The ICT Silver Bullet is one of the most popular ICT entry models because it compresses the entire framework — liquidity sweep, market structure shift, fair value gap entry — into a single, tightly defined one-hour window each session. Rather than watching charts all day, a Silver Bullet trader focuses entirely on three specific windows in New York time and looks for one clean setup within each.
The three Silver Bullet windows
There are three Silver Bullet windows, each one hour long, in New York time: 3:00–4:00am (London Silver Bullet), 10:00–11:00am (NY AM Silver Bullet), and 2:00–3:00pm (NY PM Silver Bullet). The NY AM window is by far the most heavily traded, since it falls inside the New York AM killzone — the highest-volume session of the day for most forex pairs, gold, and US indices.
The Silver Bullet isn’t a different set of concepts — it’s the same liquidity sweep → structure shift → FVG entry sequence used everywhere else in ICT, just confined to a specific, repeatable one-hour window. That constraint is the entire value of the model: it forces patience and removes the temptation to trade outside a defined, high-probability period.
The Silver Bullet entry sequence
Inside the window: (1) identify a liquidity pool that’s likely to be swept — often the most recent swing high/low or the session’s opening range, (2) wait for price to sweep it, (3) confirm a market structure shift with displacement, (4) locate the fair value gap that formed as part of that displacement move, and (5) enter on the retracement into the FVG, with a stop beyond the sweep’s extreme and a target at the next liquidity pool.
Why the timing matters
The specific window isn’t arbitrary — it corresponds to periods when institutional order flow is heaviest and most directional, making genuine displacement moves more likely and more reliable than during quieter, choppier hours. A setup that looks identical outside these windows is generally considered lower-probability simply because the underlying order flow driving it is thinner.
| Window | New York time | Best for |
|---|
| London Silver Bullet | 3:00 – 4:00 AM | GBP and EUR pairs during the London session |
| NY AM Silver Bullet | 10:00 – 11:00 AM | Most liquid window — forex majors, gold, NAS100/US indices |
| NY PM Silver Bullet | 2:00 – 3:00 PM | Afternoon continuation or reversal setups before the close |
Common mistakes
Forcing a trade because the window is ending. The one-hour constraint is meant to filter out low-quality setups, not create pressure to trade regardless of quality. If nothing valid has formed by the end of the hour, the correct decision is no trade.
Skipping the higher-timeframe bias check. A Silver Bullet setup taken against the daily or weekly trend is a lower-probability counter-trend trade, even if the local sweep/MSS/FVG sequence looks textbook on the lower timeframe.
Trading all three windows every single day regardless of context. Many experienced ICT traders focus primarily on the NY AM window and treat London/NY PM as secondary, since NY AM consistently produces the cleanest, most liquid setups for most instruments.
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