ICT quarterly theory

Quarterly theory takes the clock and cuts it into fours at every scale, then gives each of the four pieces a part in a sequence.

The partition

The scheme is a stack of cycles, each divided into four quarters, all on the New York clock:

• The year, in quarters of three calendar months: January to March, April to June, July to September and October to December.
• The month, in four weekly quarters counted from its first Monday. One guide sets aside any partial week before that Monday.
• The week, in four daily quarters: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Friday sits outside the cycle; the descriptions give it a role of its own without placing it in a quarter.
• The day, in four six-hour quarters starting at 18:00: 18:00 to 00:00, labelled Asia; 00:00 to 06:00, London; 06:00 to 12:00, the New York morning; and 12:00 to 18:00, the New York afternoon.
• The session, each six-hour quarter in four 90-minute quarters. The London quarter breaks at 01:30, 03:00 and 04:30.
• The micro quarter, each 90-minute quarter in four quarters of 22.5 minutes. The first London 90-minute quarter breaks at 00:22:30, 00:45 and 01:07:30.

From the day down the arithmetic is exact. Six hours is four 90-minute quarters, ninety minutes is four quarters of 22.5 minutes, and a day holds four sessions, sixteen 90-minute quarters and 64 micro quarters that cover it without a gap or an overlap. Above the day it is looser. Calendar quarters run from 90 to 92 days. A month has four or five Mondays, and the descriptions do not say where a fifth week goes. The week’s four quarters cover four of its five trading days.

Where the name comes from

Three of the four pages read for this entry credit it to a trader who publishes as Daye, and one calls that trader a student of ICT teaching; all present it as drawn from that teaching, with its phases taken from power of three. One guide says plainly that it is built on ICT rather than part of it, so the ICT in the name records a lineage. One guide also states the premise behind it: that an algorithm delivers price and takes its cue from each cycle’s first quarter. That is the premise the IPDA entry describes, and nothing in public prices can confirm it.

True opens

A cycle’s true open is the price at which its second quarter opens. Teaching prefers it to the calendar open, on the reading that the first quarter is preparation, which a line drawn after it leaves out. In New York time:

• Year: the first Monday of April.
• Month: the second Monday.
• Week: 18:00 on Monday, which is the start of Tuesday’s trading day when days begin at 18:00.
• Day: 00:00, midnight.
• Sessions: 19:30 for Asia, 01:30 for London, 07:30 for the New York morning and 13:30 for the afternoon.

One guide prints 13:00 for the afternoon session; 13:30 is the time the 90-minute arithmetic gives. The yearly and monthly true opens are the opens of daily candles, so the moment they name depends on the day convention: 18:00 on the Sunday before, or midnight. The day’s true open is the same midnight New York level that the liquidity pools indicator draws among its anchor opens, and the declared open that the judas swing entry gives in its strictest telling.

The phases

The quarters of each cycle carry phases. In the ordering written AMDX:

• First quarter, accumulation: price builds a range.
• Second quarter, manipulation: price trades through one side of that range, the move the judas swing names.
• Third quarter, distribution: the cycle’s move in the other direction.
• Fourth quarter, X: the move continues or reverses.

In the ordering written XAMD, the X comes first and the other three phases follow one quarter later. The true open stays at the second quarter’s open under both. Which ordering a cycle is following is judged from context, a step one guide calls discretionary. One guide adds a rule for the first quarter: a wide first quarter is expected to be followed by a quiet second, and a narrow one by a second that expands.

A worked session

Constructed prices, on EUR/USD, for one day in New York time. The Asia quarter, 18:00 to 00:00, ranges from 1.0852 to 1.0871. Midnight opens at 1.0866, the daily true open. The first London 90-minute quarter, 00:00 to 01:30, trades between 1.0858 and 1.0874, a 16-pip range. At 01:30 the second quarter opens at 1.0861, the London session’s true open.

Between 01:30 and 03:00 price falls to 1.0849: 9 pips beneath the first quarter’s low, 3 beneath the Asia low, 12 beneath the session true open and 17 beneath the daily one. The quarter’s high is 1.0864, and it closes at 1.0863, back inside the first quarter’s range. Between 03:00 and 04:30 price rises to 1.0892, 43 pips above the second quarter’s low.

Read as AMDX, the session fits the taught picture: a range in the first quarter; a run beneath it in the second, which took price below both true opens, where a buyer with a bullish bias is taught to look; and the move up in the third. The fourth quarter, 04:30 to 06:00, is the X. If it carries on to 1.0897, the reading is a continuation. If it falls back to 1.0855, the reading is a reversal. Either way the AMDX reading stands.

The same prices, read the other way

If the fourth quarter falls to 1.0855, XAMD fits as well. The second quarter’s 15-pip range, from 1.0849 to 1.0864, becomes the accumulation; the rally to 1.0892, 28 pips above that range, becomes the manipulation; and the fall becomes the distribution. The second quarter in this example both ran beneath the first quarter’s low and held a range no wider than the first quarter’s, so whichever rule separates a run from a range decides which ordering it supports.

Once the fourth quarter has printed, one ordering or the other fits this session whichever way it went. Before the second quarter opens, the two orderings expect different things of it, a run or a range, and that is the point at which the choice can be written down and later scored.

Where the clock and the market disagree

Halts. Futures stop from 17:00 to 18:00 on weekday evenings, as the new day opening gap entry sets out, and that hour lies inside the afternoon session’s last 90-minute quarter. On a futures chart the quarter from 16:30 to 18:00 holds thirty minutes of trading; of its four micro quarters, the first trades throughout, the second for seven and a half minutes, and the last two not at all. A spot currency feed that quotes through 17:00 fills the same quarter, so one quarter of the clock holds different amounts of trading on different feeds.

Half-minute boundaries. Two of the three boundaries inside every 90-minute quarter fall 30 seconds past a minute, such as 00:22:30 and 01:07:30, and so do half of a day’s 64 micro-quarter starts. No one-minute candle begins there. The guide that sets aside partial weeks illustrates the micro quarters on 30-second candles, and another describes them as about 23 minutes long; either choice is an election.

Daylight saving. Every boundary is a New York wall-clock time, so the grid moves by an hour against UTC, and against any timezone that does not change its clocks on the same dates, exactly as the kill zones do.

Session names. The six-hour quarters borrow session names without matching the windows of the same names elsewhere in the vocabulary. The London quarter runs from 00:00 to 06:00, while the London open kill zone runs from 02:00 to 05:00. The Asia quarter starts at 18:00, two hours before the Asian kill zone. The central bank dealers range, 14:00 to 20:00, crosses the 18:00 boundary into the next day’s first quarter.

Scheduled events. The 08:30 slot of many United States releases falls inside the New York morning’s second 90-minute quarter, the one read as manipulation, and the 09:30 equity open falls inside its third, thirty minutes after that quarter begins. A move in either quarter on a release day may belong to the release.

The ends of the week. When days begin at 18:00, Sunday evening’s trading opens Monday’s quarter. The guide that sets aside partial weeks also sets those Sunday hours aside, and Friday belongs to no weekly quarter, so the weekly grid leaves out trading at both ends of the week by election.

Identifying the quarters, step by step

1. Set the chart to New York time through the tz database, not a broker’s server clock or a fixed offset.
2. State the day’s start, 18:00 in the descriptions, and mark the six-hour boundaries at 18:00, 00:00, 06:00 and 12:00.
3. Divide the session of interest into 90-minute quarters, and into micro quarters if they are used, on candles fine enough to hold the boundaries or under a stated rounding rule.
4. Mark the true open at the start of the second quarter, with the first quarter’s high and low.
5. Write down the ordering before the second quarter opens, AMDX or XAMD, with the rule that chose it and the rule that tells a run from a range.
6. For the week, the month and the year, state how Sunday evening, Friday, partial weeks and fifth Mondays are handled.

Trading it, as taught

Teaching uses the grid in three ways. As a bias line, the true open divides a cycle: with a bullish bias, buying is done below it, and with a bearish bias, selling above it. Price can trade on both sides of an open in the hours after it prints, on rising days and falling days alike, so the rule places an entry once a bias exists and does not supply the bias.

As a sequence, a first quarter’s range and a second quarter’s run through one side of it set up an entry in the third quarter in the other direction. One guide reads the run as a liquidity sweep of the first quarter’s high or low and refines the entry on a lower timeframe, at a fair value gap, at an order block or inside the optimal trade entry band. As a frame, in the same guide, larger cycles set the expectation for smaller ones: the year’s or the month’s quarter is read before the week’s, and the week’s before the day’s. One guide also reads SMT divergence between two correlated markets across a pair of neighbouring 90-minute quarters. Each use is a set of elections, and a result for one set does not carry over to another.

What the quarters are not

ICT quarterly theory’s quarters are not the financial calendar’s quarters, except at the top of the grid, where the two coincide. They are not listed windows, as the kill zones and the macro times are; they are a partition that those windows sit inside.

Every one of the eight macro windows contains a micro-quarter boundary, and five of them contain or end on a 90-minute boundary. Any window longer than 22.5 minutes must contain a micro-quarter boundary, so a macro that lines up with a quarter is a property of the grid, not evidence about either. And a quarter is not an object in price: its open, high and low are those of a stretch of clock time that was fixed before price traded in it.

Common mistakes

Reading the quarters off a broker’s server clock. Copying a table of boundaries rather than computing them; one guide’s table of micro quarters prints boundaries that do not add up to 22.5 minutes. Choosing AMDX or XAMD after the session has shown which one fits. Counting micro quarters on one-minute candles with no rounding rule. Treating the six-hour London quarter as the London session of a kill-zone table. And judging a true open by the days price turned near it, without counting the days it passed straight through.

What the quarters do not settle

The grid is arithmetic: once the clock, the day’s start and the counting rules for the week and the month are stated, two people draw identical quarters and identical true opens. The claims read into it are about behaviour, and each is unmeasured: that a cycle’s second quarter holds its false move and its third quarter its direction; that the true open is a better reference for entries than another open; and, in one guide, that the first quarter’s width sets the second’s.

Each has a count that would test it. For the phases, the count is the share of sessions whose second 90-minute quarter holds the session’s high or low, set beside the same share for the other three quarters, beside hour-of-day base rates and beside the same grid shifted by 45 minutes, with the ordering fixed before the second quarter opens and release days kept apart. For the true open, it is whether the side of the midnight open that price is on says more about the rest of the day than the side of the 18:00 open or of the prior close. The quarterly partition driver’s row covers the session, 90-minute and 22.5-minute quarters and their true opens, and the anchor-opens driver’s row covers the midnight open’s side-of-open state; both sit in the claims ledger, where those verdicts render, and the two lenses keep the grid, which anyone can draw, apart from the phases read into it.