The ICT Asian Range: A London Session Workbook

A trader draws an Asian box from midnight to 5 AM on a Ghana chart. It looks plausible all year, yet in one season it includes an hour that does not belong to the intended window. That extra hour can turn a London sweep into a move that never left the box.

For an ICT study the start and finish of the measurement are part of the strategy. Here the Asian range is a defined slice of price before London, not a synonym for every market hour in Tokyo. The objective is to establish what was known when the box closed.

Definition and chart context: completed Asian range

Work on the four-hour Asian box identified in the lesson, even when your broker abbreviates the overnight market differently. Imagine a five-minute series with 48 expected opening timestamps and only 47 present. The recorded top is 1.08793 and the bottom is 1.08562. You can calculate an observed width of 23.1 pips. You cannot certify the true four-hour high or low without the missing interval.

For the ICT background, see Implementing the Asian Range. The worksheets below use stated study rules for measurement, confirmation and simulated fills. Those choices let you reproduce the examples; they are not claims that a public candle identifies the owner, size or intent of an institutional order.

Why this distinction matters

A narrow overnight consolidation can leave identifiable extremes for London to test. An already expanded Asian move presents a different starting condition. The information is not simply the width of the box. Look at whether the final candles returned toward its middle or remained at one edge. If London opens on the Asian high after a long climb, a tiny new high may say less about a reversal than a raid after hours of two-way trade.

How to identify it before the next candle

During New York standard time the four hours are 1 AM to 5 AM in Ghana; during New York daylight time they are midnight to 4 AM. Record the New York source date, which can be the previous calendar date in Accra. First check for a complete time series. A chart with gaps from illiquidity or data loss cannot confidently report the true extremes of the intended interval.

An unfinished range can still be used for a different question. For example, one might ask whether the first two hours predict the next two. That study needs its own two-hour endpoints and its own results. It cannot share a column called completed Asian high with a four-hour range, because the later bars were invisible when the earlier decision was taken.

The range worksheet: missing bars, midnight and expansion

On one synthetic winter morning the final 23:45 New York bar raises the high from 1.08471 to 1.08492 while the low stays 1.08256. The completed width is 23.6 pips, not the provisional 21.5 pips. At 5:12 AM Ghana time the bid prints 1.08485. It is above the provisional high but still inside the completed range. On the original definition it is not a raid of the Asian high. A trader who watched the chart before midnight might remember the old line more vividly, which is precisely why the recorded lock time matters.

Put the range width beside the distance remaining to the proposed London destination. A wide overnight box and a small remaining distance create a different execution problem from a narrow box under a distant high. Do not normalise the box by tonight’s eventual daily range. That denominator incorporates the London move you wanted to forecast.

How to trade the idea in a paper replay

Plan both the raid-and-return and the acceptance-outside paths. For a long after sell-side liquidity is taken, require evidence that upside delivery has broken a prior short-term high. For a continuation lower, require sustained delivery below the old low and rejection on a retest. If the tape only straddles the edge, both ideas remain unconfirmed. Measure the next opposing array before promising the opposite end of the box as a target.

The two replays use constructed five-minute candles and a controlled order model shared across this workbook series. Keeping the execution pattern comparable lets you isolate what the featured concept changes: the reference, the eligibility decision, or the management rule. These selected paths illustrate mechanics. They are not historical signals or a sample from which to estimate a winning percentage.

A session clock you can reconstruct in Accra

Start by writing the clock in the margin. Accra uses GMT throughout the year. A session definition expressed in New York time moves by one hour on a Ghana clock when New York enters or leaves daylight saving time. A session expressed in London local time follows London instead. European and US changes need not occur on the same weekend. A saved template labelled London is not evidence of which clock its author used.

For a concrete conversion, take a New York clock reading of 02:00. In US standard time Accra reads 07:00; in US daylight time it reads 06:00. Thus a 02:00 to 05:00 New York London Kill Zone appears as 07:00 to 10:00 GMT in winter or 06:00 to 09:00 in summer. The 07:00 to 10:00 New York window becomes noon to 15:00 GMT in winter and 11:00 to 14:00 in summer. A school worksheet that deliberately uses fixed GMT hours is a different convention. Label it as such.

The same conversion places New York midnight at 05:00 GMT in winter or 04:00 GMT in summer. That is not the start of every broker day. A vendor using a New York close day can start a new trading day in the Ghana evening, hours before the New York midnight reference. One vertical line cannot quietly serve as both boundaries. If your session crosses midnight locally, write the full date on both ends rather than treating the interval as a negative number of hours.

Before replay, find one known UTC timestamp on the feed. Compare it with the platform clock and the intended market clock, then check another date in the opposite season. Record the opening timestamp of the first included bar and the first excluded bar. This makes a session marking portable: a trader opening the same feed in Kumasi and another using a different display timezone should select the same physical quotes. For the paired illustrations in this lesson, timestamps use a standard-time practice clock.

Check seasonal offsets against the Ghana clock record and the New York clock record for the year being tested. Keep historical observations on their original date.

Range width is not the same as a volatility forecast

Write down the Asian high and low, then measure the current quote’s distance from each. The box width tells you how far apart two historical extremes are. Your distance from the nearest edge tells you something different: how much price must travel before an edge-based idea can even activate. Two nights can have identical widths and leave London beginning at entirely different locations.

To compare narrow and wide boxes, use only information known when the range closed. One reasonable descriptive baseline is the median completed width from earlier sessions on the same pair and clock. Record how many observations were available and whether any are shortened holiday sessions. Applying a threshold fitted after seeing the best raids can convert a useful visual observation into a backtest that cannot be reproduced live.

On the next worksheet, draw three possible London opens: inside the middle of the frozen box, near an untouched boundary, and already outside after a handoff move. Each has a different first task. The first needs travel to a relevant edge; the second needs evidence of rejection or acceptance; the third requires an audit of what happened between freeze and observation. Calling all three London range sweeps discards the most useful information.

Keep an outcome for sessions that expand in both directions before any entry qualifies. A wide final daily range can coexist with an untradeable sequence under the selected rules. A trader who confuses movement with opportunity may learn to chase precisely the session in which a carefully timed limit never had a chance.

Worked replay A: A completed box with one intact edge

The overnight box has its near edge at 1.08709 and its other edge at 1.08952, a width of 24.3 pips. Its last bar has already closed when the London tape starts. Mark both sides on the overnight chart. Only the near side and the local execution sequence are needed in the enlarged intraday diagram.

At 07:15 price trades through the Asian low and returns. The opposite box edge is an intermediate obstacle at 1.08952. In this exercise a separate premarked objective sits beyond it at 1.09085; reaching the box edge alone would not fill that final exit. Save both levels even if you habitually manage risk at the first one.

Reconstruct the decision before reading the outcome

Cover the candles to the right of 07:15. On this EUR/USD bid chart the test candle opens at 1.08751, trades down to 1.08687 and ends at 1.08718. The close tells you that bids recovered part of the excursion. It does not yet tell you that anyone bought a particular number of lots, or that the prior short-term high will give way. Mark the low as an observation and leave the order field blank.

Now reveal the candle beginning 07:25. Its close at 1.08844 is above the earlier pivot at 1.08817. This is the completed break used by the exercise. Look two candles apart: the high of the bar beginning 07:20 is 1.08763 and the low of the bar beginning 07:30 is 1.08787. Their separation forms the bullish fair value gap in this model. One strong green candle alone would not establish those two outside prices.

A resting buy at their midpoint, 1.08775, can first be submitted at 07:35 under a next-bar convention. The 07:30 candle is named for its opening time, so its low cannot supply a fill for an order that depends on its close. This matters whenever the same screenshot appears to show both confirmation and a cheap entry. Write the order time before revealing the next low, not after finding a favourable one.

Assume a constant 0.9-pip spread throughout this small slice. On the return, bid reaches 1.08746 and the corresponding ask reaches 1.08755. The latter is at or below the requested buy price. We book 1.08775 as the fill, with no price improvement, no delay after activation and enough available size. Those are transparent simulation assumptions. A real candle, even from the correct side of the spread, is not a broker’s confirmation.

What the order would risk in cash

Give the practice account a USD balance of 1320. Its hypothetical cap of one half of one percent is $6.60 for this decision. For a USD-quoted pair with a 100,000-unit standard contract, one pip at one standard lot is $10. Adding 0.7 pip for assumed round-trip commission and other execution friction gives $116.00 of modelled downside at one lot. The spread is already present in the entry and exit quote rules and is not charged a second time.

Divide $6.60 by $116.00 and round down to the next permitted hundredth of a lot. That leaves 0.05 lots, risking about $5.80 under these assumptions. A gap or worse stop fill can exceed that number. Position sizing changes the money exposed; it cannot turn a missing confirmation into a valid entry. When the minimum tradable size exceeds the cap, the worksheet records a pass.

Change just one fact

Move the freeze time five minutes later on a duplicate sheet with a late boundary wick. If the altered edge includes the supposed London raid, the two hypotheses are no longer comparable. An honest test can compare alternative box definitions, but it must rebuild both their endpoints and their post-freeze visit histories.

Worked replay B: A completed box with one intact edge

The overnight box has its near edge at 1.26606 and its other edge at 1.26434, a width of 17.2 pips. Its last bar has already closed when the London tape starts. Mark both sides on the overnight chart. Only the near side and the local execution sequence are needed in the enlarged intraday diagram.

At 07:20 price trades through the Asian high and returns. The opposite box edge is an intermediate obstacle at 1.26434. In this exercise a separate premarked objective sits beyond it at 1.26379; reaching the box edge alone would not fill that final exit. Save both levels even if you habitually manage risk at the first one.

Audit the short from the exit side of the quote

Read the second tape independently. The 07:20 bid high is 1.26625. By the end of the bar starting 07:30, bid has closed at 1.26510, below the pre-existing pivot at 1.26535. The workbook calls that downward displacement. It does not require a guess about which institution initiated the move. The mark is useful because a different reviewer can identify the same closing price on the same feed.

The low of the 07:25 candle is 1.26569 and the high of the 07:35 candle is 1.26549. The later high remains below the earlier low, leaving a bearish execution gap between them. Halving this interval gives 1.26559. A sell limit resting there becomes eligible only after 07:35 has finished. When bid subsequently reaches 1.26580 the paper order can fill at its stated price. No favourable slippage is credited.

It is tempting to score this short from the lowest red wick, because that is what the bid chart displays. The position actually has to buy back. With an assumed spread of 1.0 pip, an ask target at 1.26379 requires a bid at or below 1.26369. An ask stop at 1.26636 needs only a bid at or above 1.26626. Marking these two conversions before scoring prevents a one-spread error on both exits.

Keep the original order record even when the outcome is obvious from the last candle. A reviewer needs the decision price, the reference quote and the activation time, not just a screenshot captioned “short”. If the platform would have rejected a resting order this close to market, or the feed lacks quotes in the return interval, the correct response is to change the fill status. It is not to claim a market execution at the old limit price.

Score the path, then challenge the assumption

The deciding candle opens at 08:00. Its bid range is 1.26356 to 1.26480. With the assumed spread, the ask range is 1.26366 to 1.26490. The lower target is reached before the other exit without requiring a guess about two exits inside this bar. A later movement cannot reverse a booked exit. In particular, a later visit to the original target would not repair a prior stop.

Increase the estimated round-trip friction by another half pip as a sensitivity check, while leaving entry, stop and target fills fixed. Planned risk:reward becomes 1:1.95, obtained by dividing 17.0 pips of possible net reward by 8.7 pips of downside. This answers a cost question only. If widening the actual bid/ask spread changes whether an order is triggered, reconstruct the path instead of merely reducing the result by a fee.

Change just one fact

Move the freeze time five minutes later on a duplicate sheet with a late boundary wick. If the altered edge includes the supposed London raid, the two hypotheses are no longer comparable. An honest test can compare alternative box definitions, but it must rebuild both their endpoints and their post-freeze visit histories.

What can go wrong in the review?

A platform indicator labelled Asia may use Tokyo exchange hours, a broker server window, or a fixed UTC offset. Read its settings and manually reproduce at least one standard-time and one daylight-time session. An indicator that happens to agree in January has not been checked for July.

Reader exercise: Is this an observed expansion beyond a complete Asian box?

Try the following classification without using profit or loss as a clue. Measure the bid penetration past the frozen boundary. For this worksheet, the value must be at least 0.2 pips. Also require this separate fact: all bars in the four-hour box are accounted for. These are conditions for admitting a row to a study. They do not replace the order trigger, size calculation or exit plan. The six records are constructed cases, not a report of observed market frequencies.

Cover the answer column and decide which facts you would request before admitting each record. A passes the numerical test at 0.5 pips and has the other required evidence. B has the other evidence but measures -0.4 pips. Under the stated rule that is enough to exclude B. A clean-looking reaction after B cannot change the comparison bid penetration past the frozen boundary ≥ 0.2. If you want to study a wider definition, write it as a new version and rerun every observation.

C is the deliberate boundary case. Its value of 0.2 pips equals the threshold. This worksheet uses an inclusive comparison, so C passes. A version that demands strictly more would exclude it. Keep exact prices or timestamps in the original record before rounding for display; values that look equal on a chart may still differ at the feed’s actual precision. The most efficient place to look for a disagreement between two reviewers is often an equality case like this.

D has a smaller value than allowed, so it fails even though the separate prerequisite is unknown. E demonstrates the opposite error: the measured 0.8 pips is acceptable, but the prerequisite is known to be false. F lacks the numerical evidence and its remaining condition is satisfied. There is no basis to call it either a clean pass or a measured failure. Keeping “unresolved” distinct from “no” preserves what data collection could still settle.

A positive distance from an incomplete high is not a penetration of a verified high. The missing interval might hold a more extreme value.

Recover the day that produced the number

Go back to the full session tape for the disputed observation. Load enough history to include the session that supplied the reference and the interval between that session and the proposed decision. A screenshot starting at entry can never establish an unvisited level on its own. If your vendor has no bars for part of the interval, preserve the gap in the record. Substituting another feed may be useful as a comparison, but it changes the provenance of the observation.

For this lesson the minimum useful packet is the list of included timestamps and both frozen boundaries. Preserve the original precision and include the clock used. If another reader can reproduce the number but not the label, examine the equality rule and prerequisite. If they cannot reproduce the number, settle the input discrepancy first. These are different faults, and only the second can be repaired by retrieving better data.

Use the six rows to test the data process before drawing any market conclusion. Two rows pass, three have a known failure and one is unresolved. Of the five settled records, two pass; among all six the possible pass count is two or three depending on the missing measurement. Neither fraction measures how often a London trade wins. The labels reflect a deliberately chosen exercise, and no trade outcomes were supplied.

A test you can run on unseen sessions

Record range width as a number rather than choosing the best-looking boxes afterwards. Compare first excursions in the same session under the same clock convention, including days when neither boundary was breached.

Make one dated record for each session you inspect, including those in which the required condition never appears. Keep a count of eligible signals, orders placed, orders filled and positions closed. A result per fill answers a different question from a result per session. Separate them before comparing this rule with another way of reading completed Asian range.

Frequently asked questions

To put this worksheet beside a live chart, use the guides to London Kill Zone timing and the Judas Swing to define the session question. Then compare market structure shifts for confirmation, fair value gaps for the return price, and order blocks for the larger area behind the move.