r/ICTMentorship

Bearish reaction expected from 4538 on gold.

Potential move toward 4500 if this zone holds.

Setup invalidates above 4560.

Would you look for early entry on rejection

here or wait for confirmation before committing?

This isn’t normal price action you’re seeing on XAUUSD right now.

These are pre-FOMC adjustments, liquidity grabs, position reshuffling, and volatility expansion before the real move even begins.

I already burned my hand with an SL trying to trade the noise early.

One thing I’ve learned with gold:

discipline saves accounts more than forcing entries during uncertainty.

There will always be another setup after the news.

Overtrading pre-FOMC usually just turns traders into liquidity.

Patience stays.

Discipline stays.

Revenge trading loses.

Bearish reaction expected from 4480 on gold.

Potential move toward 4446 if this zone holds.

Setup invalidates above 4498.

Would you look for early entry on rejection

here or wait for confirmation before committing?

At this point I’m convinced brokers have a live stream of my stop loss.

Price came 0.04 away from invalidation, took me out clean, then moved straight to target without a single meaningful pullback.

No consolidation.

No second entry.

No mercy.

Sometimes the analysis is right but you accidentally become the liquidity.

Be honest — how many times has gold personally attacked your stop loss this month?

Retail trader from Italy. Got tired of the SMC/ICT crowd repeating "bigger FVG, better setup" without anyone actually checking it. So I checked.

4 years of M15 data on EURUSD, USDJPY, USDCAD. About 60,000 FVGs detected and analyzed.

Finding 1: gap size alone is essentially a coin flip. The biggest gaps (20 to 50 pips) had negative net edge in my sample.

Finding 2: the impulse (size of the candle creating the gap) is a much cleaner signal. Filtering for impulse ≥ 10 pips survives walk-forward where the baseline busts.

Three configs backtested with FTMO style caps (5% daily, 10% total, $10k, 0.5% risk, costs included):

• Baseline: +78% over 4y, but 1 bust out of 6 walk-forward windows
• Impulse ≥ 10p: +68% over 4y, 0 busts in 6 windows
• Impulse ≥ 20p: +18%, too restrictive

Also did Monte Carlo, statistical significance tests, and a null benchmark with randomized trade directions (random gave 58% bust rate vs 1.1% for the filtered version).

Caveats are in the article: small walk-forward sample, mild data snooping on threshold selection, mixed results across symbols.

Full writeup with charts, methodology, and limitations: Article

Critique welcome.

Bearish reaction expected from 4543 on gold.

Potential move toward 4515 if this zone holds.

Setup invalidates above 4560.

Would you look for early entry on rejection

here or wait for confirmation before committing?

Just locked in another payout cycle on these 4 Alpha Futures accounts and it brought the total up to $5,572 for the month. What’s crazy is almost all of it came from the same few setups I’ve been sharing here live the entire time.

Lately the IRL → ERL model has been absolutely printing in this market. NQ has been in a strong trending environment and instead of trying to be the hero calling tops every day, I’ve just been following liquidity and waiting for the market to pull back into imbalance before continuing higher.

That’s honestly been the biggest difference.

A lot of traders keep getting chopped because they’re forcing trades in the middle of ranges or trying to short a market that clearly wants higher prices. Meanwhile I’ve mostly just been sitting on my hands waiting for the same conditions over and over again: liquidity gets taken, price reclaims structure, we retrace into IRL, then expand toward the next ERL target.

The setups themselves are not complicated. The hard part is the patience.

This month only had a couple small red days across these accounts. Everything else was either base hits or bigger trend continuation trades.

That’s also why prop firms have worked well for me. Being able to spread the same execution across multiple accounts makes a huge difference once you actually have a repeatable edge and proper risk management behind it.

The best part is these were all trades I talked about publicly while they were developing.

Still a lot more work to do, but this has probably been the cleanest month I’ve had in a while just from staying patient and sticking to what’s already working instead of constantly searching for something new.

If you want the full free video breakdown of the IRL → ERL model and how I’ve been using it in this trend, comment MODEL and I’ll drop it.

Your Job as a trader isn't to predict the market. It is to read what price is already telling you; and align with it.

This ended week, above, are the trades I took; Just 4.

I took this trades based entirely on the same foundation- Higher timeframe directional bias, lower timeframe reaction off concentrated points, and executing trades based off those reactions. The most important concentration points for me are always these; an imbalance formed after a structural break, a relevant decision point being invalidated and price printing a reversal pattern off that point.

All said; strategy carries a mere percentage in my trading business. The character I am when I sit in front of the charts is what matters the most. The ability to wait for price to form a setup and sitting out until a setup is formed, and also letting the trade playout while managing risk.

Among the lessons I have learned is that; no matter how sure you are with your setup do not dare to overleverage; always stick to risk management.

Now, colleagues, I hope you understand that price is not random; it is a deliberate delivery system moving between concentrated points and reacting off relevant decision points, and your job is to trade that reaction, manage risk and be patient for your setup to play out.

Reflection Question: How do you personally think about your role when you sit down to trade? are you reading, predicting or somewhere in between?

Also share your trades from the previous week, and what lesson you learned

Join now to unlock premium signals and exclusive work opportunities
https://chat.whatsapp.com/Kedb6wNWKnjGr8SX762u2U

XAUUSD still looks bearish on higher timeframes after the massive selloff.
Lower timeframes are now consolidating, which usually means another big move is loading.
As long as gold stays below 4560, sellers remain in control.
Watching 4520 closely for a possible breakdown next week

Sharing my weekly read on gold heading into

the new week.

SSL resting below at the 4400 zone — significant

liquidity sitting there that price tends to sweep

before reversing. BSL above at 4800 is the

larger draw on liquidity once the downside is

cleared.

Bias: expecting downside toward 4400 SSL zone

first. If demand holds there, looking for

reversal back toward 4800 BSL.

Current price: 4540. Watching how price behaves

at this level before any entry.

Are you leaning toward the SSL sweep first or

do you think price skips it and pushes straight

to BSL?

Wrapping up the week on gold. Full picture:

5 setups taken.

2 stopped out.

1 closed at 1:1.

2 full 1:2 targets hit.

Net for the week: +550 pips.

Every setup posted publicly before entry.

Results updated in comments after close.

Wins and losses both. Nothing deleted.

What levels are you watching on gold heading

into next week?

Price engineered a major sell-side liquidity sweep below external lows, delivered bullish MSS with displacement, then retraced into bullish FVG for mitigation. Entry was taken targeting opposing buy-side liquidity

Bearish reaction expected from 4573 on gold.

Potential move toward 4537 if this zone holds.

Setup invalidates above 4591.

Would you look for early entry on rejection here

or wait for confirmation before committing?

Daily bias is bullish, targeting Wednesday's high. As the model states we look for a stop run on 5/1min and a fvg entry on 30s. The model is simple. Do not complicate it. You will take losses but thats the cost of doing business.