ICT 2024 Mentorship Lecture 1: The 8:30 Model — Sweep After the News, Entry on MSS

We're kicking off a new series on the blog: "ICT 2024 Mentorship Notes" — a walkthrough of Michael Huddleston's 2024 paid course, lecture by lecture, written in our own words and tied back to our existing articles on time and sessions. Lecture 1 opens the series and introduces a model the course keeps returning to: a morning New York-time window where price first collects liquidity around a news release, then only afterward moves in a direction worth trading.

What This Lecture Covers

Michael Huddleston opens by shifting the emphasis from "where" to "when." In this method, a level on the chart without the right time window for price to reach it is nearly worthless — only the combination of time and price produces a signal worth waiting for. Lecture 1 teaches one specific model built on that principle, so on our blog we're calling it the 8:30 model — because the trigger for the whole sequence is the US macro data release published every day at 8:30 AM New York time. That's the exact same hour CPI, NFP or retail sales figures regularly come out — something we cover in more depth in our Macro Times article.

The course has you work on three timeframes at once: the 15-minute as the map of the day (direction and the liquidity levels price might reach for), the 5-minute for structure context, and the 1-minute as the actual entry trigger. The lecture also introduces a set of terms the rest of the model depends on. A relative equal high is a high with a lower swing high to its right — the mark of a failed breakout and a potential reversal. A relative equal low is the mirror image for lows. A breaker block is an order block that failed: price first sweeps liquidity below (or above) a level, then breaks the prior swing high (or low) in the other direction — and the last candle before that reversal becomes the most sensitive zone to trade. BISI and SIBI are simply FVGs named after the direction of the candle that left them behind — bullish and bearish, respectively. On top of that, the course reminds you that NWOG — the weekly opening gap — exists too, something we cover in full in our separate article on NDOG & NWOG.

The core of the model is easy to remember and harder to execute: in the window before the news, price builds a level that looks like the session's high or low; the 8:30 AM release sweeps that level in one direction — and only a confirmed structure shift after the sweep signals that it's worth looking for an entry opposite the sweep itself.

The Model Step by Step

The Lecture 1 sequence turned into a checklist you can run live:

1. Sit down before 8:00 AM ET. The setup builds inside the 8:00-8:30 AM window, so you need to be present at the start of it, not just after the fact.
2. On the 15-minute, set the bias and the draw on liquidity. Which levels — old highs, old lows, unfilled gaps — are the most likely target of the day.
3. On the 1-minute, watch for relative equal highs or lows. Equal highs build the bearish scenario, equal lows build the bullish one. One of them should form inside the 8:00-8:30 AM window.
4. Wait for the sweep after 8:30 AM ET. The news release sweeps the level built in the previous step — this is the trigger, not the entry itself.
5. Wait for a confirmed MSS on the 5-minute or 1-minute. A close below the last swing low confirms the bearish scenario; above the last swing high confirms the bullish one.
6. Mark the PD Array left by the reversal leg. An order block, a breaker block, or a BISI/SIBI created by the move that produced the MSS.
7. Enter on the pullback into the zone. You don't chase price — you wait for it to return to the marked level.
8. Set the stop and the target. Stop beyond the extreme of the whole post-8:30 move (not just behind the MSS candle), target at the next liquidity level — relative equal on the opposite side, or the prior session's high/low.

How to Apply It

It's worth placing this model inside the hourly grid you already know from our time articles. The 8:00-9:30 AM ET window sits inside the first half of the New York killzone (7:00-10:00 AM ET) — so the timing itself isn't new information, it's a refinement of exactly which part of that broader window to hunt a specific setup in. What's more interesting is its neighbor: the first Macro Times window, NY AM Macro 1, falls at 8:50-9:10 AM ET — minutes after the 8:30 AM news. In practice that means two back-to-back catalysts inside the same hour: if the sweep and MSS after the news don't produce a clean signal, or you miss it, a second chance arrives with the opening of the first macro.

One thing the lecture doesn't say outright, worth adding from our own experience: not every day has a market-moving release at 8:30 AM ET. CPI, NFP and PCE inflation data come out on specific, pre-scheduled days — on the rest, 8:30 AM is just an ordinary hour with no particular fuel, and the sweep tends to be shallower and less reliable. Checking the economic calendar before the session matters here just as much as setting the bias.

The instruments best suited to this window are NQ and ES (US index futures — the cleanest price delivery in the rhythm of the New York session), GBP/USD and EUR/USD (the overlap of the London close with the New York open), and XAU/USD, which regularly makes a decisive move right inside the 8:30 AM news window. The model does get traded on crypto, but honestly: BTC and ETH have no fixed session close, so a "pre-8:30 level" is a convention that needs its own historical verification before you treat it as just as reliable as it is on indices.

Here's a simplified worked example. GBP/USD, bullish bias from the daily (price above a daily FVG, the nearest draw on liquidity above last week's high). Between 8:00 and 8:30 AM ET, two nearly equal lows form on the 1-minute — relative equal lows beneath the current price. At 8:30 AM the CPI print hits: price immediately drops below both lows by a dozen or so pips, sweeping the sell stops resting there, then reverses just as sharply. On the 3-minute, a full-bodied bullish candle prints, breaking the last swing high before the news and leaving a BISI behind — MSS with displacement confirmed. Price returns to the gap around 8:45 AM, long entry at the midpoint of the BISI, stop a few pips below the sweep low, target at the relative equal highs formed before the news. The move reaches the target before the first macro opens at 8:50 AM — the whole trade wraps up in under twenty minutes, right in the rhythm the model expects.

And a counter-example for balance: same sweep, but without a close beyond the swing high — price only wicks into the level and returns. Without an MSS that's not yet a signal, just raw material to watch; entering on the wick alone in that scenario statistically fails more often than it works.

Most Common Mistakes

• Entering before 8:30 AM. The sweep only after the news is the model's trigger — a position opened earlier is a guess with no catalyst behind it.
• Skipping the MSS. The sweep of relative equal highs/lows alone is not a signal, only its warning sign. Entering on the sweep itself, without a confirmed structure shift, regularly ends up in the noise.
• Trading without 15-minute context. The bias and the target have to come from the higher timeframe. The 1-minute is only the trigger, not the source of the directional decision.
• Wrong PD Array. The first zone marked after the MSS is usually the cleanest entry — waiting for a deeper pullback often means no entry at all.
• A stop glued to the MSS candle. The stop needs to cover the whole range formed after 8:30 AM, not just the narrow swing where the structure shift occurred.
• Ignoring the economic calendar. A day with no significant 8:30 AM ET release rarely produces the same kind of move as a day with CPI or NFP behind it.

Lecture 1 is the foundation for the rest of the mentorship series — before moving on, it's worth mastering its building blocks separately: the Market Structure Shift, the Fair Value Gap, and the full killzones map. If you want broader context on the method, start with our complete map of ICT concepts — and treat the 8:30 model as the first, narrow slice of the same time-and-price philosophy that appears in full, ten-step form in our article on the 2022 Model. Next up in this series: Lecture 3 and the model built around the daily and weekly opening gaps (NDOG/NWOG).

FAQ

Rafał — Krypto Bez Ściemy

Trader and founder of Strefa Tradingu. He’s been breaking crypto down on YouTube for years — no hype, no signals, with a focus on market structure and risk management.

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