How to Set Up TradingView for ICT, Step by Step

A surprising number of ICT problems turn out to be chart problems. Kill zones that seem to start an hour late. An opening gap nobody else can see. Fibonacci levels that disagree with everyone else’s. A chart so crowded with indicators that price is the hardest thing on it to find.

This page walks through a TradingView setup built for the methodology, in the order it matters, with the honest limits of each plan. It is deliberately minimal: the aim is a chart that shows you what the method needs and nothing else.

Step 1: New York time

Everything in ICT is scheduled in New York time — the kill zones, the macros, the midnight open, the 08:30 and 09:30 events. TradingView often defaults to UTC or to the exchange’s own zone, and a chart in the wrong zone puts every one of those an hour or more out.

Click the time zone shown at the bottom right of the chart, or open chart settings, and choose New York. Do it once and save it as part of your layout. If you live elsewhere, resist the temptation to keep your local time and convert in your head: it works until the week the clocks change in one country and not the other, and then it quietly doesn’t.

Step 2: The full session on futures

Index futures trade almost around the clock, from 18:00 to 17:00 New York time with a daily break. Several ICT reference points only exist if your chart includes that overnight trading:

• The New Day Opening Gap — the gap between the 17:00 close and the 18:00 reopen.
• The New Week Opening Gap — Friday’s close to Sunday’s reopen.
• The midnight open and the Asian range — both formed overnight.

In chart settings, check the session setting on the symbol tab and make sure the chart is showing the full electronic session rather than regular trading hours only. TradingView renames and moves these options between versions, so if the wording differs, look for the session or extended-hours setting. A quick check that it is right: you should see candles printing through the night, not a jump from one afternoon to the next morning.

On spot forex this step does not arise — the market trades continuously through the week.

Step 3: Know what your plan allows

The free plan is enough to trade the method. It is worth knowing exactly where its edges are before building a workflow that runs into them. From TradingView’s pricing page:

Plans and limits change, so treat that table as a snapshot and check the current page before paying for anything. Three practical consequences:

• On the free plan, two indicator slots is the real constraint. Use them for things you cannot draw by hand. Sessions and kill zones do not need to be one of them: the site’s kill zone clock and session clock do that job in a browser tab.
• One chart per layout means one timeframe at a time. Switching timeframes on a single chart works perfectly well for top-down analysis; it is slower, not worse.
• Serious backtesting of intraday models needs intraday bar replay, which starts at Essential. It is the most defensible reason to pay for a plan.

Step 4: A timeframe layout

If your plan allows more than one chart per layout, the most useful arrangement mirrors the analysis. A common one for intraday index trading:

If you trade index futures, a second symbol is worth more than a third timeframe: NQ and ES side by side give you SMT at a glance, as NQ vs ES covers. For EUR/USD, the dollar index plays the same role.

Step 5: Drawing tools, set up once

Most ICT levels are better drawn than generated. Setting up the tools properly once saves a great deal of fiddling later.

• Rectangles for fair value gaps and order blocks. Choose a fill colour for bullish and one for bearish and save each as a template, so marking takes one click.
• Horizontal rays for single prices — previous day’s high and low, the midnight open, session extremes. A ray starting at the level’s origin shows where it came from; a full horizontal line does not.
• A text label on each level. In a week you will not remember why a line is there.

The Fibonacci tool

The default Fibonacci levels are not the ones ICT uses. Edit the tool once and save it as a template with these levels, matching optimal trade entry and premium and discount:

Draw it from the sweep extreme to the end of the displacement, so that 1 sits on the sweep and 0 on the displacement. If the levels appear the wrong way round, use the tool’s reverse option rather than redrawing. Turn off every other default level; clutter on a Fibonacci tool is how people end up trading 0.382.

Step 6: Indicators, sparingly

The honest position is that the methodology needs very few indicators, and the ones it does use should do something you cannot easily do by hand.

• Worth a slot: something that marks levels you would otherwise have to calculate repeatedly — previous-period highs and lows, opening prices, or a correlated-pair comparison. The site publishes a free SMT script for the last of these.
• Usually not worth a slot: indicators that draw every fair value gap or order block automatically. They mark dozens a day and cannot tell which one satisfies the criteria — which is the only part that matters, and the part most losing traders skip.
• Not needed at all: moving averages, oscillators and volume overlays. They are not part of the method and they compete with price for your attention.

Walkthrough — marking up NQ before the open

The levels below are constructed to show the routine cleanly. It is a teaching illustration rather than a record of a real session.

06:45, New York time. Chart on New York time, full electronic session showing. Start on the 1H.

1. Previous day’s high and low. 21,566 and 21,402. Two horizontal rays, labelled PDH and PDL.
2. The opening gap. Yesterday closed at 17:00 at 21,480; the market reopened at 18:00 at 21,466. A shaded rectangle between 21,466 and 21,480, labelled NDOG, with a thin line at its midpoint, 21,473.
3. The midnight open. The 00:00 candle opened at 21,452. One ray, labelled.
4. The Asian range. 21,431 to 21,489 across the overnight session. Two rays, or a light rectangle.
5. Drop to the 15M. One bullish order block from yesterday afternoon at 21,428–21,445 and one unfilled bearish gap at 21,512–21,528. Both marked with their templates.
6. Read the picture. Price is at 21,461: below the midnight open, below the gap, near the bottom of the Asian range, in the discount half of yesterday’s range. The obvious sell-side pool is the previous day’s low at 21,402. The bias for the morning is written down before 07:00, with the level that would change it.

What is not on the chart: a single automatic indicator. Seven drawn levels, each labelled, each with a reason. That is a chart you can read at a glance at 09:50 with a position open, which is the whole point of setting it up this way.

Five setup mistakes

Frequently Asked Questions