ICT Weekly Profiles: The 12 Patterns That Show Where the Weekly High and Low Form

Most traders build a plan for the day and no plan at all for the week.

That produces a specific and expensive mistake. On Monday morning price does something convincing, the trader takes it as the week's direction, and then spends Tuesday being stopped out by the move that was actually setting up the week. The Monday move was not the trend. It was the manipulation that had to happen before the real one could start.

ICT weekly profiles are a set of templates for that problem. They describe the shapes a week tends to take, and they answer one question in particular: on which day does the weekly high or the weekly low get set? Knowing the likely answer on Tuesday afternoon changes which side you take for the following three days, and changes whether you should be trading that week at all.

What Are ICT Weekly Profiles?

A weekly profile is a template for how price delivers across the five sessions of a trading week. There are 12 of them in the framework: five bullish, five bearish, and two Seek and Destroy variants.

The critical thing to understand before the list is what actually drives them, because the naming gives the wrong impression.

The Day Is the Symptom, the Array Is the Mechanism

The best known profile is called the "classic Tuesday low." Read literally, that sounds like a claim that Tuesdays are special, which would be calendar superstition and worth nothing.

That is not what it says. The full statement is that in a bullish week, price trades down into a higher timeframe discount array and forms the weekly low there. Tuesday is simply when a normal week tends to get that done. Monday is often a narrow or deceptive session that stays above the discount level. If price has not reached the array by Monday's close, it typically does so during Tuesday's London or New York session.

So the mechanism is: the weekly extreme forms when price reaches the array it was drawing toward. The day of the week is an observation about how long that usually takes, not a cause. A week where the array gets reached on Monday morning forms a Monday low, and the framework has a name for that too.

This distinction decides whether the framework is usable or not. If you wait for Tuesday because it is Tuesday, you are trading a calendar. If you wait for price to reach the discount or premium zone your higher timeframe analysis already identified, and you use the day-of-week tendency to tell you when to be watching for it, you are using top down analysis with a timing overlay.

How It Relates to Daily Bias

A daily bias answers "which way today." A weekly profile answers "where in the week are we, and has the extreme already formed." They stack rather than compete.

The weekly profile is the higher layer. Once you believe the weekly low went in on Tuesday, every subsequent daily bias that week has a default: long, until price closes back below that low. That is the practical output. It is not a signal to enter. It is a filter that tells you which of your daily setups to take and which to skip.

The 12 ICT Weekly Profiles

The five bullish profiles have bearish mirrors. Read one set and you have both.

The Bullish Profiles (the weekly low forms early)

1. Classic Tuesday Low. Monday trades sideways or slightly lower, staying above the higher timeframe discount array. Tuesday drives down into that array, often during London or the New York open, sweeping the sell stops beneath Monday's low. That is the low of the week. Price expands higher from Tuesday through Friday.

2. Wednesday Low. The same structure delayed by a session. Monday and Tuesday consolidate without reaching the array, Wednesday completes the move down into it, and the expansion runs Wednesday through Friday. This is common in weeks with a Wednesday news event holding price back.

3. Consolidation Thursday Bullish Reversal. Monday through Wednesday go nowhere in a tight range. Thursday drives sharply down, takes the sell stops built under three days of consolidation, rejects hard, and reverses up. The low of the week forms Thursday and the move is compressed into the last two sessions.

4. Consolidation Midweek Rally. Monday through Wednesday consolidate, then price expands higher from midweek without a deep raid first. The weekly low is effectively the consolidation floor rather than a distinct sweep.

5. Wednesday Weekly Bullish Reversal. Price trends lower into Wednesday, reaching a deep discount, raids the sell stops there, and reverses strongly upward into Friday. The distinguishing feature is that the first half of the week was genuinely bearish, not merely quiet.

The Bearish Profiles (the weekly high forms early)

6. Classic Tuesday High. Monday stays below the premium array, Tuesday rallies into it and sweeps the buy stops above Monday's high, and that is the high of the week. Price declines Tuesday through Friday.

7. Wednesday High. The same pattern one session later, with Monday and Tuesday consolidating first.

8. Consolidation Thursday Bearish Reversal. Three days of range, then a Thursday push up through the buy stops, rejection, and a decline into Friday.

9. Consolidation Midweek Decline. Range through Wednesday, then bearish expansion lower through Friday.

10. Wednesday Weekly Bearish Reversal. Genuine strength into Wednesday, a raid of the buy stops at a premium, then a strong reversal down into Friday.

The Two Seek and Destroy Profiles

11 and 12. Seek and Destroy, Bullish Friday and Bearish Friday. These are the ones worth knowing best, because they are the ones that cost money.

A Seek and Destroy week has no early extreme. Monday through Thursday price raids both sides of its range, taking buy stops above and sell stops below, and closes back inside each time without committing. Nothing resolves. Then on Friday price finally expands in one direction, meaning the week's real move happens in the session with the least time left to trade it.

The same profile exists at the daily level and is defined the same way: a session that runs both sides and rewards neither. The weekly version just stretches it across four days.

Seek and Destroy weeks cluster around scheduled high impact events, particularly Non Farm Payrolls and FOMC, and around holiday thinned liquidity. The reason is straightforward. Ahead of an event that will genuinely reprice the market, there is no incentive to commit, but there is every incentive to clear the stop loss pools sitting on both sides while waiting.

What makes them dangerous is that they punish both kinds of trader at once. Breakout traders get filled on the raid and stopped when price returns inside. Reversal traders fade the raid and get stopped by the raid on the other side. Being right about the eventual Friday direction does not save you, because you were stopped out on Tuesday getting there.

How to Identify the Profile Before Wednesday

The framework is only useful if you can classify the week while there is still week left. Here is the sequence.

Step 1: Establish the Higher Timeframe Draw Before Monday

Before the week opens, mark where the higher timeframe wants to go: the draw on liquidity, the premium and discount arrays on the daily and weekly charts, and the obvious pools of equal highs and equal lows.

This step is not optional and it is not part of the profile. It is the input. A weekly profile tells you the likely shape and timing of the delivery. It cannot tell you the direction. If you skip this step you are guessing at bullish or bearish and then fitting a template to the guess.

Step 2: Treat Monday as Information, Not Direction

Monday's job in most profiles is to be misleading. In a bullish week Monday often trades quietly higher or sideways before Tuesday takes it lower. Traders who read Monday as the trend enter long, get taken out on the Tuesday raid, and miss the actual move.

What Monday genuinely tells you is the week's range so far, which is where the stops now sit. Mark Monday's high and low. Those are the two pools most likely to be raided next.

Step 3: Watch for the Array to Be Reached

Through Tuesday, the question is single: has price reached the higher timeframe array from step 1, and did it reject there?

If yes, and it swept an obvious pool doing it, you have the classic profile. The extreme is likely in and the rest of the week has a default direction.

If price is still consolidating and has not reached the array, you are in a delayed profile. Shift your expectation to a Wednesday low or high, or to a Thursday consolidation reversal. Do not force the trade because it is Tuesday.

Step 4: Count the Raids

This is the Seek and Destroy check, and it is the highest value part of the routine.

Keep a count of how many times the week has taken out one of its own extremes and closed back inside. Once by Tuesday is normal and is usually the setup. Both sides raided by Wednesday, with price back inside the range and no expansion, is the Seek and Destroy signature. At that point the correct read is not "which way will it break." It is "this is a week to reduce size or stand aside."

Step 5: Check the Calendar Before Trusting Any of It

If NFP or FOMC lands on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, the odds of a Seek and Destroy shift materially upward and the odds of a clean early extreme shift down. This check takes ten seconds and it reorders everything above it.

Using Profiles as a No Trade Filter

The genuine payload of this framework is subtractive. It is better at telling you when not to trade than at telling you what to buy.

When the profile is clear, it filters your daily setups. Weekly low identified on Tuesday at a discount array means you take long setups for the rest of the week and skip the shorts, even the ones that look good. That is exactly the timeframe conflict problem, resolved in advance rather than in the moment.

When the profile is Seek and Destroy, you stand down. Reduce size, cap the number of attempts, or skip the week. The framework's own guidance on profiles 11 and 12 is avoidance rather than a strategy, which is unusual and worth respecting. A template that tells you it has no edge is more trustworthy than one that claims an answer for every condition.

When the profile is unclear, that is also information. A week that does not resemble any of the twelve by Wednesday is a week where you have no structural read, and trading it is discretionary rather than systematic.

Traders who log this properly find the same pattern in their own results: a disproportionate share of their worst weeks were Seek and Destroy weeks that they traded normally. That is the single most useful thing to add to a trading journal from this framework. Tag each week with its profile, and the cost of ignoring the filter becomes visible within a quarter.

What Weekly Profiles Cannot Tell You

This framework deserves the same scrutiny as any pattern taxonomy, and it has real limitations that most write ups omit.

There is no published out of sample statistic. Every source describing these profiles, including the primary material, states the tendencies qualitatively: "most common," "typically," "probability increases." None of them publishes a tested frequency across a defined instrument set and date range. The Tuesday tendency may well be real, but you have not seen it measured, and neither have they. Treat it as an observation to verify on your own instrument, not an established base rate.

Twelve templates covering five days is close to complete coverage. With profiles for a low on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, plus consolidation variants, plus two profiles for weeks that do nothing until Friday, almost any week can be labelled after the fact. A framework that always has a name for what happened is not making a falsifiable claim. The value is in classifying early, while the week can still be traded, which is the only use that risks being wrong.

The direction is an input, not an output. No profile tells you whether the week is bullish or bearish. That comes from your higher timeframe analysis, and if that analysis is wrong the profile is worse than useless, because it will give you false confidence in a wrong direction for three days.

Instrument and regime matter. These tendencies were taught for forex majors and index futures. Crypto trades 24/7 with no weekly session structure, no NFP, and a different weekend, so the day of week logic does not transfer without testing.

The extreme is only confirmed in hindsight. "The weekly low formed Tuesday" is certain on Friday. On Tuesday afternoon it is a hypothesis, and it invalidates the moment price trades below it. Size accordingly, and define in advance what price level would prove your profile wrong.

Common Weekly Profile Mistakes

Trading the calendar instead of the array. Waiting for Tuesday and buying because it is Tuesday, with no reference to whether price reached a discount zone. This is the error the names invite and the one that makes the framework look like superstition.

Reading Monday as the week's direction. In most of the twelve profiles, Monday's move is the one that gets reversed. Treating it as the trend is the specific mistake the framework exists to prevent.

Forcing a label too early. A profile needs at least the Monday range plus a Tuesday resolution before it means anything. Naming the week on Monday afternoon is fitting a template to noise.

Ignoring the news calendar. A Wednesday FOMC changes the distribution of likely profiles more than anything on the chart does. Check it first.

Treating the profile as an entry. It is a filter and a timing expectation. You still need structure, a level, and a trigger. The profile tells you which direction's setups to take, not when to take them.

Refusing to abandon the label. If you called a Tuesday low and price closes decisively beneath it on Wednesday, the profile is void. Traders who defend the label rather than the account turn a filter into a bias, which is the opposite of its purpose.

Final Takeaway

Weekly profiles are a timing and filtering framework, not a prediction engine. They do not tell you whether the week is bullish or bearish. That has to come from your own higher timeframe read, and the profile only tells you the likely shape and schedule of the delivery once you have it.

Hold three things and you have the practical value. First, the weekly extreme forms when price reaches the higher timeframe array it was drawing toward, and in a normal week that lands on Tuesday or Wednesday, which is why Monday's move is so often the one that gets reversed. Second, once you believe the extreme is in, the rest of the week has a default direction and your daily setups get filtered against it. Third, and most valuable, a week that raids both sides by Wednesday without resolving is a Seek and Destroy week, and the correct response is to reduce size or stand aside rather than to guess at the break.

Treat every classification as a hypothesis with a defined invalidation, and verify the tendencies on your own instrument before trusting them. A framework with a name for every outcome earns its keep only when you use it early enough to be wrong.

To go deeper, read premium and discount zones for the arrays that actually set the weekly extreme, daily bias for the layer beneath this one, session liquidity across Asia, London and New York for where within a day these raids happen, the Judas swing for the mechanics of the Monday move that misleads, Power of Three for the accumulation, manipulation and distribution cycle these profiles are built from, and HRLR versus LRLR for judging the road once the weekly direction is set.