ICT Daily Bias — The Exact Method for Determining Direction Every Day
Determining daily bias correctly is the single most important skill in ICT trading. This guide explains the exact process ICT uses — not a guess, not an indicator, but a structural and liquidity-based framework.
Daily bias determination is the foundation of every ICT trade. Get the bias right and you are trading with the algorithm; get it wrong and even technically perfect entries will fail. Yet daily bias is the concept most ICT beginners struggle with most. They guess based on the previous candle, or they use indicators, or they simply trade in the direction of the most recent move. None of these approaches will give you consistent accuracy. ICT's approach is systematic, structural, and based on where the algorithm needs to go to collect the next major pool of liquidity.
The Core Question: Where Is Price Going?
Daily bias is not about predicting where price will close at the end of the day. It is about identifying the most likely Draw on Liquidity (DOL) that the algorithm is targeting today. Is the algorithm delivering price toward the buy-side (the swing highs above current price) or toward the sell-side (the swing lows below current price)? The answer to that question is your daily bias.
The DOL is always a liquidity pool. Specifically: Equal Highs or Equal Lows, Previous Day High or Low, Previous Week High or Low, a major swing high or swing low on the daily chart, an open FVG or NWOG that represents an imbalance to be filled. Before you can determine daily bias, you must identify which of these liquidity pools is closest and most likely to be reached given the current structural context.
The ICT Daily Bias Framework
- diamondStep 1 — Weekly Analysis: Determine the weekly bias first. Is the weekly chart making Higher Highs and Higher Lows (bullish)? Or Lower Highs and Lower Lows (bearish)? The weekly structure is the primary filter.
- diamondStep 2 — Mark the Weekly DOL: Where is price likely delivering to by Friday? The previous week's high (BSL) or the previous week's low (SSL)? This is your weekly target.
- diamondStep 3 — Daily Structure: On the daily chart, identify the most recent swing structure. Is the last daily candle sequence making Higher Lows (bullish) or Lower Highs (bearish)? Has there been a recent BOS or ChoCH on the daily?
- diamondStep 4 — Mark Daily PD Arrays: Identify any open daily FVGs, recent daily OBs, and the previous day's high and low. These are the levels that price is most likely delivering to or from today.
- diamondStep 5 — The London Open Context: Before London opens, note whether the overnight price action swept any Asian range extreme. If the Asian low was swept overnight, the bias for London is likely bullish. If the Asian high was swept, bias is likely bearish.
- diamondStep 6 — State your bias explicitly: "Today's bias is bullish. I expect price to deliver toward [specific level] during the New York session." Writing it down forces clarity.
The Previous Day's High and Low — The Most Useful Daily Bias Anchor
The Previous Day's High (PDH) and Previous Day's Low (PDL) are the most immediately actionable liquidity pools for daily bias determination. In a bullish bias, price is expected to reach and potentially exceed the PDH during the current session. In a bearish bias, price is expected to reach and potentially break the PDL.
When price opens the London or New York session below the PDH in a bullish context, the PDH is your primary target. When price is above the PDL in a bearish context, the PDL is your target. This gives you an immediately visible, quantifiable target before the session begins — and allows you to define your trade structure (entry at PD Array, stop below the entry zone, target at the PDH or PDL) before a single candle of the session has formed.
When Daily Bias Is Unclear
On some days, the daily bias is genuinely unclear — the weekly structure is consolidating, the daily chart shows balanced structure, and there are no obvious draws on liquidity in either direction. On these days, the correct approach is to wait. Do not force a bias onto a market that is in genuine equilibrium. The algorithm is accumulating during these periods, and attempting to trade in a direction during genuine consolidation will result in getting chopped up in both directions.
The most important bias-determination discipline: state your bias BEFORE the session opens and do not change it once the session begins unless a clearly significant structural event invalidates it. Traders who switch their bias based on the first 30 minutes of price action are not trading bias — they are reacting to noise. True bias is determined in pre-session analysis, not in real-time reaction.