ICT and your psychology
Lesson 15 · 4 min read · By DT Terminal
The traps specific to studying ICT (hindsight marking, "the algorithm will deliver", forcing setups in killzones, attachment to a mentor), each with the habit that tests it.
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Worked examples, the quiz and the interactive tools are in the app. Free account.
Hindsight marking
Every ICT concept is easy to find on a finished chart. There is always a last opposite candle, a gap, a low that got swept. Marked after the fact, the method looks right almost every time.
That is hindsight bias: once you know the ending, the level that worked looks obvious and the ones that failed fade. Confirmation bias finishes the job. You remember the charts that fit and scroll past the rest.
Hindsight
The same chart, at the time and after
- Fair value gap
- Low marked as a pool
At the time
the right edge is still blank
After the fact
the whole chart, one answer
Fair value gaps
three gaps, one held
Lows
three pools, one turn
Mark it before you see it
The fix is mechanical: mark with the right edge hidden and count every candidate. The next lesson, Testing ICT concepts in the backtester and journal, shows how.
Mark before you press play
"The algorithm will deliver"
ICT teaches that an Interbank Price Delivery Algorithm moves price between liquidity and gaps. No documented interbank algorithm works this way, and public data cannot check the claim.
If price must reach your draw, a stop looks like an obstacle, so it gets moved, widened or removed. But the draw is a call that can be wrong. The stop is where you said it would be wrong.
Worked example
Example 01: The stop that moved
The worked example, with every number walked through, is in the app.
Go deeper
Even sympathetic sources use the algorithm as a lens, not a mechanism.
See Day 18, Managing a trade after entry and Day 22, Discipline.
A killzone is a filter, not a reason
The killzone opens and it feels like something should happen. A window tells you when to look, not that anything is there. A session with no setup is a result, and it goes in the log as one.
- You loosen a rule: the sweep was "close enough".
- You drop a timeframe until something fits.
- You take a second setup because the first one lost.
The windows are in The ICT clock: sessions and killzones. Fear of missing out and revenge trading are in Day 23.
Cap the session in Trading Rules
Go deeper
A rule you wrote is one you can check yourself against later.
Your record, not a mentor's
ICT content builds strong loyalties, and every concept arrives with a personality attached. That makes it easy to defend the method instead of testing it. If a loss feels like a slight on the mentor, the mentor has your judgement.
As What is ICT covered, no independently audited long-term record stands behind the method. The record that counts for you is your own: setups logged before the outcome, a fair sample, and broker-synced trades that cannot be edited after the fact.
Check yourself
Quick review · 0 of 0
Four questions, one for each trap. If one trips you up, reread that section.