Interview noteThis page restates a public interview in new words. Dollar results, win rates, and payouts are claims made by the speaker or the host. They are not this desk's record, and they are not a result to expect.
Candace Lao says that every payout she has taken since she entered the prop business came from two ICT models, and that those payouts are in the millions. The host introduces her with a verified $2.5 million in payouts and sits with her on a $500,000 account. She scalps the Nasdaq only. She watches the S&P because, in her account, it has been leading, and she does not put the trade on the S&P. Thousands of people, the host says, already know the same concepts. The hour is her version of the filter: which sweep, which gap, which stop, and when the picture is not a trade.
She copied the models first and then changed them. The changes are the risk, the entry, and the target, matched to what she can stand to lose. She found the fit by manual backtesting. A discretionary entry, she says, has to be tested by hand, because an algorithm would not take the trades she actually takes. The test is not a single pass through ten years of data. She compares it to an athlete who cannot practice for a day and then rest for a month. The data has to be large, and it also has to stay current.
Turtle soup: a sweep, then an inverse gap, and it has to be fast
The first model is turtle soup, aimed at external liquidity. On the example, the New York morning of October 6, the 9:30 candle sweeps a relative equal high. Relative means smooth and close, not a perfect double top. She reads that shelf as a pool of stops, and the open as the print that runs them. She does not sell the sweep. A sweep and a real breakout are separated by the higher-time-frame story. If London and the pre-New York hours have already been grinding higher, she expects a retracement, and the quick poke through the high is the fake she wants, not a breakout she should chase. Before 9:30 she also wants to see sell-side liquidity built on the way up, because that is the target under the market.
The entry is an inverse fair value gap, and she will not see it on a slow chart. She runs a one-minute chart and, on a second screen, the fifteen-second and the one-second. In the example the gap is on the thirty-second. A valid gap, in the textbook version, waits for a body close. Her version is aggressive. She treats the forming gap as a candidate, and when price touches it and trades through the midpoint she is in, on a market order, inside a bracket. She will take the wick. The bracket is what makes the aggression survivable: 25 points of stop on the Nasdaq, and she is not in a hundred contracts, so the slippage of a market order is not the risk that matters. Beginners, she says, should wait.
Speed is a filter, not a preference. If the same picture takes many candles, she does not take it. The open is supposed to be violent. A slow walk into the gap means the market wants more consolidation, and she will not buy or sell a high-resistance condition when the open still has time to offer another setup.
The 25-point stop is a standard, not a level. Twenty-four or twenty-six is not the point. If an order block or another gap would force the stop wider, she treats the entry as wrong, too early or too late, and she does not stretch the stop to fit it. The bracket's take-gain is 50 points, so the minimum payoff is two to one. She will scale. If a second contract has a larger target, the first can be taken nearer one and a half to one. She will not move the stop out to an order block just because one is nearby. She came to 25 and 50 from the range she actually trades, London and New York, and from the backtest. If the Nasdaq were trading near 40,000, she says the range would be larger and the stop would have to grow with it.
The sweeps she cares about most are three. A low-resistance liquidity run: a choppy climb, not a single huge candle, that builds a pool of sell orders underneath. Relative equal highs. Session highs and session lows. A fair value gap is also a target, because she treats the gap as holding liquidity. If she is aiming at external liquidity and a large gap sits in the way as internal liquidity, she wants the trade closed at the gap. Waiting for the swing low is how the target is missed and the trade is wicked out.
The 2022 model: a shift, a first gap, and a wider stop
The second model needs a market-structure shift and a retracement into a fair value gap. It is usually not the first leg. She calls it the second leg of distribution, and the stop is larger. On the October 9 New York example she is at the desk around 9:00, not at 9:30, because the nearest liquidity pool has to be known before the open. A swing high around 9:18 that sweeps minor buy-side and drops would have been the cleaner turtle soup, and she skips it because it is still about fifteen minutes from the open. The 9:30 candle instead sweeps a swing low and retraces. The first fair value gap of the New York session is, for her, the key level of that session. On the five-minute, Asia through London has been a climb that left sell-side liquidity below, the same low-resistance run. A short from that picture would not surprise her. It is not an assurance.
Her trigger inside the gap is the midpoint, not the edge. The version she attributes to the original teaching is to short with a bullish candle and to buy with a bearish one. She wants more than the first touch of the gap, because a stop beyond the extreme is too wide for the way she is funded. Beginners should wait for the close. She does not. She will not, however, sell the moment price ticks the low of the gap.
This trade is not a 25-and-50 bracket. She is in the 2022 model, so the stop is discretionary inside a band. Around 40 points is the example. She will consider 60 or 100. She will not take a 70-point stop just to hide above an order block. She would rather use the tighter stop, know she may be tagged, and accept that, and she says beginners should not learn that part yet. The first partial is the next swing low. The rest comes off at the new-week opening gap, in a neighborhood that also holds a bullish fair value gap, a five-minute order block, and an internal liquidity pool. She uses order blocks for stops, not as her ordinary target. Internal liquidity, the big impulse that never quite reaches the external swing, is where she takes the piece off if she is not holding for the full range. A target at the far swing that price never tags is a missed exit.
Scaling on this model is two contracts at the midpoint, then a wait. If a long wick says the bearish gap is real and price is leaving, she adds on the retrace, around the second candle after that retrace. The add is late, so it risks more, and the stop trails up to the order block. The trail otherwise sits on a quarter level or the midpoint. A large gap can be cut into four. She also trails to swings. The discretion is which of those the trade has actually earned.
What the win rate will not allow
She puts her average win rate at 40 percent. Six losers in ten is the base case, and she says it out loud so a red trade is not a surprise. At that rate she will not take one and a half to one. Other people might make that payoff work. Her data says that if she keeps taking it, she does not make money. The trade has to offer at least two to one or she passes. Stops and targets are set and then managed. She does move the stop. She trails it. She does not widen it because a candle turned against her.
A session has a kill zone and a stop of its own. London's kill zone, for her, starts at 2:00 a.m. Eastern. She marks session highs and lows as the liquidity pools for the day, and she marks the one-hour fair value gaps. Asia's window, as she describes it, runs from about 8:00 p.m. Eastern to midnight. The midnight opening price is a magnet. London returns to it, and sometimes New York does too. She will not enter a long before she has seen how price behaves at that price.
Higher-time-frame direction does not license a short anywhere. The day of the live session has already fallen from the day before through Asia. The higher time frame is bearish, and price is in a deep discount. That is a reason to look for a long scalp back toward premium, not a reason to sell the low. Premium, if she is using only the Asia range, is the midpoint of that range. A sweep of minor sell-side can be a long back to midnight, or higher into the low-resistance run above. Smart-money divergence against the S&P can replace the Nasdaq sweep. If the Nasdaq takes a low and the S&P does not, and something else confirms, she will still buy. The reverse is a veto. If the S&P has already tagged the Asia high and the Nasdaq's Asia high is still far away, she calls that bearish divergence. These days, she says, the S&P leads. Once the S&P has finished the job of hitting the Asia high, she expects it to turn down and sweep minor sell-side, and she expects the Nasdaq to follow. She will not buy the Nasdaq into that.
She opens the chart without a required direction. Deciding in advance that the session must be a long, or must be a short, is how she holds the bias after the setup has disappeared. One winning trade ends her session. If the trades are losers, she has a dollar cap. On a $150,000 account the cap she names is $3,000. Hit it, and she stops until 9:30. The bracket still starts at 25 and 50. After she is in, she will tighten the stop under an order block, sometimes to about 20 points, and keep trailing as price goes her way.
Size follows the session and the quality of the entry. London starts at one contract and can scale to a second. New York starts at two and can scale two more. The first contract is the test, because an aggressive entry is a better payoff and a thinner confirmation, and she does not want the fear of missing it to become a full-size position. If that one contract stops, the idea was wrong and the damage is one contract. The add happens only after she has more confidence, so a later stop means the idea was wrong, not that the execution was. Beginners, she says, should not scale. One contract, and the micro contract if the dollar risk of the full Nasdaq is too large. She is still working on pyramiding herself.
She wants the trade assumed to be a loser before it is entered. Certainty is how the size gets too big. She will not close because a bearish candle appeared. Closing there is abandoning the idea. The people who cannot hold, she thinks, are risking more than they can afford to lose. She makes one exception for circumstance, not for the candle: a trader with a single funded account who needs the payout for bills may have a reason to take the open gain. That is their constraint, not a new rule for the model.
The live long, and why she does not take the next one
On the London session they are early for the 2:00 a.m. kill zone and late for the one she wanted. She tries a long into a one-hour fair value gap with a 25-point bracket and gets a limit instead of a market, so the fill is late. The stop has to live under the one-minute order block anyway. If that breaks, the idea is invalid. She trails it to the swing low, about 20 points, and splits the targets: about 30 points at a swing high on the first piece, about 40 on the second. Had the entry been on time, the first take-gain would have been the midnight opening price. Late, a 30-point target would have been a poor payoff, so the swing high replaces it. The second reference is the low-resistance run she had marked. She trails again, under a forty-second order block, to about 15 points.
While the long is working she does not like the climb. It is building sell-side liquidity on the way up, without the wick down into the bullish gap that would have been the clean manipulation. The S&P, which she is watching the whole time, is the part she trusts less. Price does return to the midnight opening, which is what she said that price does, and then it retraces through her entry. She lets it. A manual flatten on the bearish candle would mean she is no longer trading the idea. The stop is hit. Two contracts, a loss she puts at $656. She calls it a losing trade and not a disaster, next to a win rate she has also described in the session as 40 to 45 percent, where the two-to-one is the thing that pays for the losers.
The next long is not available just because she wants one. She wants the Asia low swept first. The London range, from 2:00 a.m. to the moment they are looking, is back-and-forth. A long inside it, after a stopped long, would be revenge. The second trade, if it comes, is the same shape as the first: a bearish push that clears minor sell-side, then displacement with speed into the gap. An inverse gap by itself is not the model. The model includes the narrative. If she cannot say what price is doing, she does nothing.
The narrative that morning is more than bullish or bearish. It is the first session after a long weekend and a U.S. bank holiday, and Monday's tape was chop rather than a normal trend day. She also will not trade an 8:30 high-impact release, the examples she gives being CPI and NFP. Time, then price, then the story. They are near the 50 percent of the range, and she does not trade the midpoint. Shorts belong in premium, longs in discount. A range trader might live in the middle. She does not. After a large bullish impulse she expects consolidation, not an immediate weak short. Her first attempt's stop, even if the fill had been perfect, would have been trailed into the same swing and the same order block as price rose. She expects she would have been stopped anyway.
She will not buy the breakout the host can see in hindsight. The host says that is what he would have tried, and that it is easy to say after the move, and that he is not the scalper in the chair. Her external-liquidity long needs discount. This is not that. Being right about the direction, all the way up through the targets she had named, still pays her nothing if the entry rule is not there. She treats a winning trade taken outside the rules as worse than the $656, because the win is what teaches her to break the rule again. One loss on a stream, she says, is enough to fill the chat with contempt. She stops for the session anyway. The level can be respected without her.