PO3 — Power of Three

Accumulation → Manipulation → Distribution. The three-phase day structure that frames most of the ICT models.

The three phases

A trading day, under the PO3 lens, has three phases:

1. Accumulation — price grinds sideways inside a range. Smart money builds position. Retail sees “consolidation.”
2. Manipulation — price spikes through one side of the accumulation range, triggering stops and pulling retail in the wrong direction. This is the fake-out phase.
3. Distribution — price reverses and travels toward the opposite side of the range. This is where the actual move happens.

The pattern is fractal. A session can be PO3 inside a week that’s PO3 inside a month. For the kind of intraday work on this site, we care about a specific daily instance.

The daily instance we use

For NQ / MNQ on the ET clock:

• Accumulation: Asia session, roughly 20:00–00:00 ET. Builds a tight range — the “Asia range.”
• Manipulation: London session, 02:00–05:00 ET. Sweeps one side of the Asia range. This is the stop run.
• Distribution: NY session, 09:30 onward. Trades toward the other side of the Asia/London range.

This maps cleanly onto how several of our models work:

• AMD — touches the opposite extreme at ~65% within 120 min of RTH open.
• LON BOTH BULL — catches the specific case where London sweeps low first, then high (a bull takeover).
• LON MOMENTUM BULL — early-London momentum when the sweep is fresh and tight.

Where the thesis bends

PO3 is descriptive, not prescriptive. Two ways it goes wrong:

Timing confusion — the AMD Early Pull trap

You can know the reversal is coming without knowing when. We tried entering in the reversal direction at the London sweep — the thesis said that’s exactly when distribution begins. Result: −$47,219 in simulated P&L, 0 / 6 profitable years. The reversal is real, but it waits for NY. Entering too early means fighting the manipulation phase.

Full writeup: AMD Early Pull walk-away.

Both-sides sweeps — the chop-day kill

The PO3 structure assumes the manipulation phase takes out one side of accumulation. When London sweeps both Asia extremes (17% of sessions), the pattern breaks — the day has no clean manipulation direction and becomes chop. We handle this with a kill-switch: lon_both_swept=True applies a −10 prob penalty to all London-window directional signals.

How to use it in practice

PO3 is a lens for interpreting price action, not a signal in itself. On this site it lives inside the concrete models above — each one takes a specific part of the PO3 structure and turns it into a trigger + target + probability + kill-switch.

Think of PO3 as the frame. The models on /contracts/nq/models/ are what you actually trade.

Related concepts

• AMD — a specific PO3 instance with a symbol (A-M-D phases)
• Liquidity raid — the manipulation phase at higher resolution
• Killzones — the time windows where each phase typically happens