No claims, no guarantees. These are my personal study notes, written for education. I am not claiming that this model works, that it is profitable or that it will work for you. Nothing here is financial advice, a signal or a recommendation to trade. Trading carries a substantial risk of loss, and most retail traders lose money. See the full disclaimer.
What is the ICT Power of Three?
Power of Three (PO3), also written AMD, is a way to describe a period of time in three acts: accumulation, manipulation and distribution. I think of it as the simplest story behind many ICT models, and it appears in my ICT research notes as one of the four time-based ones.
How does PO3 look on a daily candle?
- Accumulation: a quiet range around the open while orders build up.
- Manipulation: a move against the eventual direction that sweeps one side of the range.
- Distribution: the expansion toward the real direction, usually the candle’s close.
In the descriptions I read, a sweep of a high before a move down suggests a bearish PO3, and a sweep of a low before a move up suggests a bullish one. The problem is obvious: the direction is only known after the sweep. That is why I would write my bias before the session.
How does it map to Asia, London and New York?
A common approach treats the Asian session as accumulation, London as manipulation and New York as distribution. One indicator I looked at uses fixed clock windows (19:00–01:00, 01:00–07:00, 07:00–13:00 New York time), but other sources shift them.
The manipulation phase is what the Judas Swing describes. The same three acts, stretched into a five-stage cycle, are the Market Maker models.
Is there a weekly version?
Some educators apply the same idea to a week, anchored on the weekly open. I read claims that in a bullish week the low often forms around Tuesday or Wednesday, but I have not verified them, so I keep them as questions for my journal rather than facts.
How would I use it without fooling myself?
- Decide the bias first from higher-timeframe structure (see market structure).
- Mark the range that counts as accumulation and write down its high and low.
- Wait for a sweep in the direction opposite to my bias, not in the same direction.
- Use an entry model such as a fair value gap entry, with the stop beyond the manipulation extreme.
- Log it, including days where the sweep happened in my bias direction (which means the model did not apply).
What does the evidence say?
I found one 2023 OSF preprint by a student researcher testing PO3 on 14 forex pairs over 21 years, with encouraging conclusions. It is not peer-reviewed and I could not reproduce it, so I do not rely on it. The wider caution: retail results are poor in general. SEBI’s study of individual F&O traders found about 93% had net losses over FY22–FY24.
What are the main risks?
- Labelling after the fact: any day can be described as AMD once you know how it ended.
- Window mining: shifting the session boundaries until the pattern fits.
- Trend days: when price trends from the open there is no manipulation phase, and a PO3 trade would be wrong.
Reminder: I make no claim or guarantee of profit or success from anything described here. Examples are invented or illustrative and real results will differ. If you choose to trade, you are responsible for your own decisions and risk.
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