Blog · ICT models

The Judas swing and turtle soup: trading the fake move

Why the first move of a session is often the wrong one, how the Judas swing and turtle soup patterns form, and how to wait for confirmation instead of guessing the top.

2026-10-15 · 2 min read · ICC Charts

Many traders have bought a breakout at the London open only to watch price reverse a few minutes later. ICT gives that fake move a name: the Judas swing. It is the move that "betrays" traders by going the wrong way first, takes their orders, and then runs in the real direction of the day.

How a Judas swing forms

  1. The Asian session builds a quiet range with a clear high and low.
  2. Near the London open (or the New York open), price pushes beyond one side of that range, or past the day's opening price.
  3. That push takes the stop orders resting there (a liquidity sweep).
  4. Price turns, breaks structure the other way, and the real move of the session begins.

In a bullish day, the Judas swing is a drop below the Asian low or the midnight open before the rally. In a bearish day, it is a spike above the high before the fall.

Turtle soup

Turtle soup is the same idea on any time frame: price trades just past an old high or low (often a recent 20-bar extreme), fails to continue, and closes back inside. Breakout traders are trapped, and their exits fuel the reversal. The name comes from the old "Turtle" breakout traders whose orders sit at those levels.

Do not guess the top

The hard part is that a real breakout and a Judas swing look the same at first. A safer approach is to wait for proof:

Timing helps too: these patterns are most reliable inside the killzones, and in the direction of the higher time frame trend.

In ICC Charts

Two models in the scanner are built on this idea: Judas Swing / Turtle Soup (M3) and Asian Q2 Judas (M5). The Sessions & Killzones layer of the terminal draws the Asian range and the midnight open, and the Liquidity layer marks each swept level with an X. See all of them on the models page.

Education only. Trading involves risk; practise on a demo account first.

Try it on a live chart

Open ICC Charts in your browser, free, with the ICT and VSA layers and the model scanner.

Open the terminal →

More articles