Trading sessions & kill zones

Module 5 covered the four sessions — Sydney, Tokyo, London and New York — and why the London/New York overlap carries the most volume. This lesson builds on that with the ICT idea of kill zones: narrower windows inside those sessions that many traders restrict their trading to.

• Session opens bring a surge of participants, so spreads tighten and moves have enough follow-through to reach a target.
• Overnight ranges leave obvious highs and lows — ready-made liquidity for the new session to take.
• Scheduled news mostly lands inside these windows, which supplies the reason for a move.
• Practically: a fixed window forces a routine and stops the overtrading that comes with staring at charts all day.

Kill zones describe when volatility tends to arrive. The AMD model describes what a complete intraday day looks like inside those windows: price builds a position, shakes out the wrong side, and then runs. It is not a separate indicator — it is a way of reading the same session clock as a three-act story, and it is where the kill-zone windows above become most useful.

During the Asian / Tokyo session (00:00 – 09:00 UTC, as in the session table earlier in this lesson), price typically settles into a tight, low-volume range. Very little fresh news is moving it, spreads are at their widest, and retail traders are largely absent. Inside that range, resting orders pile up on both sides: buy stops above the Asian high and sell stops below the Asian low. This is the liquidity the next two phases will feed on. Larger participants are said to quietly build a position here without pushing price out of the range, because there is not enough volume to fill size cleanly yet — so they wait.

As European desks come in around the London open (07:00 – 10:00 UTC, including the Tokyo–London handover around 08:00), volume arrives — and with it the day's first real push. In the AMD read, that push is often deliberately directed at one side of the Asian range. A sweep of the Asian high triggers the buy stops parked there and draws breakout traders in; once that liquidity is taken, price reverses. The mirror image works at the Asian low. The point is that the obvious breakout is the trap — the move that looks like the start of a trend is actually the setup being unwound.

After the sweep reverses, the day's true direction tends to reveal itself through the New York session (13:00 – 22:00 UTC), peaking through the London–New York overlap (13:00 – 17:00). The position accumulated quietly in Asia and triggered by the London false move is now distributed into real volume as US participants enter and the scheduled data lands. This is the move worth trading — it has follow-through, it respects structure, and it tends to run toward the next opposing liquidity pool rather than stalling after a few pips.

1. 100:00–09:00 UTC (Asian session): EUR/USD drifts in a 25-pip range between 1.0820 and 1.0845. You mark the Asian high at 1.0845 and the Asian low at 1.0820 as resting liquidity, and you do nothing else.
2. 207:00–10:00 UTC (London open): price spikes up through 1.0845, tagging the buy stops above the Asian high, then immediately reverses and closes back below it. That false break is the manipulation phase — a sweep of buy-side liquidity before reversing lower.
3. 313:00 UTC onward (New York session): with the trap set, price pushes decisively lower through the Asian low and continues down into the London–New York overlap. This sustained move in the true intended direction is the distribution phase — the trade the whole day was building toward.
4. 4After 20:00 UTC: the move exhausts near a lower-timeframe demand zone, volume fades with the New York close, and the cycle resets for the next session. You were never required to trade the Asian range or the London spike — the plan was to wait for distribution and trade it with confirmation.