ICT 2024 Mentorship Lecture 3: The NDOG & NWOG Model as Reference Zones

We're continuing the "ICT 2024 Mentorship Notes" series — a walkthrough of Michael Huddleston's 2024 paid course, lecture by lecture, written in our own words. In Lecture 1 we covered the 8:30 model built around a sweep after the morning news. Lecture 3 changes the lead character: instead of relative equal highs/lows, opening gaps — NDOG and NWOG — take center stage, treated as the backbone of the entire trading day rather than just a level noted in the margin of the chart.

What This Lecture Covers

Michael Huddleston makes a bold claim in this lecture: the New Day Opening Gap (NDOG) and the New Week Opening Gap (NWOG) are the strongest inefficiencies on the chart — stronger than the relative equal highs and lows covered in Lecture 1. Since a gap is an area where literally no trading occurred, the market treats it as under- or over-valued and keeps returning to it before deciding where to go next. We already cover the full mechanics of these gaps — the close and open times, how to mark them, the 50% level — in our separate, more detailed article on NDOG & NWOG; here we focus on what this specific lecture adds: how the gaps get wired into a session model with two trading windows.

The lecture splits the day into two parts with clearly different character. The morning session demands more experience — it's traded at 7:00, 8:00 and 9:00 AM New York time, checking each time whether price has reached one of the marked gaps. The afternoon session is designed to be simpler: if the morning lacked a clear news driver and the market went nowhere, the model tells you to wait for the hours after the New York lunch. One more term gets added to the toolkit here: the inverse fair value gap (IFVG) — an FVG that failed and started working in reverse — as a second entry zone alongside the breaker block after a structure shift.

The Model Step by Step

The Lecture 3 sequence turned into a checklist you can run live:

1. Mark a minimum of four current NDOGs plus the active NWOG. Older gaps don't expire after a single tap — they stay on the chart.
2. Set the bias on the daily and 4-hour, the same way you would for any other session model in this course.
3. Check the nearest gap's position relative to price. A gap on the side of the bias but further from price is a target (draw on liquidity); a gap closer to price, between it and the biased direction, is a potential entry zone.
4. Wait for a tap of the gap during the AM window — 7:00, 8:00 or 9:00 AM ET.
5. Wait for an MSS in the direction of the bias on a lower timeframe, confirming the tap of the gap wasn't just a random wick.
6. Mark the breaker block or IFVG left by the reversal leg after the MSS.
7. Enter on the pullback into the zone, stop beyond the extreme of the sweep formed at the gap tap, target at the next liquidity level — relative equal or the prior session's high/low.
8. If the morning is quiet, don't force it. Shift your attention to the afternoon and look for an Optimal Trade Entry setup in the post-lunch window.

How to Apply It

It's worth lining up Lecture 3's windows with the hourly grid you already know from our time articles. The morning session (7:00-9:00 AM ET) opens together with the New York killzone (7:00-10:00 AM ET) — meaning the model tells you to trade exactly the part of that window where institutional order flow is just ramping up, not its tail end. It gets more interesting in the afternoon: Lecture 3's OTE window falls roughly at 1:30-2:30 PM ET, which nearly overlaps the NY PM Macro window from our Macro Times article (1:10-1:40 PM ET). That's not a coincidence — both concepts, under different names, describe the same afternoon wave of order flow after the New York lunch. If the morning produced no setup, this is the best candidate for a second try on the same day.

One thing worth adding from our own experience: a gap's role (target or entry zone) can flip during the day once price passes it and closes on the other side — exactly as we describe in our NDOG & NWOG article. That's why it pays to re-run the checklist at each of the three morning windows rather than checking it only once at the start of the session.

The instruments best suited to this model are, again, NQ and ES — US indices have the cleanest, most consistent daily NDOGs on the chart — along with GBP/USD and EUR/USD, where the morning gap sweep tends to be the cleanest setup of the day, and XAU/USD, which regularly reacts to gaps in the afternoon OTE window, especially on news days. On crypto the model needs the adjustment we cover in the NDOG & NWOG article: the spot market simply has no daily gaps, so you need to pull up a Bitcoin futures chart on CME instead.

Position management in this model is suggested by the gap itself: since NDOG and NWOG have clearly defined edges, the stop naturally lands beyond the opposite edge of the gap rather than at some arbitrary "eyeballed" point. A sensible habit is logging the morning and afternoon sessions separately for a few weeks — the lecture itself suggests the morning session demands more experience, so a beginner can deliberately start with the simpler post-lunch window before adding the tougher 7:00-9:00 AM ET windows to the journal.

Here's a simplified worked example. EUR/USD, bearish bias from the daily, with an NDOG from two sessions ago hanging above price — sitting there purely as a target the market hasn't reached yet. At 8:00 AM ET, price reaches the lower edge of that gap and stalls inside it briefly. On the 5-minute, a bearish candle prints, breaking the last swing low before the gap tap and leaving an IFVG behind — MSS confirmed. Price pulls back into that zone around 8:20 AM, short entry at the midpoint of the IFVG, stop above the top edge of the NDOG, target at the nearest relative equal lows from the prior session. Had that same morning turned out flat — price only wicking into the gap, no MSS — the model tells you to close the notebook until 1:30 PM ET and check whether the setup shows up instead in the post-lunch OTE window, rather than forcing an entry.

Most Common Mistakes

• One gap instead of a stack. The lecture calls for a minimum of four NDOGs on the chart — a single, freshly formed gap doesn't give you enough context.
• Pairing the gap with the wrong bias. A gap above price with a bearish bias is a different scenario than a gap above price with a bullish bias — mixing up the direction flips the entire trade plan.
• Forcing an entry on a quiet morning. If the market is going nowhere without a news driver, the model explicitly tells you to wait for the afternoon. Trading the morning drift usually ends in a string of false breaks.
• Skipping the MSS. A tap of the gap alone isn't enough — without a confirmed structure shift, the entry is premature.
• A stop glued to the MSS candle instead of to the full range formed at the gap tap during the morning window.
• Ignoring the afternoon window. The post-lunch OTE setup tends to be one of the most reliable points in this model — skipping it means skipping the best second chance of the day.

Lecture 3 pairs well with Lecture 1: there, the trigger was the 8:30 AM news; here, opening gaps form a fixed, repeatable skeleton for the day independent of the macro calendar. Before trading this model live, master its two pillars separately: the full mechanics of NDOG & NWOG and the Market Structure Shift, without which a gap tap is just a wick on the chart. For broader context on the method, see our complete map of ICT concepts.

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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