Market Structure (ICT)
Dealing Ranges
The range between the most recent unbroken swing high and swing low is the container everything else, premium, discount, and OTE zones, gets measured inside. Ranges nest: a major range usually contains smaller minor ones.
Draw the box, pass the containment test
Pick a zoom level, Major or Minor, then click two candles on the chart, one for the swing high, one for the swing low. The tool checks whether every candle between them actually stays inside that box: no candle exceeding your chosen top, none undercutting your chosen bottom. Pass both Major and Minor and the minor box gets drawn nested inside the major one, the fractal idea made literal.
Major zoom selected. Click a swing high candle, then a swing low candle.
How it works
- A dealing range is defined by two points, a swing high and a swing low. Between those two candles, in time, no candle can print a higher high than the chosen top or a lower low than the chosen bottom. If one does, the range is broken and the box you drew is not valid.
- "Unbroken" is checked candle by candle, not by eye. A box that looks close on a chart can still fail if a single wick pokes past the edge you picked. This tool checks every candle between your two clicks against the exact high and low you selected.
- Dealing ranges nest. A major range spans a bigger, more significant swing, while a minor range is a smaller unbroken swing that sits fully inside it, both in time and in price. Once both are valid, this page draws the minor box inside the major one so the nesting is visible directly.
- The range itself is a container, not a trade signal. Ideas like premium and discount, or an optimal trade entry zone, only make sense once a dealing range has already been defined, they are measurements taken inside the box, not part of drawing the box itself.
- Which swing counts as "the" dealing range is a judgment call. Multiple valid unbroken ranges can exist on the same chart at once, at different sizes. The major/minor toggle here is a simplification, real charts often have more than two useful nesting levels.
Where this breaks
Range validity says nothing about which range actually matters
Plenty of pairs of candles on a real chart will pass this exact containment test and still be a range nobody trading that instrument is paying attention to. The mechanical check here only confirms that a box is geometrically unbroken, it has no way to know whether that particular swing high and low are significant to other participants, sit near a prior day's level, or are two quiet candles that happened not to get exceeded. A price-only chart can measure size and structure, how wide the range is and whether it held, but it cannot see real volume or which participants were actually defending those edges, which on a live chart is a large part of why some ranges matter and most don't.