The Silver Bullet is one of the most popular ICT models because it is short and easy to follow: one hour, one setup, then you are done. It is built from three ideas covered elsewhere on this blog: liquidity sweeps, market structure shifts and fair value gaps.
The three windows (New York time)
- London: 03:00 to 04:00
- New York AM: 10:00 to 11:00 (the best known)
- New York PM: 14:00 to 15:00
Outside these hours the model does nothing. That rule alone keeps many traders from over-trading.
The steps
- Bias first. Decide before the window whether you only want buys or only sells, from the higher time frame trend and the draw on liquidity (where price is likely heading).
- Wait for a sweep against the bias. In a bullish bias, price first takes out a nearby low (sell-side liquidity) and closes back above it.
- Look for the shift. On a low time frame (often 1 minute), price breaks a recent swing high with a strong candle: a market structure shift with displacement.
- Enter in the gap. That strong move leaves a fair value gap inside the window. The entry is a limit order in the gap, often at its middle.
- Stop and targets. The stop goes just beyond the sweep wick. The first target is the nearest liquidity on the other side (at least 1R), and the final target is the main draw on liquidity.
When to skip it
- High-impact news inside the window.
- No clear bias, or the gap is in the wrong half of the range (a buy in premium, a sell in discount).
- The order is not filled soon after the window opens; a late fill is a different trade.
The Silver Bullet in ICC Charts
The scanner runs the Silver Bullet (model M1) on every market in each window and draws the entry, stop and three targets, with a grade for how many checklist points were met. Switch on the Sessions & Killzones layer in the terminal to shade the windows, test the model on past months in the strategy tester, and read the full model list on the models page.
Education only. No model has a proven edge and losses happen. Practise on a demo account first.
Open ICC Charts in your browser, free, with the ICT and VSA layers and the model scanner.
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- The Judas swing and turtle soup: trading the fake move
- Wyckoff and VSA: reading accumulation and distribution with volume
- Fair Value Gap (FVG): what it is and how traders use it
- Liquidity in trading: buy-side, sell-side and the sweep
- Market structure: break of structure (BOS) vs market structure shift (MSS)
- Volume Spread Analysis (VSA) basics: effort, result and no supply
- ICT killzones: the trading sessions that matter (New York time)
- How to use the ICC Charts model scanner and alerts