with it, but I want to thank you for allowing me to become more open-minded about finding my own way in the market instead of feeling like I have to put price action into a box every time I look at it.

[03:17:13] ICT: I would be a cult leader if I told you that you’re not allowed to have independent thought or think beyond the boundaries of what I’ve taught. I’m not omnipotent. I don’t know everything. My exits aren’t always where I want them, so I’m obviously not perfect.

I understand what you’re saying, and I wish more people approached it this way because people sometimes put me on a pedestal that I don’t deserve, and that makes me uncomfortable.

You’re allowing me to be human, and I appreciate that. Thank you.

[03:17:49] Speaker 6: You’re welcome, bro. A lot of us came to you after failing with other systems. Talk to enough students and you’ll hear, “Before this, I traded supply and demand,” or “I traded trend lines,” or whatever it was.

So a lot of us arrive from a place of hurt because we’ve hurt ourselves trading those other systems. When we first find you, some of us naturally start seeing you as a father figure, an uncle, a brother, or somebody filling a role we might not have in our personal lives. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. Sometimes people need something like that at a particular point in their lives.

But eventually, you have to realize that you’re just like me. You went through the same things I’m going through—

[03:18:56] ICT: I did.

Speaker 6: And I’ve leaned on you because you’ve allowed me to learn from your experience without having to experience all of the pain myself. That’s valuable. But my greatest learning still comes through my own experience.

[03:19:12] ICT: You are—

Speaker 6: I’m taking what I’ve learned from you, but nothing can substitute for actually being in the market myself. You can explain how to ride a bicycle to me all day long, but until I get on the bicycle and ride it myself, I’m not riding the bike.

That’s really what I’m getting at.

[03:19:34] ICT: I’m picking up what you’re putting down, brother.

[03:19:36] Speaker 10: Yeah, I appreciate it.

[03:19:37] Speaker 6: I hope everything’s well with you, man. Thanks for your time. It’s always great to hear your voice, and I hope you’re doing well. That’s it, bro. You all have a good night.

[03:19:47] Speaker 1: Neil, that was probably the most heartfelt, heartwarming bro experience. I don’t know if you felt that, Michael, but I think he was trying, in his own way, to give you a hug as a friend more than anything.

[03:20:05] ICT: I appreciate that approach. When students come up here and start saying, “I just want you to know you’re this, you’re that, you’re the greatest thing in the world,” I’m sitting there thinking, “Man alive, please just get on with your conversation and your question.” I don’t like that. It makes me extremely uncomfortable.

I’m sure a lot of you listening don’t want to hear it either. You’re probably thinking, “Come on, bro. Stop.”

The fact that you’re learning from me is enough. That tells me you respect my time, appreciate my effort, and you’re taking the material seriously.

[03:20:41] Speaker 7: You want to learn.

ICT: Exactly. That’s all I’m asking for. Give it an honest effort and let me be one of the gang here. I’m not trying to be the cult leader. I’m not trying to be the supreme leader.

I’m just hanging out with you, having a conversation, bouncing ideas around, listening to what you’re saying, and trying to encourage people who are doing things on their own.

[03:20:59] Speaker 7: I’d like to ask the supreme leader a question. I mean, Michael.

[03:21:05] ICT: Go ahead.

[03:21:07] Speaker 7: What about the 8:20 CME open? Can you explain what we’re supposed to look for there? Is there a setup? Because I haven’t seen it yet.

[03:21:16] ICT: Say it again. What are we looking at?

[03:21:21] Speaker 7: The CME open at 8:20 in the morning.

[03:21:23] ICT: What are we looking at there?

[03:21:32] Speaker 7: You’ve mentioned before that we should always keep an eye on 8:20, but I’ve never really seen a specific setup or entry associated with it. I want to know if there’s something we’re supposed to look for. Is there any significance to the 8:20 open?

[03:21:48] ICT: You’re talking about the bond market?

[03:21:51] Speaker 1: Yes.

[03:21:52] ICT: Yeah, that’s CBOT, not CME. That’s what threw me off.

[03:21:57] Speaker 7: Right, right, right.

Bond Opening Range Analysis

[03:21:58] ICT: Okay, let me go back. I’m getting old, but I didn’t remember saying anything about a CME open at 8:20. I was thinking, “What?”

So yes, we’re talking about the bond open. What you’re doing is observing the first 30 minutes of its Opening Range, just like we do with ES and NQ.

[03:22:17] Speaker 7: Correct.

[03:22:18] ICT: Same bit of business. During those first 30 minutes, you’re looking at where price is relative to what it’s reaching for, how it has used Globex price, and how it’s using any first presented Fair Value Gap.

You can take measurements from what it does during those first 30 minutes and then measure the First Hour’s Dealing Range. Everything we do with index futures can be applied to the bond market as well.

But bonds give you an additional benefit because you can compare the 5-year, 10-year, and 30-year.

Let me put it this way: if you asked me to choose between trading index futures or bonds, and the only conceptual tool I was allowed to use was either the Interest Rate Triad—5-year, 10-year, and 30-year—or SMT between ES and NQ, I would choose the bond market every single time.

[03:23:28] Speaker 3: Wow.

[03:23:29] ICT: So if you’re looking for something that can add strength to your trade setups, start blending that concept with your index futures analysis.

Many times—not every time, but many times—it will supercharge the idea of what you think may be developing in ES or NQ.

And that information can be derived from the first 30 minutes or the First Hour’s Dealing Range in bonds.

[03:23:56] Speaker 7: Oh my God, thank you so much. I was hoping you would say that. You just confirmed everything I’ve been studying for the past—what—six years?

[03:24:12] Speaker 1: Good for you, buddy. I love hearing that. That makes me happy. He’s so excited right now.

[03:24:20] ICT: You gotta love that.

[03:24:21] Speaker 1: I really appreciate that, Pip Daddy.

[03:24:23] Speaker 7: It’s the first time I’ve gotten to speak to Michael.

[03:24:24] Speaker 1: I know. I can feel your goosebumps, buddy. I can feel them.

[03:24:29] Speaker 6: It’s cool.

[03:24:30] Speaker 1: He’s like, “Oh my gosh.” You can hear it. That’s cool, man. That’s cool. Pippi Banks, Charter Community, has his hand up.

[03:24:42] Speaker I: Since we’re on the topic of bonds, I wanted to ask you something. You kind of answered it already, but I remember you saying—I don’t want to quote the video because I don’t remember which one—that you found your consistency through the bond market.

[03:25:10] ICT: Yes.

Speaker I: Was there anything specific you saw that helped you find that consistency? Was it basically what you just explained with the Interest Rate Triad and the Opening Range, or is there more to it?

ICT: There’s more to it, obviously, but it would require a series of videos to explain it properly. Let me say this: today’s bond market environment is not the same as it was before quantitative easing. Quantitative easing caused a lot of things to decouple, and the bond market got a little crazier for a while. It went on this parabolic run.

Back when bonds were near their highs, I posted a response to Tom Dante. I told him, “You’re a bond trader. The next big runs are going to be in interest rates.” We topped out, and the chart has been falling ever since.

Everything I explained in response to the previous student’s questions still applies. But if we’re talking about the 1990s and early 2000s, the bond market back then was candy easy. It was ridiculously easy. The imbalances were extremely obvious and one-sided.

They would form perfect equal highs. Not relative equal highs—perfect. Price would stop at exactly the same 32nd. Boom. Same 32nd. There are 32 ticks in a full point in bond futures, and it was like, “Come on. This is literally like taking candy from a baby. There’s no opposition here. This is so easy.”

I was a one-trick pony: one contract, one contract, one contract. Then I started thinking, “What happens if I go to two? If I can double it without any adversity, maybe I can go to four. Then eight, 16, 32.”

I kept building it up, and nothing changed because the liquidity in the bond market was ridiculous. Getting in and out was night and day compared with now. It was so easy.

We don’t have that anymore.

Someone who would be really good to ask about this is Pax, because he was trading during the same period I was. He could probably give you some insight into it as well.

Speaker I: Yeah, I speak with Pax often. He actively trades bonds now, but he doesn’t necessarily trade them intraday. He approaches them more from a swing-trading perspective.

[03:28:02] Speaker 12: Yeah.

[03:28:03] Speaker I: He doesn’t really trade them intraday. What’s interesting is that there are a lot of similarities between what you guys do. It’s completely different—almost polar opposites—but at the same time, it’s very similar, if that makes sense. It probably doesn’t. It seems like the biggest difference is simply the language.

[03:28:29] Speaker 8: Yeah, right.

[03:28:30] Speaker 5: It’s just the language.

ICT: The old heads.

But Pax was actually on the floor. Let me tell you something: he was doing what I aspired to do. My goal was to get on the floor. That’s what I wanted. I wanted to be down there on the S&P floor. That’s where I wanted to be.

It just didn’t work out that way.

[03:28:48] Speaker 7: Yeah.

[03:28:52] Speaker I: So with that being said, just to piggyback on it, you don’t really trade bonds anymore, right?

ICT: I haven’t taken a bond trade in—good grief, we’re in 2026—probably 2019. If it wasn’t 2019, it was 2018. I haven’t touched them since.

Speaker I: Okay. Do you still have that same thought process that the market doesn’t really move unless the bond market starts pushing first?

ICT: No. We have a whole lot of other—

Speaker I: Not anymore, right?

ICT: Yeah. There are a whole lot of things now that just do whatever they want to do. They don’t even hide it. They run the market. They rig it and just take it off. They don’t care.

Which is fine. It makes things a little more challenging, but guess what it gives us?

Volatility.

And volatility is how we make our money.

Speaker I: Right, right, right.

[03:29:55] Speaker 1: Okay.

[03:29:56] ICT: Yeah, that’s good.

[03:29:58] Speaker I: That’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you about because it really stood out to me, especially the intermarket analysis portion of the mentorship. I think that’s extremely important, and a lot of people just gloss over it. So I’ve always wanted to ask you that. Thank you.

ICT: Unfortunately, most people see it as just another step: “Now I have to do something else before I can get into a trade.” But you want to do quantitative and qualitative analysis, and they’re not the same thing. Having a better understanding of what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and why that idea should be supported by other markets doing either similar or opposing things is such a disregarded topic today.

Everybody wants a simple pattern: “Give me a buy setup. Make it simple. Tell me where the stop goes. I just want to make money.”

Before I came on here, I replied to a guy on X. I’m sure he was sincere, but the undertone was, “You make this too difficult. Why can’t you just give us something simple?”

I have given you simple things. I’ve given you the 2022 Model. I’ve given you the Silver Bullet. I’ve even given you other times of day to use it.

I watched a video recently from an Asian guy who’s a quant. Somebody emailed me about him as a YouTuber. He posted a video where he used Claude to run numbers on my Silver Bullet. It reminded me of the guy who won the Robbins Cup a couple of years ago—I think his name was Ivan Sherman. He went on Venezuelan television and was asked about ICT Concepts. He said he had his team go through my material and try to automate it. According to him, it failed, didn’t make money, and didn’t work.

He also said, “I don’t make money selling courses.” Well, I don’t sell courses either, and I’m trading the things I teach every single day.

I’ve seen a couple of people publicly approach it that way, but I’ve also had dozens of people contact me asking for tips on how to automate my concepts. What they really want is for me to sit down and give them the actual coding logic.

I told everybody during the mentorship: I’m not going to walk you through automating it. I’m not going to do that for you.

There are simple things you can automate, but there still has to be discretionary involvement, and that’s what’s missing. People can come out and say, “I coded this. I let Claude test it. It doesn’t work.” Yet I’m out here using the very concepts they say don’t work, week after week, day after day.

Next week, when I’m teaching backtesting—what to observe, how to log it, and the things I’m teaching my youngest son—you should be doing those same things.

Some things are much harder to automate than they appear. You might think, “Okay, if ICT says when the market does this, this, and this, then it should be bullish. That should be easy to code.” But look at all the subtle nuances.

Take the last two trading days. Those weren’t easy conditions. You have to continually reassess things: If I get long and price moves against me, is there another opportunity to get back in? Or is this a one-and-done setup? You have to watch what each individual candlestick is doing.

That’s extremely difficult to code.

Then there’s choosing the specific wick I would use to support the trade, or determining which Inversion Fair Value Gap is actually relevant. That’s what I was explaining to the young man on X.

Everybody asks me the same question: “Can you just give me something really simple and bulletproof, with a good strike rate, where I don’t have to think too much?”

Okay.

That’s the Silver Bullet. That’s the 2022 Model.

But even those require certain concepts and premises behind them, otherwise they fall apart. We can say, “Fair Value Gap.” Okay—which Fair Value Gap? Where is it forming? At what time is it forming?

Those are rules.

I’m sure this young man didn’t include all of that because he watched the one Silver Bullet video I released and ran calculations from it. I don’t remember his handle, but he was fair in how he presented his conclusions. I disagree with him, but toward the end of the video he also said that if you let one version run a certain way, it made $400,000.

You can’t deny that.

So the average person watches the video and comes away thinking, “He proved Silver Bullet doesn’t work and the statistics don’t support what ICT claims.” Yet one version of his own test made $400,000.

I don’t know exactly what parameters he used for that version, but he also had what he called the as-taught rules. If you remember how I originally taught Silver Bullet, it was very simplistic, but it was predicated on understanding where the draw on liquidity is.

How are you going to turn that into code? Whether you’re using Claude or writing it yourself, how do you implement bias, especially when bias can change on a candlestick-by-candlestick basis?

That’s the difficulty.

When I automate something, I only automate it up to a certain point where I’ve already determined that the trade should pan out. What I’m looking for is already present. Then I’ll open the appropriate script and—bang—there it is.

But I’m still the one deciding which script to run.

I don’t have anything where I simply turn on the computer and go play golf. It doesn’t work like that with my material. I don’t have that. If I did, you would’ve never heard about it. I would’ve never said anything about it.

Getting back to what you were saying about bonds and the parallel I’m trying to draw: we like to believe everything can be simplified down to one simple thing.

People often say, “If you really understand something, you should be able to teach it to a five-year-old.”

Really?

Try teaching a five-year-old trading.

You’re not going to be successful because trading requires a certain degree of understanding and aptitude that a five-year-old doesn’t have. It requires critical thinking. It requires something like an algebraic thought process.

Suppose we look at a market and say, “Okay, here’s the problem.” We believe price is going higher because there’s something above it that looks likely to be disrupted. Maybe it’s too smooth up there. Whatever the market or price level is doesn’t matter. We believe price is going there.

The missing piece of that algebraic expression—the X—is where you’re going to enter.

That’s the money-making piece you need to solve.

Think of something like X + 9 = 15. You only understand how to solve for X because you’ve learned the underlying logic of algebra. Apply the same concept to the marketplace.

Suppose the relative equal highs are where I believe price should go. That’s the answer. That’s the endpoint of the expression for this particular time frame and period of trading.

But the idea is only valid if I can enter before price reaches a certain level. Once price has moved too far toward those relative equal highs, the remaining reward doesn’t justify the risk. At minimum, I want 1:1, and ideally I teach 3:1.

So now you have to solve for X.

What’s the missing piece?

That’s your model. That’s your PD Array. That’s your entry mechanism. That’s the thing you trust to provide the missing piece of the equation.

That’s why it’s difficult to teach someone to think this way. Every trade is an algebra problem.

Algebra isn’t particularly complicated once you understand the arithmetic underneath it. One operation is the opposite of another. If you’ve studied algebra, you know what I mean. If you haven’t, that statement won’t mean much.

That’s why I told the young man that I understand why he’s asking for simplicity. Everybody asks for it. But you need supporting concepts to arrive at the answer you’re asking for.

You can’t simply say, “I think price is going up and there’s no reason for it to go down.”

How do you know it isn’t going to go down?

Look at the questions people ask me about my trades: “That entry was crazy. How did you know it wasn’t going to keep going against you?”

Because I understand everything else surrounding the trade that I’m not necessarily calling attention to while I’m executing it. I can look at it and say, “Okay, it’s already done this. It’s done these things. Those things support the idea that it shouldn’t go down there anymore because price has already proven itself through this behavior.”

But brand-new students don’t want to hear that.

They want to hear, “Give me one or two things to worry about. Tell me where to put my stop. Tell me exactly how to enter. Then let the trade run to target without drawdown, make it work more often than not, and let me make a lot of money.”

That’s wonderful.

That’s how a five-year-old would describe trading if they understood enough to know that profitability was possible:

“I want all the candy in the candy store, but I don’t want a tummy ache.”

That’s not realistic.

As adults, we can understand that trading isn’t that easy.

You need the supporting pieces around the trade.

[03:41:58] Speaker 7: Question?

[03:42:06] ICT: Sure.

[03:42:09] Speaker 7: It has nothing to do with trading. This is just a little personal.

[03:42:15] Speaker 1: Oh God, Pimp Daddy. You’re full of zingers today, aren’t you, bud?

[03:42:20] Speaker 7: We all need to know.

[03:42:23] Speaker 1: Don’t mind me, Michael. It might be a little personal. Anyway, Pimp Daddy, pretty please, come on. Help us out. Feel free.

[03:42:35] Speaker 7: Come on, it’s going to be a quick question, and I know he’s going to have a lot to say. Talk to us about the grand—

[03:42:43] ICT: About the grandbaby? My grandson? Okay, here we go.

I wish I felt comfortable sharing pictures and videos of him online. Personally, I would, but Cody and his wife asked us, “Please don’t put anything online,” so we don’t.

He is adorable. He’s so beautiful and very, very happy. When he lights up and smiles, you can’t help but smile when you see him. He giggles like crazy. He’s like a little Cabbage Patch Kid.

[03:43:21] Speaker 3: He’s chubby.

[03:43:22] ICT: He’s adorable. I’m just thankful that he’s healthy and blessed.

[03:43:26] Speaker 7: Thank you.

[03:43:28] Speaker 12: You’re welcome.

[03:43:29] ICT: Thank you for asking, though.

[03:43:38] Speaker 1: I always have to hold my breath with you, Pimp Daddy. I never know what we’re going to get. I’m literally sitting here with my fingers crossed, holding my breath, wondering what’s coming.

[03:43:48] ICT: “When’s the last time you went on a drunken stupor?”

[03:43:53] Speaker 7: Well, Michael has been in the lives of everyone here—and even people who aren’t listening right now—for a very long time. So you gotta—

[03:44:03] Speaker 1: That’s very true. Very, very true.

[03:44:05] Speaker 7: You’re right.

[03:44:07] Speaker 1: I love that everyone has that connection. You have conversations with Michael as if you know him way better than he knows you. He’s kind of like, “Uh, yeah, nice to meet you.” And you’re thinking, “Well, Michael, you don’t understand. We’ve been having this relationship with you for so long. We’re already there. We’re on the same page.”

[03:44:45] ICT: All right, go ahead, Kit.

[03:44:48] Speaker 1: It’s all good, buddy. We’re here at 6:53. How are we doing on time, Michael?

[03:44:53] ICT: We can go another 30 minutes or so, until my wife walks through the door. That’ll change things, but I’ll keep going.

[03:44:58] Speaker 1: Yeah, I got you. I understand. I appreciate that. Sorry—go ahead, Mauricio. Jump in, bro.

[03:45:06] Speaker 12: I just want to make sure you can see the picture I put in the Purple Pill. Do you have it up right now?

[03:45:15] ICT: Yeah, give me a second. Let me see. Hold on.

[03:45:18] Speaker 1: My Purple Pill is broken, so I’m absolved from the conversation. I’m just here supporting you guys mentally.

[03:45:38] ICT: I’m scrolling down. I’m looking at the most recent posts, but I don’t see anything yet.

[03:45:43] Speaker 12: It was posted about 27—hold on. Let me see. Maybe switch it to Relevant and see if it appears there.

[03:45:54] ICT: Did you post it 29 minutes ago?

[03:45:56] Speaker 5: Yeah.

[03:45:57] ICT: Okay, I’m looking at the chart now. Let me maximize it. Explain your question to me.

[03:46:03] Speaker 12: My question is about what happens when you select RTH. With RTH, you can see the regular gaps, but sometimes you have a gap spanning several days. In the picture I posted, I used the 4-hour chart just to make it as clear as possible.

Do you see where I labeled Liquidity Void around the 29,850 level?

[03:46:35] ICT: That was at 11:50. Yeah, go ahead.

[03:46:38] Speaker 12: Correct. So first, I want to make sure: is that what you would call a Liquidity Void, or am I mistaken?

[03:46:46] ICT: A Liquidity Void, by my definition, is an area where there has actually been no trading at all for that—

[03:46:51] Speaker 1: Okay, that’s like FOMC or some type of news event, correct, Michael?

[03:46:57] ICT: No, it’s simply an absence of trading. It could happen with a New Week Opening Gap. Price doesn’t have to trade right back down into it. The gap can remain open and price can just tear off and start running. It can also happen with a New Day Opening Gap at the 6:00 p.m. restart. Those are two instances where it can occur.

Then we have the Regular Trading Hours gap, from where price settled the previous day at 4:14 p.m. Eastern Time to the following day’s 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time open. Those gaps can remain open for a while. They don’t necessarily have to fill immediately, and that’s always been the case. Even before I started trading, when I looked at charts from the ‘80s, I’d see gaps that remained open and think, “Man, this is wild. How do you deal with that?” It was difficult for me to accept that gaps don’t have to fill.

[03:47:56] Speaker 12: Right, they don’t have to fill. Okay.

[03:47:58] ICT: Exactly. But when they don’t fill, they give you information. Ask yourself: what direction is price moving away from the gap? That’s usually indicative of strength in that direction.

For instance, suppose price can’t completely fill a gap and leaves part of it open while moving lower. Based on how I teach order flow, that’s telling you price has no interest in finishing that gap. It has somewhere else to be, and it’s in a hurry to get there. Those last few portions of the gap are irrelevant because price is reaching for something more important.

[03:48:35] Speaker 12: But in this particular case, if you look at the picture, we also have one below. That’s probably part of why you’ve been saying this week has been particularly difficult to trade.

When I zoom out through the weekly, daily, and 4-hour charts, I see these inefficiencies both above and below price, and it becomes difficult. I have to go down to the 1-minute chart, which I’d prefer not to do because I’m more of a swing trader.

What was particularly disturbing to me was seeing these liquidity voids both above and below, so close together. The one above and the one below are only about 400 points apart.

[03:49:34] ICT: That’s a characteristic of Jackson Hole Symposium week. I’m convinced these people say things knowing they’ll be used as a smokescreen for the market to do crazy things. It’s not their words themselves moving the market. It’s the people running the market saying, “Okay, we’ll use this.” Traders read it on the newswires, hear it through the gossip chain, chase the move, and then price reverses on them.

That’s what you’re witnessing—the cause and effect of billionaires, not even elected officials, meddling with things while the market uses it as an opportunity to do more damage.

It’s like what happened with Reddit when people wanted to take down the billionaires shorting AMC, BlackBerry, and GameStop. They knew people were going to buy, so price was run aggressively and then collapsed on them.

That’s what they do, folks. The game is to make you believe you’re making a good, sound investment, then pull the rug out and take your money. That’s what the market does. But it has this wonderful mechanism of continuing higher over long periods of time while repeatedly doing the same thing.

Going forward, let’s see whether you have the same concerns about these gaps outside this particular week. I think what you’re feeling is simply the difficulty this type of event creates, which is exactly what I warned about.

If this is the first time you’ve experienced it while really paying attention, it can be unnerving. But once you’ve been around for a while and seen it several times, you recognize it and think, “Oh yeah, I remember this. This is a bunch of crap.”

[03:51:36] Speaker 12: Yeah, I’ve seen the gaps before, just not these particular liquidity voids I’m referring to. Those are what caught my attention. I actually went back several years looking for them.

Obviously, we see normal gaps and Regular Trading Hours gaps, but these particular ones aren’t something I’ve seen in a while. That’s why I wanted to ask you about them. Thank you.

[03:52:00] ICT: You’re very welcome.

[03:52:10] Speaker 8: Hi, Michael. How are you?

[03:52:11] ICT: I’m doing well. Thank you for asking.

[03:52:12] Speaker 8: Great stuff. I’ve just got a question about standard deviations of the NWOG. I’ve been looking at this for maybe the past three or four weeks since I’ve been watching Kit’s live streams, and I’ve noticed that when we’re trying to project the high or low of the week—maybe during a ranging week or a large-range week—we’ll usually run three or four standard deviations down. But let’s say we have a visible draw on the daily chart that’s quite a way underneath. Are there any standard deviation projection levels beyond 12.5 that you’d use to potentially bring price down toward that level from the NWOG?

[03:52:51] ICT: You can do as many replications of whatever range you’re measuring as you want, as long as those projections line up with other things that support the trade idea. Standard deviation by itself is not the answer. It’s not the panacea.

I’ve been showing the -0.5, and I can already see everybody getting excited: “Oh my goodness, that’s all I need. Just tell me where to anchor it, and I’ll short the highs and buy the lows.”

You still have to understand what the market is doing. It doesn’t work by itself like that. If it were that simple, I could’ve made one video and said, “Here it is. This is the only video you need. Don’t listen to anybody else. Download this and you’re done.”

[03:53:38] Speaker 8: I appreciate that. I’ve been going through your content for a number of years now, maybe two or three years, so I’d like to think I have an understanding of how the market works. That was really my only question because I’ve been going through price action and it seems to stand out quite a bit that the high or low of the week is often projected around three to four standard deviations. But if you’re saying that isn’t everything by itself, then I won’t put too much emphasis on it. Thank you for the advice.

[03:54:06] ICT: You’re very welcome. Can I ask what market you trade?

[03:54:09] Speaker 8: I trade NASDAQ and Gold.

[03:54:12] ICT: How are you doing in Gold?

[03:54:13] Speaker 8: It’s been choppy recently, I won’t lie. I’ve been doing all right, but I haven’t been making much money. It’s not about the money, though. It’s about the process and how you learn.

I’ve been getting chopped up recently in that 27-day range. I got chopped up badly. I’m not afraid to admit that I’ve made quite a few mistakes, but you learn from your mistakes. I’m fascinated by Gold, though. It’s great how it moves.

[03:54:39] ICT: Very interesting. Thank you for sharing that.

Speaker 8: No problem. Thank you very much for your insight and everything as well. It’s great. I love watching your content, so keep going. Thank you very much.

[03:54:51] ICT: Thank you, brother.

[03:55:00] Speaker 1: Keep going. Hey, we’re just boys hanging out, you know?

[03:55:05] ICT: Yeah, yeah. Out of all the concepts I teach, can you name one that stands entirely on its own?

[03:55:13] Speaker 1: One concept that you teach?

[03:55:18] Speaker 8: Is that a question for me?

[03:55:20] ICT: I was asking Kit, but other people can chime in too. I don’t want to have a—okay, yeah. What else?

[03:55:32] Speaker 8: I like the Market Maker Sell Model and Buy Model, the Universal Models, if you’re talking about an entire model.

[03:55:37] ICT: No. I’m talking about one specific element, like a Breaker. That’s one PD Array. Something along those lines.

[03:55:43] Speaker 1: If I said PO3, would that be acceptable?

[03:55:46] Speaker 11: No.

[03:55:48] Speaker 1: No, because that incorporates more than one concept, similar to a Market Maker Model, correct? So we’re trying to isolate one individual concept. Something like OTE would be an example.

[03:56:00] ICT: Yeah. That’s one principle, one individual item.

[03:56:05] Speaker 1: So you’re asking me to identify one individual concept that could stand by itself, right?

[03:56:13] ICT: That’s exactly how I framed the question. Name one concept—one specific element I teach—that requires nothing else for it to be advantageous. Something that stands entirely on its own and doesn’t require anything else.

What is that one thing?

Speaker 1: Maybe a Mitigation Block?

ICT: I’ll save you a whole lot of time.

There isn’t one.

Nothing I teach stands entirely on its own.

That’s the misconception people have when they come into my content—or when they’ve been trading with it but haven’t really figured out who they are as a trader yet. They think, “I just need to find that one thing he teaches that works the most. Once I know that one thing, I’ll be able to trade really well or read price action really well.”

I’ve always hoped to communicate that while I have a lot of tools, I’m not forcing any particular tool onto the market. I’m not trying to force a hammer into the role of a screwdriver.

I’m letting the market tell me where it’s likely to go, and then I look at what the market presents to me.

I have plenty of models sitting dormant. That doesn’t mean they don’t work. It simply means I can’t rely on them right now because they aren’t in play.

[03:57:51] Speaker 7: Correct.

ICT: But I’m not a model trader. I’m a Universal Trader.

I can come into the market, observe whatever it’s doing, and use the appropriate puzzle pieces to fill those gaps of misunderstanding that retail thinking created for me as a trader. Those pockets and periods of confusion are where my PD Arrays come in and resolve things for me.

As a student, you eventually have to realize that you’re not searching for one easy thing that works by itself and requires nothing else.

You do need to determine what your multiplier is going to be.

What is your entry mechanism?

Whatever that specific thing is, start there.

Then go through backtested data and setups.

[03:58:44] ICT: If you want to use things like Market Replay, I’m not a fan of it, but if you want to walk through a move that’s already happened and get familiar with it on a stunted basis, that’s still progress. It’s not ideal or optimal, but it’s something. You still have to know where the market is likely to go. What benefit is there in saying, “I know how to identify buy-side imbalances,” if the market is actually going lower and you don’t understand the concept of inversion? Do you understand my question now?

[03:59:21] Speaker 7: Yes.

[03:59:24] ICT: I’m presenting it almost like a riddle at first because it sounds easy to answer. You think, “Oh, that’s simple.” But it isn’t. That’s the problem I have as a teacher. Students come to me believing there’s one approach, one thing they need to focus on, but you still have to understand what keeps the market in your favor after you’re in the trade.

I can get you into all kinds of trades. But can you recognize when the trade is telling you, “I’m not going to do this anymore,” or, “This is all you’re getting. You better take profit here”?

How are you going to recognize that?

You have to understand how to read order flow. You have to understand what each individual candlestick is telling you. Every individual candlestick is a PD Array. Price is a long chain of consistent delivery, and every candle is part of that. The candles that communicate in agreement with what you expect price to do are what allow you to navigate and read the move.

That’s what makes this more complicated than people want it to be. Most people come to me wanting an ABC, 123 model. I’d love to be able to give you that, but markets are more complex than that.

Then you hear people say, “ICT makes it complicated. ICT traders complicate everything. It’s just buying and selling pressure.”

Okay.

Where are your executions? What did you do today? How did you navigate today’s price action?

What I’m trying to teach you is confidence in understanding that you don’t have to know what’s going to happen at every moment. You need to know what should happen at the right time.

When you’re watching price at the open, how should it behave? How should it book price? How does that compare with the previous session?

Look at what happened this week. I actually forgot to include this in the video, so everyone here gets this little piece of candy.

If one session consolidates and then the next session looks like it’s consolidating too, sometimes that second session isn’t really consolidation. It’s reversal.

Price creates a low just after 9:00 a.m., rallies from there, retraces back into it, and then begins its trend higher.

Like I’ve said before, you generally aren’t going to get consolidation, consolidation, consolidation across three consecutive sessions. You can get consolidation, consolidation, then expansion. More commonly, you’ll get consolidation into expansion or consolidation into reversal.

You’re looking for momentum, a shift in direction, something changing in the market.

Knowing what the previous session did is important. And what is a session? How do we define it? We can treat the 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. pre-market window as its own individual session.

That gives traders a useful benchmark for anticipating how price should book afterward.

It doesn’t give you direction by itself. You still have to come into the equation with some understanding of what the answer should be.

You’re solving the puzzle pieces the market gives you.

Previous session: London consolidation. Then 7:00 to 9:00 consolidation. Price creates a low just after 9:00.

What changed? Consolidation, consolidation, reversal.

Now we’re entering a time when we can reasonably expect expansion. Expansion leads to what? **Trending. **Trending toward where?

[04:03:18] Speaker 7: Where—

[04:03:19] ICT: What are we looking for?

I originally wanted that Volume Imbalance high to be traded to. Price didn’t do it. Okay. I’m going to switch.

I’m going to switch gears and look for price to go higher on Day 1 and Day 2 of the Jackson Hole Symposium, because price showed me it was unwilling to go down to an objective that I reasonably expected it to reach on the daily chart. It failed to go there.

Then look at how price traded today. It went higher, but once it got high and lofty, it gave up the goods pretty hard and sold off.

So knowing how you’re going to enter a trade is only one piece.

How are you going to know the trade is still good?

You see people ask this all the time when I show executions. They comment on the videos or on X:

“How did you know it was going to do this?”

“Why didn’t you think it was going to do that?”

Because I’m relying on other information that supports the model I used for the trade.

That means understanding how price books, price action, market structure, seasonal tendencies, how the weekly range should form, and the economic calendar. People don’t want to hear those things.

That’s why I like coming in here, because all of you understand it. You understand that I’m not going to reach into my pocket, hand you one little concept, and suddenly you can use it effortlessly.

You have to think. You have to bring some thought to it.

It’s going to require work, and it’s going to take time. It isn’t going to happen quickly.

But every day you work toward understanding it and apply the rules I’m giving you, you’ll start seeing things in price action that you can’t deny.

Those observations begin supporting the ideas that eventually lead to trades where you aren’t easily shaken out.

You’ll see the setup forming. You’ll know what price wants to do.

[04:05:21] Speaker 7: Yeah, okay, one more. With everything we’ve learned from you and the number of trades people have taken, some of your followers—not necessarily me—have reached a point where it’s like, “Okay, I can’t talk about this.” You mentioned something way back about the Men in Black kind of thing. So nobody’s going to say—I don’t know if you understand what I’m saying, but I’m not going to say any more.

[04:06:00] ICT: Oh, okay.

[04:06:09] Speaker 7: Yeah, there was this thing where you said that if you figured it out and started making so many trades per day and making a certain amount, people were going to start visiting you. That kind of thing.

[04:06:23] ICT: That’s sarcasm. That’s my dry humor. It’s also me teasing the people who know that I have a fourth book that’s going to be fiction.

[04:06:31] Speaker 5: It’s fiction.

[04:06:32] ICT: It’s all fiction. Just like the story about them picking me up in a van and all that stuff. That’s not me. That’s the character I’m going to write about.

[04:06:37] Speaker 7: I’m still not going to say it. I’m keeping it to myself, just in case.

[04:06:49] Speaker 1: Just in case. Okay, this is fun. This is good. We’ve heard from ICT Kane. Pip Daddy’s been plugging into the conversation left and right. He’s like, “Wait, is this mic on? Wait, I can ask more questions?” So yes, it’s been good. It’s been fun. It’s been real. Pez has his hand up.

[04:07:09] Speaker 11: So basically, I just posted a picture in the comments showing where you took your trade today, Michael. I wanted to know whether you utilized a Gray Pool and whether I’ve utilized it correctly.

[04:07:26] ICT: Give me a second. You posted something—what’s your profile name?

[04:07:32] Speaker 11: Pez and K. It should be from about eight minutes ago.

[04:07:42] ICT: Okay. Is it the chart that has Replay written over it?

[04:07:46] Speaker 11: Yeah, yeah.

[04:07:47] ICT: Okay, I’m looking at the chart. I don’t see a price axis, so what exactly am I looking at?

[04:07:53] Speaker 11: There are two Consequent Encroachments of the wicks marked out.

[04:08:00] ICT: It’s hard to see. Okay, I can see it. I can see that.

[04:08:10] Speaker 11: I just wanted to know whether that’s the correct application of a Gray Pool.

[04:08:14] ICT: Well, opposing wicks—that’s what we’re going to use if we’re looking for Obsidian.

[04:08:23] Speaker 8: Yeah.

Opposing Wicks and Obsidian

[04:08:26] ICT: A Gray Pool is part of that family of PD Arrays, but whenever you’re using opposing wicks, it’s Obsidian.

[04:08:34] Speaker 11: Right, okay. So would that be classed as Obsidian?

[04:08:40] Speaker 5: Yes.

[04:08:41] ICT: Whenever you see two wicks in close proximity that are opposed to one another, measure their two midpoints and extend that out as an area where price is likely to behave. If you know the direction, you can use smaller time frames to find a setup within that little area where price otherwise wouldn’t appear to be paying attention to anything.

[04:09:02] Speaker 11: Did you utilize that in your trade today?

[04:09:06] ICT: No, I did not.

[04:09:07] Speaker 1: No.

[04:09:08] Speaker 11: Right. And the order flow today as well—if you understand your concepts and how to read price, it was absolutely stunning. I can see how people get chopped up in it, but even from the 8:50 to 9:10 macro, when we traded up into a 15-minute Balanced Price Range, we had that inversion at the top, which was the 7:09 high. We traded lower, failed to get to the -0.5 on the other side, and in my head I’m thinking, “We haven’t booked price above the pre-market range during Regular Trading Hours.” So I’m automatically anticipating that we’re going to go back up there and book it during RTH as well.

[04:10:00] ICT: Did you see the second video I posted today?

[04:10:05] Speaker 11: No, I haven’t watched it at all.

[04:10:07] ICT: Yeah, I cover what you’re asking about. I didn’t use Obsidian, but I used other things in that video that explain it.

[04:10:15] Speaker 11: Oh, lovely. But even coming down from that 8:50 to 9:10 macro, the way the PD Arrays are layered over the gradients and price respects them—there are no bodies in the upper half. The order flow is absolutely stunning through every price swing today.

[04:10:33] ICT: You’re going to find that it’s like that every week and every day. That’s the wonderful thing about it. I’m excited by your observation and your appreciation for how the market books price like this. I get a lot of messages saying, “This is unbelievable.” I get it, I love it, and it energizes me. But this is what I’m talking about: if you don’t go in looking for it, you won’t recognize it. Once you understand what we do here and understand the language, it becomes simplified because you’re looking at these individual candlesticks differently and at the right time. It doesn’t feel like guesswork anymore. If you’re in a trade and know what you’re looking for, everything is communicating to you: “Everything’s good. Nothing’s bad yet. This is completely normal. Don’t worry about it.” Then price continues moving in your favor. That’s the very thing I prayed for when I was younger. I used to be scared to death when I entered trades, constantly afraid they were going to turn against me. I’m thankful now that I have the skill set to see and understand what price should do, what it cannot do and still remain valid, and what would invalidate the idea and the order flow. You can visually see it. They’ll never be able to hide this from you. People say they’re going to change the algorithm, but if you understand how price books, how are they going to change it so you can’t see it? They can’t. Time can’t stop. Every candle has a starting point, a high, a low, and a close. How are they going to hide that from you? They can’t. That should give you tremendous excitement and peace of mind. As long as we’re allowed to trade these markets, the skills you’re learning give you an edge that can’t simply be stripped away or diminished the way other things can. That’s power.

[04:12:59] Speaker 11: It removes the emotion from the trades. You know what you’re operating on, you know what you’re looking for, and it takes all the emotion out of it.

Wick Quadrants After Displacement

[04:13:08] ICT: Exactly.

Speaker 11: And with the way PD Arrays are displaced through—if we’re bearish, we have displacement lower, and there’s a wick to the left of that Fair Value Gap, I favor the wick. I mark the quadrants on that wick and use that wick throughout the day instead of the large Fair Value Gap itself.

[04:13:25] ICT: That’s it. Those are the rules. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?

[04:13:31] Speaker 1: It’s exciting, isn’t it?

[04:13:33] Speaker 11: It’s awesome. It’s the best thing. My uncle and I have learned this together, and honestly—

[04:13:40] ICT: Oh, really?

[04:13:41] Speaker 1: Where’s your uncle from?

[04:13:43] Speaker 11: We’re based in Wales. He’s been doing this a lot longer than me. I was trading support and resistance on crypto.

[04:13:52] Speaker 1: So your uncle got you turned on to good old ICT, huh?

[04:13:59] Speaker 11: Yeah. I trusted my uncle straight away, and then I trusted the concepts because I could visually see them.

[04:14:06] ICT: That’s awesome, man.

[04:14:09] Speaker 1: That is awesome. That’s really cool.

[04:14:11] Speaker 11: The bond we’ve got together now, where we just bounce ideas off each other, is awesome. It’s awesome.

[04:14:18] Speaker 1: That’s very cool. So learning the ICT language and trading with your uncle has actually brought you guys closer as well.

[04:14:26] Speaker 12: One hundred percent.

[04:14:27] ICT: That’s awesome.

[04:14:33] Speaker 11: So again, thank you for the time. I appreciate everything.

[04:14:37] Speaker 1: How old are you, bro?

Speaker 11: I’m 25.

Speaker 1: Okay, you’re 25. I understand somewhat how you engage with price, and I’m hearing you provide some really nice nuance around specific models and concepts. But if you had to explain to someone how you regularly engage with price right now, how would you describe it? What’s your call sign? How do you explain what you’re seeing?

[04:15:11] Speaker 11: If I’m being completely honest, I just trust the amount of times I’ve seen price reprice. I don’t need an exact model. I know what I’m looking for and what signatures need to be applied at the right time.

[04:15:22] Speaker 1: So you’re more of a Universal Trader?

[04:15:25] Speaker 11: One hundred percent.

[04:15:26] Speaker 1: I love that. I think the more you learn the language and the more universal you become with the concepts, that becomes the natural application—

[04:15:38] Speaker 11: You just get in sync with order flow.

[04:15:40] Speaker 1: Exactly, because then you’re seeing where and how the 2022 Model, PO3, and OTE are all occurring simultaneously. They become layered confluences that you can use when engaging with a trade.

[04:15:55] Speaker 11: And the way everything ties together from mentorship to mentorship—you gradually see more of it. The breadcrumbs are dropped, but he doesn’t give it to you directly. You have to go into the charts and study these things yourself to understand them.

[04:16:07] ICT: That’s the commission cost here. You have to pay it.

[04:16:13] Speaker 1: And nobody can avoid it.

[04:16:15] ICT: Nope.

[04:16:16] Speaker 1: Nobody can avoid it. Everybody has to pay.

[04:16:20] Speaker 3: Yep.

[04:16:21] Speaker 11: Yeah.

[04:16:22] ICT: The ferryman must be paid. And you pay him with time and due diligence. You have to put the effort in. There are no shortcuts. I don’t care how many times somebody tries to sell you one—you’re never going to get a shortcut.

[04:16:32] Speaker 11: And the way you grow as a person through studying the charts is insane as well.

[04:16:36] ICT: Yeah.

[04:16:39] Speaker 1: We were talking about this earlier, Pez. At 25, studying this with your uncle, there’s your why, which is your intention, and then there’s what you’ve sacrificed, which is what this pursuit has cost you. What are your thoughts on your why versus your sacrifice in trading?

[04:17:01] Speaker 11: Obviously, you’re sacrificing time, and that’s the most precious thing in the world. You can’t buy time.

[04:17:07] Speaker 1: Yes, that’s one of the things you’re sacrificing.

[04:17:10] Speaker 11: Yeah. But honestly, I’m doing it for my family. That’s my main driving factor.

[04:17:16] Speaker 1: Your why is your family. Michael has explored that in some interesting ways before. Is it validation? Is it wanting to provide more? Is it wanting to be the guy? Is there a level of acceptance involved? When you say your family is your why, Michael has done a good job of peeling that layer back a little further.

[04:17:43] Speaker 11: I just want to remove the stress of inflation and everyday life from my family.

[04:17:50] Speaker 1: Who’s in your family? What do you have—a wife and kid, mom and dad? What are we talking about?

[04:17:58] Speaker 11: I’ve got a girlfriend, and I just had a kid. She’s about three months old.

[04:18:04] Speaker 1: Congratulations.

[04:18:05] Speaker 11: Yeah. And I’ll be honest with you, having her has completely changed my perspective on life.

[04:18:11] Speaker 1: It’s gonna.

Speaker 11: It’s gonna.

Speaker 1: And congratulations. It’s awesome.

[04:18:14] Speaker 11: I approach the charts with a lot more maturity and responsibility now as well, whereas before I was a bit of a loose cannon. I have to credit my uncle for that too. He’s been able to rein me in because I’m still young, still learning, and still developing as a person. He’s much more mature, he’s got his head screwed on, and he’s been able to coach me in the right direction.

[04:18:38] ICT: That’s awesome. That is awesome. You brought up a really good topic that maybe you can use for a future Trader Roundup: what has been your sacrifice in trading? What did you have to give up? What did it cost you to get where you are in trading? Or even better, what are you willing to sacrifice?

[04:19:00] Speaker 11: Yeah. If you’re willing to invest in this, I feel like it’s all about time. Even in the charts, everything is time. Time is the most precious thing in the world because no matter how rich you are or what you have, you’ll never be able to buy time.

[04:19:15] ICT: Unfortunately, doing anything worthwhile requires a lot of it. Everybody wants a shortcut around that. I wanted it too, I’m not going to lie. I wanted it to happen faster, and it sucked going through the learning curve and realizing that I made it longer for myself than it needed to be. But you learn from that.

[04:19:35] Speaker 11: But I don’t understand it because if it were quick and easy, it wouldn’t feel nearly as good when you finally reached the point of achieving it.

[04:19:44] Speaker 11: The flowers—it just wouldn’t feel as good.

[04:19:48] ICT: When you get good at this and you’re firmly rooted in what you’re doing as a trader and analyst, and you’re consistently able to read price action day by day, you’ll see other people saying it’s complicated, contrived, dribble, gobbledygook, or that it’s made more complex than it needs to be. But you know what it does in your own hands. You know what you can see and how that contrasts with people using other methodologies. I’m not saying you should compare yourself to them, but when they rail against what you’re learning here—“There’s no algorithm. This guy’s a fraud. This doesn’t work. There’s no track record. He didn’t win the Robbins Cup”—they build a laundry list of reasons why you shouldn’t learn it. But they don’t do what we do in price. They don’t see the moves we see. What we do repeats every single day, whereas sometimes their methodology doesn’t even give them a trade. In my hands, there’s a setup every day. My veteran students can find one every day—FOMC, Non-Farm Payroll, whatever. That’s not the goal, to trade every day, but it’s a byproduct of knowing what you’re doing. And if you talk too much about that confidence, you’ll sound narcissistic, but really it’s just being comfortable in your own skin and knowing nobody can change your mind about what you understand about the market and about yourself as a trader.

[04:21:41] Speaker 11: You’ve done it, you’ve seen it, you’ve put the work in, you’ve put the time in. Nobody can change how you see the markets.

[04:21:51] Speaker 7: Exactly.

[04:21:52] Speaker 1: Once you see it, it’s like The Sixth Sense with Bruce Willis. The kid sees dead people throughout the movie, and you don’t realize until later that Bruce Willis is dead too. It’s like that kind of plot twist. You walk up to a chart and see things other people can’t see. You can’t unsee it once it’s there.

[04:22:28] Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 1: And it’s crazy when you show the chart to people you love and they just don’t see what you see.

[04:22:42] ICT: Like a stereogram.

Speaker 1: But you do.

ICT: Like a stereogram. You stare at it, your eyes almost cross, and then suddenly—

[04:22:49] Speaker 1: Yeah, like the butterflies.

[04:22:50] ICT: Suddenly these images appear and look three-dimensional, and you’d swear they weren’t there a second ago. That’s what it’s like. Other people see random price and say, “Look, there’s a Fair Value Gap. If you traded that, it would’ve failed.” They don’t realize that when we say we’re looking inside a candlestick, we really are. But we don’t need to know exactly how many people bought at a specific price. We can see what price is doing inside the candlestick as it moves. The rules are simple. When it’s bullish, the upper half is discount sensitivity. When it’s bearish, the lower half is premium sensitivity. Those ideas stack on top of each other and keep building. Over the last two years, I’ve been encouraged as a teacher because this is not easy to learn. It takes real effort, and anybody who gets it has earned it. I get messages from people saying, “I’m watching this unfold exactly how it was taught.” They stop feeling like they have to make money immediately or rush into trades because they’re comfortable observing price and saying, “It should go here. It should go there.” It starts to feel like a superpower. Before learning to trade, you never would’ve looked at these squiggly lines and thought you could figure any of this out. I didn’t either. I thought I needed an indicator to tell me what the candles were going to do. The candles intimidated me. I loved Larry Williams because he had all these indicators, and those indicators taught me to ignore price. But price is telling you everything.

[04:24:50] Speaker 11: It’s perspective and anticipation as well. It’s like the window washer, if you know the film I’m referencing. He can see a crash from two blocks away, but the people on the street can’t. It’s the same thing with price.

[04:25:04] ICT: Exactly. Good analogy. Well, Kit and gang, I’ve enjoyed hanging out with you, but that time has come. I’m going to get off here and take care of some errands around the house before I head down. I hope everybody had a wonderful week. I hope you learned something. If you hurt yourself, understand that it’s a temporary boo-boo. Everything works itself out in the end. You have to keep working toward it. Everything heals. The scar tissue is only as bad as you allow it to be. If you say, “I got a scratch. It isn’t going to fester into an infection. I’m not going to keep picking at the scab and reminding myself that I did something wrong,” then you can heal. Stop replaying, “Remember that one trade I took during Jackson Hole when I didn’t listen?” Learn from it and move on. Every year you’re going to have events like this. Now you know what to expect. There’s lots of volatility and lots of opportunity, but you don’t have to trade it. Nobody says you have to.

[04:26:16] Speaker 8: No one.

Progression From Study to Execution

[04:26:17] ICT: I’m not holding you to it, and if I’m your instructor and I’m not holding you to it, why should anyone else? Why should you listen to somebody saying, “Did you trade? You’re not a trader if you don’t trade Mondays and Fridays.” There are rules and general principles, but that doesn’t mean everybody has to apply them the same way. In the beginning, though, you should respect the times I tell you to abstain because it’s very easy to build scar tissue in your first year. All those fearful, painful experiences come from rushing and trying to use tools you haven’t learned to handle yet.

I studied iaido, the art of drawing a sword. In the beginning, you train with a bokken, a wooden sword. You’re not allowed to start with a live blade because if you mishandle it, you’ll cut yourself.

[04:27:13] Speaker 7: Okay.

[04:27:14] ICT: Trading is no different. Every candlestick is a live blade. Every single one has the ability to take money from you, even the smallest one, if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you don’t know how to stop the bleeding, you’ll hemorrhage and blow the account. So you need a procedural progression: start with no risk and no expectation, just observation. Watch the instructor. How does he swing the sword? How does he draw it? Where do his arms stop? Where does he leave the blade pointing? How does he return it to the scabbard? Those are conceptual observations.

Then you practice with the wooden sword. That’s backtesting. The trade is already dead. You can’t do anything with it. You’re just observing how it behaved and becoming familiar with the blade.

Then you move into demo trading and tape reading. Now you’re holding something shaped like a real sword, with the scabbard and tsuba, but it still doesn’t have a live edge. You can’t lose real money, so you can’t get cut. But demo can also build false courage. People say, “Let me see what happens with 10 contracts.” You don’t have the money for 10 contracts. You couldn’t afford that risk in real life. Then when it goes wrong, you shrug because nobody saw it and no real money was lost. That’s not progress. That’s reckless handling of the blade.

The goal is to use demo properly: understand what you should and shouldn’t do, experience the encouragement when a setup works, and counsel yourself when it doesn’t. You start to feel, “I did that right. It feels balanced in my hands. I don’t feel disoriented. I don’t feel like I’m going to drop the sword or cut myself.” Then, once you know your model and know how to read price action, you can finally handle the live blade—real money—without fear because you know how to navigate it. You know how to parry, how to move, how to handle yourself. Taijutsu is body movement. When all those skills work together, you become a warrior. You can go into this arena every day and compete with everybody else, and nobody has any greater advantage than you do. But you don’t broadcast what you’re going to use. You just operate quietly in the shadows.

Have a good weekend. I’ll talk to you next time.