The ICT 2022 Model: Sweep, Shift, Gap, Measured on SPY

Michael Whitman · Trading since 2017, full-time since 2020 · Published 2026-09-26

The ICT 2022 model is a trade setup built from four steps that have to happen in order: price sweeps an obvious high or low, reverses hard enough to break the most recent swing the other way, leaves a fair value gap in that reversal, and then pulls back into the gap. The pullback is the entry.

AlgoKings’ guide to the model, read on 26 September 2026, attributes it to the free mentorship Michael J. Huddleston, the Inner Circle Trader, ran on YouTube in 2022, and summarizes it as an intraday setup: “wait for a liquidity sweep, then a market structure shift with displacement, then enter on the fair value gap it leaves behind, inside the New York and London killzone hours.”

This page does not give ICT’s official definition. ICT’s own videos were not reviewed for it. The steps below follow that secondary guide, and the exact rules used to count setups on SPY are this site’s own, written for daily bars. Neither should be read as the model’s official specification.

How it works

The guide lists more than four steps: a higher-timeframe bias first, marked liquidity levels, a killzone, and a premium or discount check before entry. The core it describes is the chain below.

Step one, the sweep. Price trades through an obvious level where stop orders are likely to rest, such as the low of the previous day or a clear swing low. The liquidity sweep page covers how that looks and why the close back inside matters.

Step two, the shift. Price then turns and breaks the most recent swing in the opposite direction. As the guide puts it, a bullish setup has to break above the latest lower high. That break is the market structure shift, and the model wants it made with displacement: wide candles moving one way, not a slow grind.

Step three, the gap. The displacement usually leaves a fair value gap, a three-candle pattern where the first candle’s high sits below the third candle’s low. The model uses that gap as the place to enter.

Step four, the return. Price pulls back into the gap. The entry goes there, the stop sits beyond the swept high or low, and the target is the liquidity on the other side, usually a prior high for a long.

The bearish version mirrors it. A sweep of a high, a break of the last higher low, a gap left on the way down, and a rally back into the gap.

Why the order matters

Each step is a filter on the one before. A sweep on its own happens constantly; a shift proves that the sweep was followed by a real reversal rather than more of the same move; the gap marks where the reversal was fastest; and the return gives a defined place to enter with a defined place to be wrong.

Drop a step and it becomes a different idea. A sweep followed by an immediate entry is closer to a plain fade of the breakout. A gap entry with no sweep before it is just a continuation trade. The model is the sequence, which is also why it is so easy to see after the fact and so hard to fix in advance.

A worked example

SPY, November and December 2025, daily bars, bullish side.

• Sweep, 21 November. The lowest low of the previous 20 sessions was $651.89, set on 20 November. On 21 November SPY traded down to $650.85, $1.04 below it, then closed at $659.03, back above the old low.
• Shift, 26 November. The highest high of the five sessions before the sweep was $675.66. SPY closed at $675.02 on 25 November, just short, then at $679.68 on 26 November, above it. No session in between traded below $650.85.
• Gap. The candle before the shift day, 25 November, had a high of $676.21. The candle after it, 28 November, had a low of $680.50. The gap runs from $676.21 to $680.50.
• Return, 1 December. SPY traded down to $678.74, inside the gap, and closed at $680.27.

What followed. Ten sessions later, on 15 December, SPY closed at $680.73, up 0.07% ($680.73 / $680.27 - 1). In those ten sessions it never went back below the $650.85 sweep low, and it never reached $689.70, the highest high of the 20 sessions before the sweep. The high was $689.25 on 11 December.

A textbook sequence, every step in order, and a result of almost nothing. The next section shows how typical that was.

The original data

This site’s own measuring rules. The guide gives no session counts, so every number below is a choice made for this test, not part of the model as taught. SPY daily bars from 29 January 1993 to 25 September 2026. A bullish sweep day has a low strictly below the lowest low of the 20 sessions before it. The shift is the first session within the next 10 that closes above the highest high of the 5 sessions before the sweep, as long as nothing trades below the sweep low first. The gap exists when the low of the session after the shift is above the high of the session before it. The return is the first session within the 10 after that which trades down to the top of the gap, again before any new low. Bearish setups mirror every step. Each sweep and the furthest step it reached is in the sweep file.

How often each step happened. There were 743 bullish sweeps. 102 of them, 13.7%, shifted structure within 10 sessions. 73 of those left a gap, and 49 saw price return to it: 6.6% of the sweeps, about 1.5 complete setups a year. On the bearish side, 1,745 sweeps of a 20-session high produced 162 shifts, 101 gaps and 87 returns, 5.0% of the sweeps.

What happened after the return. For the 48 bullish setups with ten full sessions after the return, SPY closed higher 10 sessions later in 26 cases, 54.2%. Across all 8,442 days with a 10-session window, it closed higher 60.6% of the time. A two-sided binomial test puts that difference well within chance (p = 0.38). The median 10-session change after a bullish return was +0.28%.

Bearish setups did no better. SPY closed lower 10 sessions after 40 of 87, 46.0%, against 39.2% of all days (p = 0.23). Both results are small samples, and neither side shows a measurable edge on daily bars.

Which level came first. Within ten sessions of a bullish return, price traded above the prior 20-session high before the sweep low in 19 cases, below the sweep low first in 9, and reached neither in 20. For bearish setups the sweep high was taken first in 35 cases, the prior 20-session low first in 26, and neither in 26. Every completed setup is listed in the setup file. The most recent bullish return came on 23 September 2026, too recent to score.

Search interest is modest. In the 24,971-video study behind this site, 5 titles name the 2022 model or the 2022 mentorship, from 5 channels, at a median of 13,742 views. Titles containing “ICT” number 681, at a median of 13,695.

Daily bars are not the model as taught

The timing layer is missing. The model is taught on intraday charts inside specific session windows, and this test uses one bar per day. It checks whether the sweep-shift-gap-return logic carries information on its own; it cannot say anything about the killzone timing or the lower timeframes.

The definitions are this site’s choices. A 20-session sweep, a 5-session swing and a 10-session window are one reasonable reading of each step, not ICT’s rules. Other readings produce other counts, and no other settings are reported here. The test also leaves out the higher-timeframe bias and the premium and discount check the guide describes.

When it fails

The sweep keeps going

3 October 2023 is the clean failure. SPY swept its 20-session low of $422.29 with a low of $420.18. It shifted on 9 October with a close of $432.29, above the $431.85 swing high, left a gap between $431.13 and $432.53, and returned to it on 12 October, closing at $433.66. Then it rolled over: on 23 October it traded down to $417.80, through the sweep low, and ten sessions after the return it closed at $412.55, down 4.87%.

Every step was in place. The sequence does not protect against a market that simply resumes falling.

The setup is drawn after the move

Hindsight makes every step look obvious. On a finished chart it is easy to pick the swing that broke and the gap that held. The honest test is to name the swing and the gap before price returns, as the rule above does.

Treating the target as the likely outcome

Opposite liquidity was reached first in fewer than half. For bullish setups the prior high came first in 19 of 48. A plan that assumes the target is where price is headed is assuming something this record does not show.

Ignoring how rare it is

About one and a half bullish setups a year on SPY daily. A trader who needs this setup to trade will either wait a long time or start loosening the rules until something qualifies, and at that point it is no longer the same test.

Related

ICT is the wider framework this model comes from, and that page separates its original ideas from the renamed ones.

Each step has its own page: the liquidity sweep, the market structure shift, displacement and the fair value gap. Read them in that order and the model is simply those four ideas in a row.

The silver bullet is a narrower ICT setup that uses an ordinary imbalance entry inside a fixed one-hour window.

This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.