ICT Seek & Destroy — The Friday Profile When It's Best NOT to Trade

Most ICT material teaches you when to trade. This article teaches you something more valuable: when NOT to trade. Seek & Destroy is a weekly profile in which the market sits still from Monday through Thursday, and on Friday — around a major macro release — sweeps the stops on both sides of the range before showing its true direction. Anyone who tries to trade inside that consolidation gives money away twice: once in the mid-week chop and again in Friday's hunt. In this guide I'll show you how to recognize such a week by Thursday, how the bullish version differs from the bearish one, and — if you absolutely must — how to play the only move that makes sense: the one AFTER the news.

What the Seek & Destroy profile is

Seek & Destroy is one of the ICT weekly profiles — templates describing which day of the week the market makes its high or low and what the path to it looks like. Most profiles have a readable direction from the weekly open. This one doesn't — and that is precisely its definition.

The mechanics work like this: the calendar has a release on Friday (or Wednesday, in the case of FOMC) important enough that institutions don't want to build positions before the print. So from Monday through Thursday price churns in an ever-tighter range. Above the high of that consolidation, sellers' stop-losses accumulate (buy-side liquidity); below the low, buyers' stops (sell-side liquidity). For four days the market engineers liquidity on both sides — we covered the details of this mechanism in the article on liquidity pools.

On Friday, around the release, the algorithm does what the profile is named for: it seeks stops and destroys them. It sweeps one side of the range, often the other as well, and only after clearing both pools does it move in the direction of the higher-timeframe order flow. In the language of Power of 3: accumulation ran from Monday through Thursday, manipulation happens on the news, and distribution comes after the sweep. It's the same AMD scheme, just stretched across the whole week and compressed into a single Friday.

The most important sentence in this article: Seek & Destroy is a neutral, low-probability profile. Its main signal isn't "enter here" — it's "stand down until Friday afternoon."

How often does this happen? More often than you might think: NFP lands on the first Friday of every month, plus there are eight FOMC meetings a year, monthly CPI prints and central bank decisions. In practice, every third or fourth week on the market has a calendar event capable of producing this profile — which is why recognizing it isn't trivia, it's basic hygiene for working with the macro calendar.

How to recognize a Seek & Destroy week — by Thursday

You can identify the profile two to three days before Friday. Three conditions must be present at the same time:

1. A "red-folder" release sits on Friday's macro calendar. The classic is NFP — first Friday of the month, 8:30 AM ET. Weeks with FOMC (Wednesday, 2:00 PM ET), CPI and central bank decisions create similar dynamics. You check the calendar on Sunday, not Friday morning.
2. Monday–Thursday price action is sideways or "choppy". Instead of a clean directional sequence you see higher highs paired with lower lows, small-range candles and moves that cancel each other out.
3. The weekly order flow has a readable bias, but the daily candles don't respect it. That divergence — a clear direction on W1/D1 alongside intraday drift — is the sign the market is waiting for the print before positioning.

If all three conditions are met, from Thursday onward you treat the week as Seek & Destroy: no counter-trend entries, no chasing "breakouts" from the middle of the range, no scalping the chop. On crypto the rule works the same way — in FOMC/CPI weeks, BTC and ETH can sit in a 2–3% band for four days and then run both sides of the range within minutes of the release.

How to play a Seek & Destroy Friday — step by step

The only playable moment of the profile comes AFTER the release. The sequence is identical for the bullish and bearish versions — only the side differs:

1. Confirm the profile by Thursday. News on Friday + Monday–Thursday chop + a readable weekly bias. If the weekly bias is unreadable — you skip the entire week, because you have no directional target.
2. Mark the high and low of the Monday–Thursday range. These are your two liquidity pools and, at the same time, the levels whose violation you'll be watching.
3. Stand aside until the release. Zero positions before the print. No exceptions.
4. Watch which side the market sweeps first. With a bullish weekly bias, expect a sweep of the low first (collecting buyers' stops); with a bearish bias — a sweep of the high. The side opposite the sweep is your entry direction.
5. Wait for price to return deep into the range. The sweep alone isn't enough — the institutional fingerprint is a swept extreme followed by a quick return to the middle.
6. Drop to M5–M15 and wait for an MSS or CISD in the direction opposite the sweep. No structure shift, no entry — the news candle can sweep both sides several times.
7. Enter on the close of the MSS/CISD candle or on its retest. Stop-loss behind the swept extreme. Target: the nearest higher-timeframe draw on liquidity — the last significant high/low, the previous week's extreme, the daily order flow objective.

A bonus that significantly improves the risk-reward: if the return move after the sweep left a clean FVG or a breaker block, price coming back into that imbalance gives you a second, better entry in the same direction.

Example: an NFP Friday in a bullish week

Let's picture the model scenario. Order flow on W1 is bullish, but from Monday through Thursday EUR/USD (or BTC — same scheme) sits in a range: equal highs on top, equal lows underneath, no session resolving direction. On Thursday evening you check the calendar: NFP tomorrow at 8:30 AM ET. All three conditions met — you mark the range high and low and close the platform until Friday.

On Friday at 8:30 AM ET the news candle dives below the Monday–Thursday range low, pulls the stops of every buyer from the entire week — and within minutes returns to the middle of the consolidation. On M5, a clear MSS to the upside prints with an impulse that leaves an FVG. You go long on the retest of the gap, stop below the freshly swept low, target at the previous week's high. The post-NFP move delivers the second leg in line with the bullish bias — exactly where the market "couldn't" go for four days, until it had collected fuel from both sides.

Notice what the edge in this scenario actually was: you predicted neither the print nor the direction of the first reaction. You waited for the market to show you which side it had cleared. That is the core of the entire profile — Seek & Destroy doesn't reward news analysis, it rewards patience with its aftermath. The traders who at 8:29 AM "knew" what NFP would show were, at 8:31 AM, usually feeding the sweep on both sides of the range.

Common mistakes

• Trading the Monday–Thursday chop. The most expensive mistake of the profile. Pre-news consolidation produces fake "setups" on a conveyor belt — and they all share the same fate: a stop-out.
• Holding a position into the release. Even "a small one, just for a moment." The market built liquidity on both sides precisely to collect it — your order is part of that liquidity.
• Entering on the sweep candle. The first move after the news is manipulation, not direction. Without a return into the range and a structure shift on M5–M15, you have no confirmation the sweep was the last one.
• Playing the week without a readable W1 bias. A both-sides sweep with no directional target above is a coin flip, not a setup. Unreadable order flow = skip the entire week.
• Confusing Seek & Destroy with TGIF. TGIF is Friday in a TRENDING week — profit-taking and a retracement back into the weekly range. Seek & Destroy is Friday in a CONSOLIDATION week. Different profile, different play; mixing them up ends with you trading against the current.
• Getting the clock wrong. NFP is always 8:30 AM New York time — if you trade from Europe or Asia, the DST transition weeks in March and around the turn of October and November shift your local equivalent by an hour. A chart set to New York time solves the problem.

Seek & Destroy is best treated as a calendar filter: once a week, on Sunday, you check the macro schedule and classify the days ahead. If a hunting week is shaping up — your edge is your chair, not your keyboard. And if the week turns out to be trending, you'll play Friday from a completely different profile — you'll meet it in the article on TGIF. The foundations without which this profile won't work are covered in the pieces on liquidity pools and Market Structure Shift.

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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