Concepts
Market structure as a drawing layer — how to switch them on, name them and rewind time.
Concepts are rules that read your candles and draw what they find: gaps, zones, levels, breaks. Every find is an observation, not a signal and not a recommendation — what you do with it is up to you.
They run on the candles your chart already holds. Nothing extra is loaded, and nothing is sent to us.
Switching them on
Open Tools at the top right, then the Concepts tab.
The list applies to one chart — the one you clicked last. That is the same “which chart” the watchlist uses when it sends a symbol; on a Surface an amber outline marks the chart in question. Two chart tabs side by side can show different concepts, and your selection survives tab switches, reloads and another device.
Each row has a ? that opens this handbook on that concept’s page (the drawer rolls down over the desk).
In a Surface tab the selection applies to every chart in that tab.
Wording
At the top of the panel choose ICT wording or Neutral wording.
That is a rename, not a second calculation. The same gap is a “Fair Value Gap” under ICT in both desk languages. Neutral wording follows the desk language: “Price gap” in English, “Preislücke” in German — same candles, same finds, different words.
A school may bring different default numbers (different numbers, same rule). Anything you moved on a slider yourself survives the switch.
Each concept page below spells out the Neutral English name, the Neutral German name and the ICT term.
Used-up zones
A zone that price has come back for (touched or filled, depending on the concept) stops counting. By default it vanishes once that happens — the picture shows what is still valid at the as-of candle.
At the top of the panel, next to the wording, Dim used-up keeps those zones in view: grey, frozen at the candle that used them up, with the name still on them. They are history, not something you could still have traded at that time. Hide used-up is the default.
This does not change when a gap counts as filled — that is still the per-concept setting.
Per-concept settings
Clicking a name unfolds its rules: thresholds, lookback lengths, the swing method. Above them sits the active school’s one-liner and its other names for the same thing.
Some concepts read other concepts’ finds. When a switched-off concept says “Computed for …, not drawn”, it runs because another one needs it — it gets no ink, and its settings then come from the concept that asked for it.
As-of time — what was visible when
As soon as one concept is on, a strip with a slider appears under the chart. It moves the as-of time: “what could I have known at this candle?”
- LIVE means everything up to the last closed candle.
- -25 means 25 candles back. A dashed needle marks the spot.
- The mouse wheel over the strip steps the as-of time (drag still works).
This is not a filter over the finished picture — it is a real recomputation up to that point. Some finds only come into existence through later candles. A pool you would have seen at candle 24 may be absorbed into a wider one twenty candles later; a filtered view would then show less at candle 24 than was really there.
A find is drawn from where it became knowable, not from where it happened. A swing high needs candles to its right to be one; before they closed, nobody could trade it. A zone or level that is still valid is drawn up to the current candle (the as-of bar, or the live one), not into the empty space to its right.
On a Surface the as-of time is shared: rewind one of two charts side by side and you mean both. It is the third shared time beside zoom range and crosshair.
Messages
When the selection cannot be computed as it stands, the strip says so in amber:
| Message | What it means |
|---|---|
| … needs "…", which no concept produces | A building block is missing in this version |
| Unknown concept "…" | Left over from an older setting — untick it |
| The selection runs in a circle | Two concepts wait for each other; nothing is computed |
| … want different settings | Two active concepts need the same building block with different numbers. Its defaults apply then — to set those numbers yourself, switch that block on as well |
The concepts
- Price gap
- Liquidity pool
- Impulse candle
- Swing break
- Direction change
- Wick zone
- Swing range
- Impulse zone
- Held zone
- Broken impulse zone
- Flipped gap
- Two-way gap
- Level pierce
- Zone overlap
What the picture does not say
A drawn find is an observation about past candles. It is not a forecast, not a buy or sell recommendation, and no indication that a zone will “hold”. Market data comes straight from the exchange; we cannot vouch for its accuracy or completeness.
See also Chart.