What To Focus On Right Now
Make room to focus.
Choose a little time for this lesson. Pause whenever you need to.
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Two Perspectives — Who Is The Victim?
The uninformed money doesn't acknowledge that smart money exists; its perspective is that indicators are the answer — that overbought/oversold is the precursor to a move ("indicator-itis"). If you're new and not infected with that yet, you actually have the advantage. The smart money perspective is that of the liquidity provider: everyone else is liquidity — in the form of buy stops, sell stops and pending orders above and below the most recent highs and lows. 90% of traders lose; a huge new pool of liquidity enters the market every single day.
Daily Price Action Logs — Start Here
Come in with no previous knowledge — go back to square one, even if you've made money before (if anything outside institutional order flow led to your profitability, it was coincidence). The very first thing: create a daily price action log with price charts, with this much data displayed per timeframe:
What To Note On The Charts
- Where price has shown a quick movement from a specific level — those big candles will be influential later.
- Recent highs and lows that haven't been retested — they'll influence future price delivery.
- Clean highs (two equal highs in close proximity): buy stops build above them and the market usually comes back up and runs through that. Equal lows: a big area for sell stops — the market has a willingness to go down and test that liquidity.
- What day the weekly high/low forms, and what time of day / killzone (London or New York) — it lends to prognostication.
- The daily high and daily low of every single trading day, and when they form. Note previous day's high/low and draw them out to 0 GMT.
Work the levels top-down: mark them on the daily, drop to the 4-hour — the same levels transpose immediately and more highs/lows become visible — then the hourly (which defines the weekly range), then a separate 15-minute chart covering the last 3–4 days.
- One currency pair — and pick one apart from the pound and euro, since the mentorship uses those; you want a unique perspective you arrived at yourself.
- Keep the annotated level-charts separate from the executable chart — don't let charts get too busy.
- Three charts total: the executable, the 15-minute MTF, and the HTF.
- Resist the urge to forecast price movements — that's not for this stage; it only leads to frustration.
- Never marry your analysis — if real-time price stops making sense for your expected conditions, you need the flexibility to switch gears or go to the sidelines. We don't know direction with certainty; we know probabilities.
- Do it every single trading day — even after 23 years, ICT still keeps these logs. It's what professionals do.