New Day Opening Gap

What is a New Day Opening Gap?

A new day opening gap (NDOG) is the span between one trading day's closing print and the next day's opening print. The concept is cleanest on CME index futures, where the day genuinely stops: the session closes at 5:00 PM New York time, halts for an hour, and reopens at 6:00 PM. The NDOG is whatever distance separates those two prints. Even when the gap is only a few ticks, ICT practice marks its high, low, and midpoint and keeps them on the chart as reference levels for the coming session.

The logic mirrors other imbalances: nothing traded between the close and the reopen, so the gap is an unauctioned span the market may later rebalance, a scaled-down cousin of the classic session opening gap and of its weekly counterpart, the new week opening gap. Reactions at recent NDOG levels are common enough to be worth charting but are not guaranteed, and small gaps in particular are often consumed within the first session and lose relevance quickly.

How traders use it

• As intraday reference levels: the gap's high, low, and midpoint (its consequent encroachment) act as decision prices — acceptance through them supports continuation, rejection at them frames fades.
• As confluence: an NDOG overlapping another array (an imbalance, an order block, a session extreme) upgrades that level; a lone, stale NDOG is weak evidence on its own.
• As an early-session magnet: when price opens away from a fresh NDOG, trading back to rebalance it is a common opening scenario, planned as a possibility rather than assumed.