Indicator Development · · 6 min read

DOL Map: Building a Daily & Weekly Draw on Liquidity Plan

How the Vaderdan DOL Map turns last week's and yesterday's candles into a daily and weekly plan: the draw, the path to it and the level that cancels it.

Every session I used to start the same way: pull up the weekly candle, then the daily, and ask three questions before I looked at a single entry. Where is price drawn to? How is it likely to get there? And what would tell me I'm wrong? The DOL Map is those three questions, answered on the chart before the session opens.

It takes last week's candle and yesterday's candle and turns them into a plan for the day and the week: the draw on liquidity, the likely path to it, and the level that cancels the idea. This post covers how it's put together and why each piece is there.

Why a second "draw" tool?

When I wrote up the Draw Engine, I called it the street map: which order block price is drawn to on each timeframe, and what inducement sits in front of it. That's detailed, block-level information.

The DOL Map works one level higher. It doesn't care about every order block. It cares about the range: last week's high and low, yesterday's high and low, and what's sitting inside them. One tool is the plan for the day and the week. The other is the street-by-street route. I wanted both, because a trader who only has the street map can still drive confidently in the wrong direction.

The DOL Map combines Candle Range Theory with ICT/SMC range liquidity, the Power of Three and Wyckoff. If any of those are new to you, the Wyckoff and CRT hub and what Candle Range Theory is are the places to start.

The core rule: ERL vs IRL

Everything in the DOL Map is built on one split. Every level is either:

  • External range liquidity (ERL) — the highs and lows that frame the range, or
  • Internal range liquidity (IRL) — fair value gaps, the 50% of the range, and the 00:00 open.

Then the logic is simple, and it's the same logic I apply by hand:

  1. External swept against the bias and rejected → the draw goes internal first, then to the external on the other side.
  2. Internal reached and held → the draw goes external.
  3. External taken → expect a retrace back to internal.

Price moves between those two kinds of liquidity. It runs a range extreme, it rebalances inside, it runs the next extreme. Once you see the market that way, half the "random" moves stop looking random.

The targets follow CRT exactly: TP1 is the 50% of the range candle, TP2 is its far side. I didn't want a new target method in the DOL Map. The whole suite reads the chart through the same CRT lens, so the map's targets are the same targets the CRT Radar would give you.

Reading the week and the day

Each closed candle is read against the one before it:

  • a close beyond the prior high or low reads as continuation,
  • a sweep that closes back inside reads as a reversal.

That's Candle Range Theory in one line. The draw is then the other side of the range — PDH/PDL for the day, PWH/PWL for the week.

The piece I'm most attached to is how the day and the week talk to each other. If the daily draw gets swept before New York and rejected against the weekly draw, the map treats that day as the week's Judas swing — the fake move that sets up the real one. It's exactly the kind of thing that's easy to miss when you're only looking at one timeframe.

Day vs week

A daily draw that points the same way as the weekly draw is a cleaner story. A daily sweep that runs against the weekly draw and fails is often the manipulation leg of the week, not the start of a new trend.

Grading the odds instead of guessing them

A plan is only useful if you know how much to trust it on a given day. So the DOL Map grades the odds using six conditions, each ticked in the tooltip:

  1. daily and weekly aligned,
  2. yesterday was a CRT,
  3. manipulation from discount or premium,
  4. a key level,
  5. a killzone,
  6. a sign of strength.

I chose a checklist over a single mystery score on purpose. If a plan has three ticks out of six, I want to see which three. "Daily and weekly aligned plus yesterday was a CRT" is a different day from "killzone plus key level" — even if the count is the same.

The path, drawn on the chart

The part that took the most thought was the path. Dashed arrows link price through each step to the draw, so you can see the expected sequence — for example a sweep of an external level, a rebalance at internal, then the run to the other side.

Alongside the arrows sits a plan panel with five rows — DOL, W, D, NOW and ODDS — showing the daily and weekly profiles, the market maker model stage, the ADR used, and the plan's hit rate on your chart.

That hit rate needs an honest note: it reflects only that chart's own history. It's there so you can see how the map has behaved on the symbol and timeframe you're looking at. It is not a win rate, it's not a promise, and it says nothing about the next trade.

Alerts and the 18:00 bias post

The DOL Map alerts on each stage of the plan, so you don't need to watch the chart to know when price has moved from one step to the next. There's also an optional daily bias post to Discord at the 18:00 New York open — the start of the trading day — so the plan for the new day lands where you already are.

The timing sits in New York time throughout. If you want the deeper reasoning behind why the day starts at 18:00 and how sessions fit together, that lives in the Time Theory hub.

Where it fits with the CRT Radar

The DOL Map shares the Radar's CRT reading: yesterday read as a CRT, PDH/PDL draws, and key levels. The way I use them together:

  • Before the session, the DOL Map tells me the draw for the day and the week, and the level that cancels the idea.
  • During the session, the CRT Radar tells me whether there's a valid setup — the range, the sweep, the turtle soup and the entry.
  • If the Radar's setup points toward the mapped draw, that's context I want. If it points against it, I need a very good reason, and usually I don't have one.

That last point connects to something I wrote about recently: six signs a CRT setup is invalid. A setup fighting the draw isn't automatically dead, but it's one of the first things I check before I commit.

What it is not

The DOL Map is a plan, not a prediction. The mapped path and the odds are a framework for reading the day — they aren't a buy or sell signal, and price can ignore the plan entirely. Some days the map is clean and price walks the path. Plenty of days it doesn't, and the invalidation level is the most useful thing on the chart.

It's built for YM, NQ, ES, gold and the major forex pairs in New York time, and it reads best on the 15-minute to 1-hour charts.

Get the map

The DOL Map is one of the five companion indicators in the CRT Suite, alongside the Draw Engine, Quarterly Cycles, Highs and Lows and the Engulfing Bar Close. You can watch the demo and read the full feature list on the CRT Radar page. The rules underneath it — ranges, sweeps, turtle soup and targets — are written out in the CRT Handbook.

Rule the candle, rule the trade. Know where price is drawn before the session opens, and you'll stop chasing it after.