PD Arrays

What are PD Arrays?

PD arrays (premium/discount arrays) are ICT's collective name for the reference points a market leaves behind as it trades: old highs and lows, order blocks, fair value gaps, liquidity voids, breakers, mitigation and rejection blocks. "Array" is used in the sense of an ordered arrangement, not a vague zone. Take the dealing range (the swing high and swing low bracketing current price) and split it at equilibrium, the 50% mark: every array then sits in either the premium or the discount half. The claim built into the term is that price is delivered from one institutional reference point to the next, so the arrays in a range read as an ordered ladder of destinations rather than a scatter of zones.

The framework matters because it makes the arrays do two jobs. Ahead of price they are draws (candidate targets ranked by proximity and importance); behind price they are entry inventory (levels to trade from when price returns to them). With a bullish higher-timeframe read, the playbook is to buy from discount arrays and aim at premium arrays, mirrored when bearish. None of it is mechanical certainty: an array is a candidate reaction point, not an obligation, and the commonly cited matrix ordering shifts across different eras of the teaching. The stable core is buy-from-discount, sell-from-premium, and treat untouched arrays as open objectives the market may come back for.

How traders use it

• To structure a dealing range: mark the bounding swing high and low, drop equilibrium at 50%, and inventory the arrays in each half. The output is a ranked map of where price is likely to react on the way up and on the way down, before any trade is considered.
• To locate entries in line with bias: with a bullish read, entries are hunted where price drops into a discount array (an unmitigated order block, an open gap), often refined with the optimal trade entry retracement; premium arrays serve the mirrored role for shorts.
• To set targets: the opposing arrays supply the draw on liquidity. The nearest untapped premium array is a first objective for a long, the range extreme a fuller one, and partials are commonly planned array-to-array rather than at arbitrary distances.
• To align timeframes: a higher-timeframe array (a daily gap or order block) defines the zone worth trading, and the lower-timeframe arrays that form inside it refine the actual entry, keeping execution and narrative on the same map.

PD arrays vs nearby concepts