Do new week opening gaps always get filled?

No. NWOGs are treated as reference zones, not fill obligations: some are rebalanced within the first sessions of the week, while others act as support or resistance repeatedly without ever filling completely. The practical use is watching how price behaves when it arrives at one, not assuming it must trade through.

How many new week opening gaps should stay on the chart?

The common ICT convention is the most recent five, each marked with its high, low, and midpoint. Older gaps are not meaningless, but the usual practice is to prune them because recent, nearby gaps dominate the read, and five weeks of levels is already a busy chart.

Why would a tiny weekend gap matter at all?

Because the reference is the untraded span, not the drama of its size. Even a few ticks between Friday's close and Sunday's open mark prices where no auction occurred, and the retained set of such spans builds a map of weekend repricings. That said, wider gaps carry more information: the midpoint read only becomes meaningful when the two halves of the gap genuinely differ.

Do NWOGs exist on crypto?

Not on native spot venues, which trade through the weekend without a halt. CME crypto futures do halt from Friday close to Sunday reopen, so genuine NWOGs exist there, and the CME-gap-fill idea became folklore in crypto for exactly that reason. Traders who map CME gap levels onto spot charts are borrowing a reference from a related but distinct market, which deserves extra skepticism.

What is the consequent encroachment of an NWOG?

The midpoint of the gap, and the standard decision price inside it. Reaction at the midpoint splits the zone's story: rejection there says the gap's far side remains unfinished business, while acceptance through it argues the whole span is being rebalanced. On wider weekend gaps the midpoint read is often more actionable than the edges, which get probed routinely.

Is there reliable evidence that price reacts at old NWOGs?

The evidence is practitioner lore plus visible examples, not audited statistics; no rigorous public study establishes reaction rates at retained weekly gaps. The concept earns chart space because the levels are cheap to maintain, unambiguous to define, and frequently coincide with other structure. Trade them as locations with defined invalidation, and let confluence and live reaction, not the label, size your conviction.

Concept

New Week Opening Gap

New Week Opening Gap is a Smart Money Concepts / ICT concept. The Library holds 1 implementation, a working definition you can pull into Quant.

NWOG

Top New Week Opening Gap indicator

The top custom implementation, built on the original standard New Week Opening Gap formula.

1 total

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ICT NWOG/NDOG & EHPDA

Indicator

What is a New Week Opening Gap?

A new week opening gap (NWOG) is the span between Friday's closing price and the new week's opening price: for markets that trade essentially around the clock during the week, like index futures and forex, the end of Friday's session against the Sunday-evening reopen. Whatever repricing happened over the weekend happened without trading in that market, so ICT treats the span, however small, as untraded territory: a standing reference zone in the opening gap family rather than a one-time event to be filled and forgotten.

The working convention in ICT teaching is to keep several recent NWOGs on the chart (commonly the last five) because price is held to react at them long after the week they printed. Each gap's high, low, and midpoint are marked. Treat the 'price returns to these' claim as a tendency to plan around, not a rule: some gaps are revisited within hours, some weeks later, and some not at all.

The weekend is the longest scheduled information blackout in these markets: on CME index futures, no trading from Friday 5:00 PM New York until Sunday 6:00 PM, while news, geopolitics and sentiment keep moving. The NWOG is the printed record of that silent repricing. Retained five deep, the gaps form a lattice of zones above and below price, and derived tooling extends the idea further: LuxAlgo's ICT NWOG/NDOG & EHPDA study computes event-horizon levels between neighboring retained gaps, treating even the space between them as structured reference territory rather than empty chart.

In live use the gaps interact with the liquidity narrative around them. A recognizable weekly sequence is a raid on resting session liquidity, a sweep of an old high or low, followed by rotation back into a retained NWOG, the sweep supplying fuel and the gap supplying destination. Overlaps carry extra weight: where an NWOG coincides with a fair value gap or an order block, the zone is read as stronger than any single reference, which is standard confluence logic applied to the weekly map.

How to identify a new week opening gap

One gap prints per week, so the process is calm: mark it precisely, retain a fixed number, and let the overlaps tell you where the important zones sit.

1Work in New York time and locate the week boundary: Friday's closing print and the Sunday-evening reopening print on futures, or Monday's open where that is the venue's first trade.
2Box the span between the two prints, in both directions: gap-up and gap-down weeks are marked identically.
3Add the working levels: gap high, gap low, and the midpoint, its consequent encroachment.
4Retain the most recent five gaps, dating each; prune older ones unless price is actively trading around them.
5Note where retained gaps overlap each other or other arrays; those composite zones are the references that earn attention first.

How traders use it

As resting support and resistance: when price trades into a recent NWOG, the reaction at its edges and at its midpoint (its consequent encroachment) is watched for rejection or acceptance.
For weekly bias framing: opening and holding above a fresh NWOG reads supportive; acceptance back inside or below it argues the weekend repricing is being unwound.
In clusters: where several retained NWOGs overlap, the shared zone is treated as a stronger draw than any single gap, and the daily counterpart, the new day opening gap, is stacked into the same picture.
As sweep-then-rebalance context: after a liquidity sweep of a prior week's extreme, a retained NWOG is a natural candidate for where the reversal rotation is headed.
As a weekly planning ritual: the Sunday reopen adds one gap, retires the oldest, and re-draws the map before the week's killzones begin, so the reference lattice is fixed before execution windows open.

NWOG vs related gap concepts

New Day Opening Gap: Identical construction, different cadence and lifespan: NDOGs print daily across a one-hour halt and fade within a session or two, while NWOGs print weekly across the weekend and are retained five deep for weeks. The weekly gap encodes far more accumulated repricing per print.

Opening Gap: The classic opening gap is an equity regular-session event with a statistics-driven playbook, gap-and-go versus gap-fill. The NWOG is treated less as a one-shot bet and more as a durable reference zone: marked, retained, and consulted whenever price returns, filled or not.

Fair Value Gap: An FVG is a three-candle imbalance that can appear dozens of times a week anywhere on the chart; the NWOG appears exactly once, at a scheduled halt. Scarcity and scheduling make the weekly gap a calendar-anchored reference, while FVGs are structure-anchored and far more numerous.

Concept family

Smart Money Concepts / ICT

54 concepts mapped · 54 in the Library