ICT trader RealTraderTim explains dealing ranges: how to identify them after buy-side and sell-side liquidity purges, and how to use premium/discount and equilibrium with higher-timeframe bias on the
Key Takeaways
- Dealing ranges start after buy-side and sell-side liquidity are both purged and define where price is trading relative to equilibrium
- Higher-timeframe bias should drive the decision; in a bearish bias, favor shorts in premium above equilibrium
- Price is fractal, so the same range and premium/discount logic applies on any timeframe
- Combining dealing ranges with fair value gaps and inversions helps refine entry and target levels
What the video covers
- Introduces dealing ranges as a core ICT framework for determining daily bias and filtering higher-probability setups
- Defines a dealing range as the price leg that follows a purge of both buy-side and sell-side liquidity
- Explains the dealing range high, low, and equilibrium (midpoint) and how they are marked on charts
- Walks through daily S&P chart examples showing how the range is identified in practice
- Emphasizes higher-timeframe institutional order flow as the primary guide, here bearish bias
- Explains shorting in premium (above equilibrium) and targeting liquidity and inefficiencies below
- Shows how fair value gaps and inversion fair value gaps can fail to support price in a bearish context
- Demonstrates refining dealing ranges across timeframes, such as a daily range combined with a 4-hour refined range
- Stresses the fractal nature of price, so the same reading applies from weekly down to 1-minute charts
- Recommends journaling, backtesting, and reviewing live charts to internalize the concept
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Dealing Ranges
- 02:06Key Framework: Higher Timeframe Bias and Fractal Price
- 04:00Defining a Dealing Range
- 04:03Dealing Range Examples on the Daily S&P Chart
- 06:03Shorting in Premium and Targeting Inefficiencies
- 11:30Refining Dealing Ranges Across Timeframes
- 18:30Applying the Concept on Lower Timeframes and Closing Thoughts
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
hello everybody thank you for coming to another video and I am very very excited to share this video with everyone so today's video as you can see will be on dealing ranges it is a simple concept TOA ICT but if we use this as the framework
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for our trading for our higher probability setups it helps us with so many things it helps us avoid low probability setups by extension anticipate high probability setups it helps us determine the daily bias it helps us understand where we are in the
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range it helps us understand what we expect to be delivered to and what we expect in my opinion more importantly what not to be delivered to so dealing ranges is a very very useful tool useful concept that is intertwined in the
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tapestry which is ICT this being said take your time on this because we're going to discuss dealing ranges independently what they are how to identify them first and then we're going to go into the charts and we're going to look at dealing ranges in
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action in price on the S&P and then we'll go down from higher time frame all the way down to lower time frame to see how we can bring this all together all of the concepts determine daily bias time dealing ranges premium
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discount my model whatever it is all these things can come together and it all starts from understanding where we are in the dealing ranges so take your time with this rewind the video if you have to pause it take notes but I really
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really hope you guys enjoy this video and I'm really excited to share it with everyone so just like all the other videos that I have already made I really want you guys to think about these two things while you go through this video
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number one institutional order flow or in other words higher time frame bias or higher time frame Direction secondly I really want you to think about how price is fractal meaning we read price we internalize it the same way from a
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technical standpoint regardless of its the weekly chart the daily chart the 4 hour all the way down to the 1 minute so really think about this as we go through this video and we'll show examples on why I want you to think about the fact
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that price is fractal because we can use all this information that we're about to discuss on all time frames so before we get into the charts we need to understand what a dealing range is and how we can identify it so if you see
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here at the bottom a dealing range is just the price leg that follows a perge verge of both buy side and sell-side liquidity so you can see here we have sell-side liquidity here and we have buy side liquidity here price comes up and
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purges this level so this buy side and then it displaces lower and purges this sell side so we have buy side purged and sell side purged so this price leg following those two things occurring is the dealing range you can see here this
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is the high of this dealing range okay so the high that we're delivering from after the buy side Purge and this dealing range low is the low that's formed after the cell side has purged by extension of that this would be
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equilibrium of the dealing range so the midpoint from this dealing Range High to this dealing range low so this is a good graphic of it but again if this isn't making sense we're going we're going to go into the charts and we can see
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countless examples of this in price action so now we are looking at a daily chart for the S&P and we can see just what we just discussed in the previous slide we have a purge of buy side here
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then we displace lower and Purge this sell side so this price leg that completed those two things the buy side Purge and then the sell side Purge is the dealing range so you can see it charted here this is Discount of the
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dealing range and I'm using this swing low that's formed after the sell side is purged and this is the high of the dealing range excuse me this should say high not low just a typo there but this is the high of the dealing range the
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swing high after the buy side was purged by extension of that this is equilibrium or the midpoint so this would be the range we working in but at as always the higher time frame bias the institutional order flow is the most important thing
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so in these upcoming examples the higher time frame bias Direction order flow is bearish so we'll discuss towards the end of the video why higher time frame order flow was bearish but for the next few examples keep in mind that the framework
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of all of these examples is that the order flow is bearish we are expecting lower prices on a higher time frame now what is the main framework that I tells us for shorting we want to short in a premium so we want to short
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above equilibrium of this dealing range that we just mentioned if price is moving to what inefficiencies or liquidity in a premium because remember we're bearish long term we're looking for lower lower prices where is it going to go to well we have
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a swing High here and we have a swing High here so that is liquidity in premium of this dealing range so we expect price to come back up here above equilibrium of this dealing range before going lower and this is
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where the best short setups will come so not only are we looking for shorts up here but we could be long down here targeting up to equilibrium if it's going to reach to equilibrium and Beyond it where it's going to go liquidity here
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liquidity here now after we've had this buy side Purge we have a new dealing range so we've already worked within the dealing range from the previous slides but now we have a new dealing range to work with here because we've swept this sell side
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then we've gone up and swept this buy side so this price leg here that completed those two tasks is the dealing range if this is confusing pause or rewind the video and take it slowly and it'll make sense as we continue through
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these examples but if our higher time frame bias is bearish what do we want to see occur we want to see discount or bullish PD arays fail to support price that's what we expect if we're expecting bearishness heaviness lower prices on the S&P long
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term so first of all if we were to get long in a fair value Gap if we were bullish we wouldn't want to long in a premium anyways we would want to long in a discount so the fact that this fair
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value Gap in and of itself on top of the fact that we're bearish long term the fact that this is above equilibrium of this new dealing range we expect this to fail we want to see it at least and
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expect it to at least get to equilibrium and below it so as price is delivering inside of the CBI or excuse me this bissy this fair value Gap here on the lower time frames we could just be monitoring the CE the quadrants and we'd
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want to see those levels get disrespected in day when it's delivering inside of this bissy so if we're getting a short up here what could we target equilibrium and then what is the first inefficiency below equilibrium this little fair value Gap
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here this can be a partial you can take full profit here or you can just monitor to see and make sure that we don't find support here but besides this inefficiency here where is the other inefficiency there is none so what would
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price do it's going to go to to sells side liquidity it's going to go to this dealing range low because what does price do it moves to inefficiencies or liquidity so if it's not respecting this inefficiency in discount of this dealing
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range what's it going to do if it continues lower because our higher time frame bias is bearish it's going to Target and deliver to this sells side liquidity which is the dealing range low so you can see now we do in fact
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get this dealing range low but we can start to see how we can combine some of these Concepts if we expect this fair value Gap the larger fair value gap of the two here to fail to support price because we
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are bearish because it's in a premium of this stealing range that we're working in once we close below it what do we want to see it become an inversion fair value Gap and fail to get back above it
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we want to see this act as resistance now what does it do we close above above it or excuse me below it here we open up and Wick back up do we reach CE of this no that's a signature that's the
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algorithm telling you it's weak do we reach this little fair value Gap in here no that's a breakaway Gap that's the algorithm after we displace that's the algorithm telling you that it doesn't care that there's a Cy here a fair value
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Gap by extension it's telling you that it's weak and our bias is correct and it smashes through this little inefficiency here and goes to the dealing range low the sell side liquidity now let's look at our new dealing range so this was the
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fractal price that we were just working with we displaced through that previous dealing range low this sell side liquidity and we make this new swing low down here you can see we got this swing low as well so this is our new dealing
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range low and this is our new dealing Range High We sweep this by high side in here so again this is the high so equilibrium between these two price points is right here this yellow line now you can see we were displacing
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aggressively down to this newly formed swing low and what did we leave on the way down here two Breakaway gaps so if we are to have a short-term rally what do we expect price to reach for equilibrium premium of the dealing range
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that we you're working with where could it reach for what inefficiency is above that the first Breakaway Gap and the second Breakaway Gap so on the lower time frames if we're seeing signs that bullish price could be reasonable to
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expect we could be targeting equilibrium in this inefficiency here and then once we get back up to a premium back up to these daily cbies then we can monitor to see if we get a short out of this
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premium to get back in sync with institutional order flow but a rally up here is reasonable and you can see that we do just that we deliver back to a premium of this dealing range to this inefficiency here now a few things are
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occurring while price is delivering into this Cy we're failing to get to the top of it but what else is occurring none of the bodies in here can close above CE consequent encroachment or midpoint of this fair value Gap that is a
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signature that we've discussed in previous videos that is the algorithm telling you that it's weak and that this retracement here since we're still bearish long term and again we're going to go into y later in this presentation but since we're still bearish long term
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this is exactly what we want to see the way we can internalize this retracement back into a premium of this dealing range would just be okay we're coming back to a premium to to this inefficiency but we want to monitor how
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does it deliver in this inefficiency or does it deliver to this upper Breakaway Gap because if it's struggling up here for all the reasons we just said that's the algorithm telling you it's still heavy it's still weak it doesn't want to
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reach up to this inefficiency it doesn't care that there's an inefficiency here because we're still bearish and it's just coming back up to a short shortterm premium of this dealing range before the next move lower so now you can see we
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did get this sell side here but we have a new dealing range to work with so rewind it if you forget what the previous dealing range was but we failed to get to this upper Breakaway Gap and displace lower so what is the new Range
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we're working with we sweep sell side here then we sweep buy side here so this price leg is the dealing range what do we want to Target if we're bearish inefficiencies below equilibrium in a discount of the dealing range are
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there any inefficiencies in here no there is none so what's price going to do it's just going to spool to the low of the dealing range to the liquidity because again price only does two things it moves for liquidity or it moves to go
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deliver to sell-side liquidity right cuz we're bearish here there's no inefficiencies here so this is when you can expect those low resistance liquidity runs since there's no inefficiency here and we're bearish everything's taken care of up here it's
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just going to run through that to get to this dealing range low this sell-side liquidity now you can see here annotated we can see a signature we can see that immediate rebalance if you haven't watched that immediate rebalance video
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go watch it now it's a great great signature to use it's very very powerful and you can use it on multiple time frames but we can see that here this candle opens comes up touches the low beautifully of this candle and then we
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get speed in the following two candles to our sells side Target Beautiful price action here beautiful delivery but again the most important thing is that the higher time frame order flow is bearish so we want to see PD in discount
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get smashed through there was none here so we just went right to the sell side liquidity the dealing range low so for our last example this is the new dealing range and I'm sure and I hope that you
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guys get it now if you don't just rewind it take your time don't rush this stuff because it can be confusing but this is the dealing Range High because we swept buy side here and this is the dealing
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range low because we swept sell side here so we have dealing range discount dealing range premium what is in premium of this dealing range well buy side liquidity swing High here what's above that a volume imbalance a CBI so there's liquidity and
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inefficiencies above here now one thing that you may be thinking or questioning is that don't we want to avoid calling Bottoms in a bearish market well yes but there's a reason that this was the low and that this delivery back to buy side
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was so aggressive so let's go look at that now so now we talk about IPA if you don't know what IPA is I will just direct you to month five of ict's core content playlist on his YouTube channel
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he goes into much deeper depth on this and of course explains it far greater than I can or ever will be able to but I'm sure some of you know what this is so I won't go into really deep
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explanation on what it is Al just to the main framework but as you can see this was our sell-side IPA objectives so we have our Market structure shift here that occurs on August 17th so what does ICT teach us
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to do we want to go to the start of this month when this structure shift occurs which is August 1st in this case and then we look back 20 days 40 days and 60 days and then you just look for the
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clear swing lows in those time periods so obviously you can see this Market structure shift actually served as our 20-day look back lb just short for lookback but you can see our 40-day look back here and our 60-day look back here
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so the reason that we were bearish that whole time in all those examples is because we were in a sell program for IPA targeting the 40-day look back and the 60 60-day look back excuse me now if you look here on the right this is the
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previous slide where we started to have the low and the aggressive delivery up why was this so aggressive it's because of the cast forward from August 1st so if we go 20 days forward 40 days forward and 60 days
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forward this is the general time period where you want to see IPA complete these objectives so you can see the 60-day cast forward is right here so it did not reach these relative equal lows yet the 60-day look back one price had has yet
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to reach that 60-day look back or clear equal lows or relative equal lows right outside the 60-day time period from August 1st in this example it's going to want to swoop down there really quick take it and then return back to the
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range okay because for lack of better terms since this is the 61st and 62nd day since octob or excuse me August 1st it's behind schedule per say so it's going to quickly resume back into the range and attack what buy side
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inefficiencies buy side here so on and so forth so that entire time we were discussing those bearish scenarios looking at those dealing range examples this is why this is what we're targeting the IPA 40-day look back 60-day look
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back and now we are in the current IPA range so using the same logic as the previous slide what occurs we break a swing High here and if you want to be more conservative we break a swing High
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here so a market structure shift when does this occur we're using this example this swing High For This depiction it occurs on November 10th so when do we want to Anchor our look back and cast forward to November 1st this is our
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20-day look back es got it this is our 40-day look back es got it and this is our 60 and we haven't gotten this yet but this is the same logic so all the examples we discussed were on the sell
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side of the curve now we're going for the buy side of the Curve for the IPA range so if you made it this far congrats this is where you're going to get some of the real sauce and let's
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go deeper into the lower time frames and talk about refining dealing ranges so what you're seeing right now on the screen is an example we already discussed but we're going to go dig deeper into this but understand this is
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the daily range that we're going to have depicted on the next chart so as you can see see we are down on the 4our chart and this light brown box is the daily dealing range I changed it to just Brown
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just to one color for visual purposes but that's the daily dealing range from the previous slide if you're confused rewind it and this yellow line is the equilibrium of that daily dealing range this blue line here is the immediate
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rebalance from the daily dealing range chart that we were looking at again rewind it real quick if you forget you can see here we're going to refine our 4-Hour dealing range so keep in mind anything above this yellow line
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already checks out in terms of premium for shorts for the daily dealing range but we want to refine this on the lower time frames to get a better idea of what and when to expect price to do so what
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do we have buy side sweep Here Sell side sweep here at this little red line there so what does that make this low to this high this is our 4-Hour dealing range you might be thinking well yes we got
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this immediate rebounds from the daily right here at this white circle but you've been teaching this whole time this whole video that we want to wait to short until we get to premium of a dealing range let's take a a deeper look
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into this now for the rest of the video take your time take notes pause it rewind it if you have to this is where we can start to see how all these Concepts can come together and how we
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can really determine what we should expect price to deliver to and not to deliver to so as you can see we have refined our 4-Hour dealing range because why why would we refine this lower the original one from the
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previous slide was from this high to this low the refined dealing range low stays the same but we're refining the high of it why because look here look closely we've had all this back and forth movement and we create this little
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Cy here and we've already delivered to it so everything above here if we're bearish should be balanced there should be no reason for price to get back up here so we're going to use the next swing High here which is the refined
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4-Hour dealing range we're using this next swing High to Anchor to gauge discount in premium now keep in mind this refined 4 hour is still in the premium of the daily dealing range so as we go to the lower time frames this is
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how you can refine what you expect price to be delivered to what you should expect it not to be delivered to with the previous dealing range on the 4our from the previous slide price hadn't reached a premium but once we refine it
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it reaches a premium into that immediate rebalance which is also a bearish breaker here so now it starts to make more sense why it's reasonable to expect this fair value Gap to become a breakaway gap for price not to reach up
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here once we reach this immediate rebalance here in this 4-Hour breaker and displace away leaving this open that's exactly what you want to see on top of our higher time frame bias which is already bearish these are the things
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that you want to see in terms of when to expect a breakaway Gap how quick we should expect price to spool in our direction that we're targeting where we are in the range where do we want to look for our short entries in this case
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you can really refine your levels your areas where you're hunting shorts using all of these Concepts but it starts with where we are in the range we're above daily dealing range equilibrium so a premium on The Daily and a premium in this refined 4-Hour
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dealing range but remember we got rid of this swing high in terms of where we're anchoring the dealing range to because of all this back and forth movement we've already delivered to the CBI and we have our daily immediate rebounds and
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our 4-Hour breaker here now let's take a look at the hourly chart and see how we can put the pieces together on top of all the things we've just discussed from the daily and 4H hour chart number one
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thing is what bearish bias but what do we have here we have a stop raid and then we have this Cy created here this High here right under that light bulb icon that is exactly the consequent encroachment of
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that Cy to the tick so that's an algorithmic signature telling us that premium PD arrays premium signature levels premium reference points are being respected now let's look to the right more look at this Yellow Block here price does what it goes for
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liquidity or inefficiency where is the inefficiency in here there is none there is no inefficiency in here so there's no reason for price to come back up here and we've already had the signature here so we don't want
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to see it come back up here we've already had the Stop raate and there's no inefficiencies in here so this is when we can start to see a low resistance run possibly take place for it to be reasonable for that to occur
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reminder we're in this daily immediate rebounds here this blue line where this white circle is and this white box is just the 4-Hour refined dealing range so what does this do this comes back above equilibrium of that 4H hour range into
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the daily immediate rebalance and there's no inefficiencies here so this is what we expect this is what we want to see if we're bearish so now we can kind of put together a dealing range checklist per se on what we want to look
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for when internalizing price when we show up to the charts and in the morning these are the type of questions or things I look at I want to identify the higher time frame bias the IPA targets I want to identify the current dealing
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range I want to identify what is balanced or imbalanced in the premium or discount of that dealing range for example if I'm bearish I want to look for shorts in premium of dealing range opposingly if I'm bullish I want to look
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for Longs and discount of dealing range so I hope you can see if you made it this far into the video how you can use dealing ranges along with all the other Concepts to really refine your entries refine your areas where you want to look
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for entries improve your understanding of what to expect price to deliver to or not to deliver to and just like I mentioned at the very beginning of this video I want you guys to think about how price is fractal and how we can use all
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of these Concepts all of the ways that we internalized order flow internalized price throughout this presentation we can use those same things that same thinking that same logic on the lower time frames on the one minute time frames and it becomes really really
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powerful so I know some of the things might have been a little advanced in this video but start to look at these things in your charts when you're journaling when you're back testing when you're reading live action understanding
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where we are in the range is extremely useful when reading price so thank you everyone for watching as always the link to my Twitter and Discord will be in the description of this video I also just opened up some spots for oneon-one
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coaching so if you're interested in that it is also in the link in the description and be sure to like subscribe turn on notifications we have plenty plenty more videos coming plenty plenty more things to discuss so God bless you all and I will talk to you
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soon
Topics:ICTdealing rangespremium and discountequilibriumliquidityfair value gaphigher timeframe biasS&P 500price actionsmart money concepts











