ICT Price Action Chronicles - Market On Close Macro transcript

Hello folks. How are you? Hope you're doing well. [sighs] All right. So, I'm going to cover the PM session from Monday, and it's the market on close macro. It's a small little 10-minute window where the market generally produces some of the cleanest little predictable runs in price action for an intraday scalper. Now, I have students that have made this their entire model. They don't do anything but just trade this. And I know it may sound crazy, but they basically have a 10-minute, maybe 25, 30 minute workday as an intraday trader.

And not every day obviously is as good as this one was, but sometimes you can get burned a little bit. So just like anything out there, just be mindful that perfection is a target. It's not a destination. Okay? You're working towards it. Always trying to refine your craft and not getting beat up along the way when you take a hit or stopped out or get a loss to that effect or you miss a trade. Sometimes there isn't really anything to do but should it execution.

And I want to kind of go into details with what it is I did, what I was looking at, why I placed the stop loss where I placed it, why I added to the position, and why I thought it was going to go where I thought it was going to go. Okay, so uh this price action chronicle entry is for Monday, New York PM session for August 3rd, 2026. All right. So, here's the intraday price action for Monday morning all the way up. We had a consolidation during the two-hour lunch and then we rallied up and then we have this little portion in here where it was small consolidation.

Now, when people see this, if they're inexperienced, generally they just many times blow their account because they're trying to capture the next price leg. And this lecture here is going to focus on the importance of knowing the time. It's also important to know the characteristic of the time of the day. And I'll get into that in a moment, but right now, I want you to focus on a few things. Number one, at 1:30 p.m. Eastern time, that starts the New York PM session, pre-market session start.

Okay? So 1:30, we have that 30-minute window between 1:30 p.m. Eastern time. Always set your time to New York local time. I don't care where you are in the world. I don't care who who said what, who's teaching you what, who taught you, whatever. New York local time. Okay? I promise you if you do that everything you learn from me Swiss time piece precision I promise you that. Okay. So from this point in time at 1:30 p.m.

Eastern time on Monday and every day thereof um towards the close of the day we'll just say 400 p.m. Eastern time just for the sake of completeness and and keeping it easy. Obviously, regular trading hours goes until 4:14 p.m., but for this particular macro, it's only a it's a 10-minute little script that causes the market to repric to a an obvious little pool of liquidity, okay? Or an inefficiency, and I'll explain that as we go.

But I want you to take a look at this small little section that's shaded in yellow. Okay? So, that shaded yellow area, we're actually going to zoom into that. And I'm going to break everything down for you. And then for those that didn't see it on my X account, I actually posted the little vignette of me entering the trade and managing it. And you'll notice that at the end of this talking port part and portion of this lecture, uh you'll see the recording and it is absolutely not market replay.

Okay? So, I know there's a lot of young guys out there that just can't accept the fact that the old man knows what he's doing. But I'm teaching you this way so that way you can see the mechanics, the conceptual ideas and theories that I'm teaching you that the market absolutely uses under algorithmic delivery. All right. So, we're zoomed in here as you see over here to the lefth hand side 1:30 p.m. Eastern time. And this is the high of the day for Monday during regular trading hours opening session.

So, while price is moving around and migrating until we close at 4:14 p.m., we don't really know what that daily high and daily low is. We can have an intraday daily high and low, but that's not set in stone until 4:15 p.m. When that happens, the highest high and the lowest low that formed between 9:30 Eastern time and 4:14 p.m. Eastern time, none of those things can be called the higher low. Okay? So, in this case, it just happens to be the range at which we're annotating here.

And if you go back through that price action from that high down, okay, the first octant on the daily range is right here. It comes in at 28,883 even. Okay, I'm going to go back one slide just so you can see. measuring the low all the way up to the highest high that formed after 1:30. Okay, notice that. And as we get closer and closer and closer to that 3:00 hour, we're looking for reasons to justify why this should be viewed as the daily high. even though regular trading hours are opening the possibility for more price action fluctuations and it could very easily go up and take that out.

Now I'm going to teach you how I weigh that type of thing and kind of cancel the idea for a higher high before regular trading hours. Opening range or not opening range but regular trading hours session closes at 4:14 Eastern time. So, we'll go into the one minute zoomed in. So, we have that little section of price action now. And now we have that high that I'm going to flesh out the idea why I believed this was such a no-brainer type market on close or as I call it murder on close.

So, focusing on this portion of price action, this candlestick right here, that's 3 p.m. Eastern time. That's why it's shaded there and carried all the way over to 4:00. So the end of the shading in yellow is 4:00 p.m. Eastern time. So that's the last hour of trading for regular trading hours. Last full hour, let's say it that way. Yes. You see that old guy in the background? He's got his eye on you. Okay. Unfortunately, these types of things have to be shown this way because a lot of my content gets ripped off and a lot of people take it and they pretend it's their lecture notes, it's their mentorship, it it's something that they try to copy and make money with.

So, just be mindful that um I appreciate your input, but please don't complain to me about the watermark because it will absolutely remain there while we're in this playlist. It's just going to have to be there. If you complain, I promise you I'll block you. Okay? I don't want to hear cryb babies. So, you're here getting it for free. So, there it is. [sighs] All right. So, we're going to break down the details here. And I want you to focus over there.

Okay. So now since we had a day that just simply went up all day long during Monday and we made this high intraday and we've moved off that high. This high here starting at 3:00 could be a intraday intermediate term high meaning it's it's a high. It's an important high but it's going to be within the range that formed over here. So, if this is the highest high it posted for Monday's trading, then this could be just a short-term high, and they may want to take us down in to take out this low and this low.

And this low and this low are basically relatively equal. Now, they don't look so obvious when they're s when they're zoomed in like this, but that's the criteria I teach when it comes to relative equal lows. the one closest to you in market price, in other words, to the left, needs to be higher than to the left of it, this low. So, the second low needs to be higher. If this low was lower than that one, then that would not be a high probability candidate for a draw on liquidity.

All right? So, right away, we know that this is a likelyhood of being traded two and this was two. Okay? Okay, so initially I had this noted as you'll see in the recorded session or actually executed. Uh this was noted as a minor sellside liquidity pool and this is a minor sellside liquidity pool. Well, why what makes them both minor sellside liquidity pools? Because it's in the context of trading into the intraday full daily range or session range.

Okay. So, in this case, we have the daily high that could potentially be the high of the day. And then now we're entering the 3:00 portion of time. So, it's noted as minor sell side liquidity. And right away, obviously, this is a little bit of a spoiler, right? [laughter] It's it's obviously done this. Now, right up to this point, if you didn't watch me execute yesterday, uh then this you just going to look like cherry picked hindsight and all that business.

But I promise you, you're going to see it. All right. So, right away off this high, we want to frame some context at 3:00 at this candlestick open, which is down here. What do we see in price? Well, if you went to the left and looked at this range low and this range high, this is a premium PDA in the form of a premium wick. Now, when price is down here at 3:00 and opening there, and this wick is above where price starts at 3:00, the wick takes precedence over the fair value gap.

See that? So this fair value gap between here and there, if this wick wasn't there, then I would use that fair value gap. But if it builds next to a wick like this, the wick takes precedence over the fair value. Okay? So much in the same vein with what I teach as visual order flow with my PD races. Simply looking at a candlestick, you don't need to complicate anything. If the market opens here and it's likely to go up to go down.

So we open, we trade up. If this wick is in fact going to be a premium array, that means it's going to hold price down. We don't want to see the bodies buried above the halfway point. Now, we do get wicks above that and that's fine. I'll cover that in a moment. But when it does these types of things and each body closes and then we leave it, that's significant. That tells us that this is a formidable barrier at the beginning of 3:00 and then we see this type of price action.

So right away what that has done during the last hour trading again focus inside that yellow area that shaded. I just gave you the backdrop why selling short the last 10 minutes is more likely than going long just by noting this and the time at which it runs to it during the last hour. So at 3:00 it quickly runs up it can post a body or a series of bodies above its midpoint. So this PD array which is a premium wick, it's telling you visually that the algorithm is recognizing this as the anchor point at which it needs to break above this before it becomes bullish again.

But because it's done this characteristic here, leaving the bodies in the lower half, that makes this lower half of this wick extremely sensitive or in this case what we call premium sensitivity. It's a formidable barrier to which price should not go and it's not classic support and resistance. Okay, so the idea of using that wick, your supply and demand heroes aren't going to be able to tell you that anything about that particular wick is important.

They don't talk about wicks, okay? And not in the context that I'm teaching. So, we we drop down and we create a short-term low here. So right away going into the latter portions of the last hour of trading for regular trading hours, we have this short-term range here and we have this short-term range here. So the market on close macro, it begins at 3:50 Eastern time. Okay? So 3:50 p.m. New York local time starts that.

That's this candlestick right here. Okay? So, what we're looking for is the tiniest little fluctuation in price action that occurs at 350 and completes by 4:00. Now, many times whatever takes place at the macro of 350 to 4:00, it can continue beyond that to 3:14. And many times it can continue into the actual electronic uh session closing at 4:59 p.m. Eastern time. Then we have that one hour of no trading and then we have a electronic trading hours restart at 6 PM Eastern time.

So I don't want to give you all the details and bore you. I want this have this video kind of short. I want these all to be short and succinct. But because we're starting the series off with this one, I kind of like want to lay down some ground rules for housekeeping. That way you know what we're trying to do each time. All right. So the next bit of business is we have relative equal highs. Why is that important? Because at 3:00, we have this smooth area.

And we've already had a willingness to show the premium sensitivity off of that wick. And we chose that wick because the fair value gap is to the right of the wick. So if there's a wick to the left of the fair value gap that you're your eye is going to jump to naturally, just cancel that out if there's a wick and then simply take the entirety of that wick. Okay? So whatever wick shares the range that creates the fair value gap, you're going to have to do some grading on that.

And that's what we did here. So buy side falls in line with okay, it looks like we're going to go lower because of this business and we posted relative equal highs. We have a sell pull here and here. These are much more jagged versus look how smooth this is. See how that is? What's more jagged? This low to that low or this high, this high, this high? Very smooth here. So, you can see how all of these things are starting to stack in favor of a market rallying up just to drop down again.

So, we have the final hour of retro trading hours dealing range high right here. And the final hour of regular trading hours dealing range low right there. What do you think you can do with that information? Remember this range is inside of the daily range because this at this moment at 3:00 this is the regular trading hours daily range high intraday high basically. It could be once we trade the 4:15 p.m. Eastern time then that makes this the actual daily high but we can't call it that yet.

So we're it's just right now the reg trading hours daily range high and this is the range inside of that and remember this is the first octant measuring that range from the lowest low in the morning all the way up to that high here as I open up this presentation. So the first key level it should drag down to in any retracement would be this octant and below that the next level would be the upper quadrant. So because we're looking for just a small little snippet of price action a very surgical strike for intraday trading scalping only it's easiest to look for the lowhanging fruit objective that would be around and sharing in close proximity the first octant level.

So here the market at 3 350 rather it trades up and we're entering the area where there's minor buy side liquidity. When we know that final hour forever trading hours dealing range which we would know obviously entering 350 look to the left that range is finite. It's specifically outlined here and here. There's no well you wouldn't have known that range was the high and what are you talking about? Okay, I got a lot of new students that are just coming here and they don't know the language created.

They don't know how to talk like us. They don't look at the market the same way we do. So, they get tripped up and think, you know, how would you know that was the low? No, because it's there by time. But here and here, several minutes have gone by, close to almost an hour. So, at this moment right there, we're looking at where we at in the range for the last hour so far. There's the low. There's the high. Because we can define that, then we can grade it.

You take your fib and you anchor to the high and you drag it down to the low. And when you get that, what you can do is then if you have any question about what the settings are for your fib, I actually included it over here. I know. I'm so thoughtful. Very nice, Amanda. So, this is the 0.5 level. As you can see, it's highlighted right there. Okay, this sometimes changes to other levels, and I'll teach those as we progress forward.

Just be mindful that this level here is like a very easy bellweather expansion outside of a range. And I use it for opening range gaps. I use it for dealing ranges, all these little simple things of projection. Okay, when we have this range here, how far can it go if it does tackle that that low? Well, this orange line here suggests that we could see price trading down to a low of 28,870.75. It's just a real nice little ballpark figure.

It doesn't mean it's going to go right to it and stop. It can many times it has. You've seen me take trades where it literally goes right to it and to the tick it stops sometimes to a fault. My my limit orders sometimes don't get filled when I'm trying to be so precise. So, you got to give a little bit of fluff to your [snorts] exits. I used to struggle and wrestle with the idea of I needed my exits to be so perfect.

And I found that precision when you're exiting is much more harmful than focusing on precision on the entries. Now, I'm not saying entries are paramount because you can obviously get into a trade once you know where it's going with all kinds of applications of my PDA rates. You don't have to have the highest high of a short. So, what I'm saying is in reference to the relationship between precision of either entering a trade versus the precision of exiting a trade, you don't really need uh precision because think about what I teach in terms of partials.

If you expect 100 handles as your your complete run for the trade and you're taking profits at 50% of that range, obviously that's not precision, is it? Or is it perception? I believe if you can hold out to half the run you think it's going to go to and take a profit beyond just beyond that 50% of the run you expect, that is precision. But then you start looking at other places where you would take a partial because you're going to grow in your understanding.

It's not going to happen right away. And you want to kind of give yourself a little reward by holding on to the trade idea longer each time you participate. And don't be afraid of the getting stopped out portion because you're going to learn by holding on what signatures, what characteristics that are are being shown to you while price is going towards your your target. If it turns around, stops you out, you'll have the clarity of hindsight to go back and see what you did not recognize when it was happening.

Don't be fearful of losing. The losing or stopping out or missing moves, all those things, they're events that highlight. They put a big spotlight on an opportunity for you to improve on. You don't get better by doing the trades and they work out like you thought. That's not that's not how this works, okay? You get better by realizing what you're not doing as efficient or as well to the rules and sticking with it and in managing and wrestling your your trade psyche and the eb and flow of fear and greed while you're in the trade.

Those things, there's no secret to that. There's no shortcut to it. There's no mentor or teacher is going to tell you how you can get around all that stuff except for just being in the market, desensitizing yourself. Okay. So, there's your soapbox uh rant. So, if we continue on that low, that's the low of the PM session that began at preession 130. So, right there, there's sellside. So, look at what we have here. We have a short-term minor sellside liquidity pool here.

We have this low of the PM session. Remember, look, you're looking at it right here at 350. So looking at that moment right there looking back to the left was the lay of the land. That's the intraday high. We have this high here. We have this low and we have this low. So we tried to go up higher, tried and failed here. And then at 3:00 we tried one more time and went lower and we've consolidated and created relative equal highs.

So where's the market jagged? There to there. there to there. This is too smooth. So, anticipate, not react. Anticipate the market's going to trade higher to go lower. Where is it going to go to? It should go below here and continue below here. But how much further can it go below here? To that orange line, which is the0.5 level of this dealing range. Okay? See how mathematically specific that is? We're not guessing.

We're not hoping and praying. Okay? We're looking at the market saying, "Okay, I believe that the market's going to behave a certain way. I believe it's going to go in a certain direction. I believe it's going to take out a specific low. I don't need the low the lowest low. I just need to be in the highest probable area where it could allow me to get out." Now, the obvious easy one is just put your limit order right at that low.

If you're scared, that's how you progress when you're doing limit exits. Whatever you think the target is, okay? Go one. If in this case, if you're aiming for it from here to go down to get out of a short position, [sighs] you can do a couple handles above that low and be pleased once it smashes through it and learn by putting yourself into it multiple times how to trust hanging on to it a little bit longer. You can put it right at that low or one tick below.

That's the that's the progression naturally. When you don't know what you're doing, you should practice like that. Okay. But for the folks that want to try to see if they can get a little better of an exit and you're like me, you want to fancy dance a little bit. How much further can it go below there? Well, we're calling for this mathematically from that range low to that range high. So it opens and trades down to the liquidity pool there.

It trades to the mathematic measurement of dealing range high, dealing range load to an algorithmic range projection for the final regular trading hours range. That's this. And when it pierces this, the wicks again, they're allowed to do the damage. So we have that expansion through and it goes below that. How much further do you have to go below that? That's the art. That's the art of this. So, if you're aiming for this, just above that, it's fine.

You don't need to have anything, you know, widely uh lower than that. So, if we take this PDA, which is the premium wick, extend it over when we entered 3:00 and we're trading up. This is where it can trade to, but it should not get in the halfway point of this. So, that's going to help me frame what? My stop loss. my stop loss is anchored to this candlestick's wick because look how many bodies were inside the lower half of that wick.

So, it can come up here and tap that. And if it does, I'm going to try to add more. I'm not fearful that it's up in this area. Remember, we're looking for buy side to be taken inside this wick. So this line right here, okay, roughly is in the upper portion of that wick, but it's also the upper quadrant. See that? That's what makes this wick high probability because it's anchored not only to the octant just below upper quadrant, but it's two key levels part of this dealing range.

So that makes this extremely formidable. the upper half, no bodies, but allow for your stop to get close to that. Now, obviously, I was well, let's be honest. I was showing off the last couple days, and I wanted to show how that stop loss sitting just above that high wasn't getting hit. And you can say whatever you want to say. I'm not here to try to brag. I'm just telling you this is the logic that I'm teaching. You have to go in and back test and see if these things hold up.

I can walk forward with it and trade on the hard right edge. You're going to graduate to doing those things over time, but you're not going to get there quick. So, this is where we allow for the errant price action. That means how far it can reach and the draw down that's permissible for your trade and still be good is basically what I'm saying. Now, focus again right here. right here. Premium wick at 3 pm. That starts the last hour of red trading hours.

That's this candlestick right there. And the wick is right there. See that? So, we have this wicks range. And we'll take out the portion. So, you can see the line here. That's the midpoint line. The bodies, look where they're at. They're only allowed to go in the lower half of the wick, but the wicks can go up and bang the low of that wick. So, that's how you're measuring what is permissible for draw down. Nobody teaches that.

Nobody teaches that stuff, folks. They tell you, "Here's where you put your stop loss." But how many times have you been in a trade and you got scared out of a trade and you collapsed the trade so it wouldn't hit your stop loss? But if you just would have left it alone, you would have been fine. Put a number one in the comment section if that's ever happened to you and you wanted to know how to overcome that. The way I teach, because I'm trading the market, the source code, what makes these markets go up and down.

If you know what it's likely to respect in terms of the range relative to the time of the day, and where it's going to draw to, what's the furthest thing it can do and still be okay with the trade? This wick high is joining this whole area from that wick low up to halfway point. So this becomes a balanced price range and we've already had it here. And where's the energy leaving that that wick, this candlestick. So that tells me that candlestick's high plus a tick or two.

That's a really good place to put a stop loss. And I don't care. If it starts flirting around up here and every time it closes lower, see how it goes up there and it closes lower. It goes up there and closes lower. Every time it closes below here, if I can get something off and enter in the upper portion like that, I'm getting VIP seating, folks. Like I didn't ever get to a concert, you ever go to a venue and there's open seats?

You're not supposed to do this, but you know you've done it. When I was a wrestling fan, I've did it. you go closer to the, you know, the ring or whatever it is you're watching because no one's been sitting there for the first 30 minutes. Maybe they'll come late and make you get out of the chair, but it's worth going over because you have a ticket for the seat you paid for. So they they can't take your seat over and say you can't sit there if you have to go back to yours.

So it's VIP seating and I I'm not going to claim that I know for certain it's going to do this. I'm going make allowance for it. I'm making allowance for the trade to have that much draw down up to that candlestick's high. Now, classic trading ideas would tell you if you're trying to shorten here for any other reason, your stop loss needs to go up here. Not me, Jack. Not me. I'm cut from a different cloth. So, I need to know what I need to know in price action, and I'm going to stick to those rules, and I'm not going to borrow the logic from somebody else's stuff.

So, that's why you see, you'll see it in the trade. That's where my stop loss is at. Why? Okay, we're in the last portions of what I'm sharing over the next two years. So, there's a whole lot of details that many of you have been asking questions for. While I'm never going to teach everything I know, uh what I agreed to teach publicly, you'll get over the next two years. But I know you keep dragging it out. That's right.

But the market then collapses here and runs quickly below that short-term low. below that low and then below that low and finally right there at 356. We get that run right below the target and it clears the algorithmic range projection on the final regular trading hours dealing range from here to here. And folks, I don't know how you want to call it anything else, but that's very very precise. Hopefully you learned something from this.

Until I talk to you next time, be safe.