ICT Rejection Block: What It Is and How to Trade It

ICT rejection block explained: how wicks at a swing high or low form one, how it differs from an order block, entries, stops and mistakes.

LSG Club · 25 October 2026 · 14 min read

A rejection block is the zone between the candle bodies and the long wicks at a swing high or swing low: the part of the range where price was pushed in and immediately rejected. In ICT terms, a bearish rejection block runs from the highest candle body at a swing high up to the top of the wicks, and a bullish rejection block runs from the lowest candle body at a swing low down to the bottom of the wicks. This guide from LSG Club’s journal for rejection block trades explains how to mark one, how it differs from an order block, a breaker and a mitigation block, and how to plan the entry, stop and target with a worked example.

The concept comes from the Inner Circle Trader (ICT) curriculum taught by Michael J. Huddleston. The bodies show where the market accepted price; the wicks show where it refused. On a later return to the swing, traders enter at the body level and place the stop beyond the wicks.

What is an ICT rejection block?

Every swing has bodies, where candles opened and closed, and wicks, which only show that price visited a level. If the wicks at a swing are long compared with the bodies, the market traded beyond the bodies but could not close there. That failed auction is the rejection.

ICT uses the rejection block as one of the PD arrays: zones where price is expected to react when it returns. A bearish rejection block belongs to the premium side of a range and is used for sells; a bullish rejection block belongs to the discount side and is used for buys. Like every PD array, it is a location, not a signal on its own.

The three levels of a rejection block

Body level — for a bearish block, the highest open or close among the candles that form the swing high; for a bullish block, the lowest open or close among the candles at the swing low. This is the entry line.
Wick extreme — the highest high (bearish) or the lowest low (bullish) of the swing. The stop goes beyond it.
Mean threshold — the 50% point between the body level and the wick extreme. Some traders use it as a deeper entry or as the line that should not be closed through.

Bullish vs bearish rejection block

Bearish rejection block

It forms at a swing high. Price runs above the prior high, often taking the buy stops resting there, but the candles close well below their highs. Mark the highest body of the candles at the top (an up candle’s close or a down candle’s open) and the highest wick. When price later rallies back into that area, the expectation is that it trades into the wicks, fails again and drops through the body level.

Bullish rejection block

It forms at a swing low. Price drives below the prior low, often sweeping the sell stops, but the candles close well above their lows. Mark the lowest body (a down candle’s close or an up candle’s open) and the lowest wick. On a return to the low, buyers look for price to trade into the lower wicks and hold above the wick extreme.

How to identify a rejection block step by step

Most bad rejection block trades come from marking random wicks. Use a fixed procedure.

Start on a higher timeframe — the 4-hour or daily chart — and find a clear swing high or swing low that stands out from the surrounding price action.
Check the wicks. They should be long compared with the bodies of the same candles. A swing made of full-bodied candles with tiny wicks is not a rejection block.
Look for liquidity on the other side. The best rejection blocks form when the wicks ran through an obvious prior high or low, so the move was a liquidity sweep rather than a random spike.
Mark the body level: the highest open or close at a swing high, the lowest open or close at a swing low. If two or three candles form the swing, use the most extreme body among them.
Mark the wick extreme and, if you use it, the 50% mean threshold between the two lines.
Confirm that price left the zone with intent. After a bearish rejection block you want a lower-timeframe market structure shift or at least a strong move away; after a bullish one, the same upward.
Wait for the return. The zone is a plan for a future retracement, not a reason to chase the move that created it.

Rejection block vs order block, breaker and mitigation block

The rejection block is often confused with its neighbours in the PD array list. Each one is built from a different part of the chart.

Order block — the last opposite-colored candle before a displacement, marked from its high to its low (often with the body as the key part). It is about the candle that launched a move. See the order block trading strategy guide for the full rules.
Rejection block — the wicks of the swing itself, from the bodies’ extreme to the wick extreme. It is about where price was refused, not about which candle started the move.
Breaker block — an order block that failed after a sweep of the prior high or low, and that now acts from the other side. The ICT breaker block guide covers how it forms.
Mitigation block — also a failed order block, but formed without a sweep: the second swing failed to make a new extreme before structure broke.

A practical way to separate them: an order block and a rejection block can come from the same swing. At a swing high, the last up candle before the drop is the bearish order block, while the zone above the bodies, into the wicks, is the rejection block. The order block suggests where to sell inside the candle range; the rejection block suggests selling at the body level with a tighter stop above the wicks. Breakers and mitigation blocks appear only later, after an order block has been broken.

Rejection blocks also pair well with gaps. If the move away from the swing left a fair value gap just below a bearish rejection block (or just above a bullish one), the gap is often filled first and the rejection block acts as the last line before the stop.

How to trade a rejection block: entry, stop and target

Entry at the body level

The standard entry is a limit order at the body level. For a bearish rejection block, price has to rally back up to the highest body of the swing; the sell order sits there. For a bullish one, a buy limit sits at the lowest body. Others wait for price to trade into the wicks and close back through the body level on a lower timeframe: a worse price, but fewer fills on returns that keep going.

A deeper variant uses the mean threshold of the wicks as the entry. It improves the reward-to-risk ratio but fills less often. Pick one version and record it on every trade.

Stop beyond the wick

The stop goes a few pips beyond the wick extreme: above the highest wick for a sell, below the lowest wick for a buy. Add room for the spread. If price closes beyond the wick extreme, the rejection has failed. Some traders also treat a candle body closing beyond the mean threshold as an early exit signal.

Targets

First target — the most recent opposite swing, the low that formed after a bearish rejection block or the high after a bullish one.
Second target — the next pool of liquidity in the direction of the trade, such as equal lows, the previous day’s low or an old weekly low.
Context check — the target should sit on the other side of the dealing range. A sell from a bearish rejection block in the premium half of the range aimed at the discount half makes more sense than a sell already sitting at the range low.

Size the position from the stop distance, not from the account balance alone. The position size calculator turns the entry, stop and risk percentage into lots, and the risk-reward calculator shows whether the targets justify the stop.

Worked example: a bearish rejection block on EURUSD

The numbers below are an illustration of the method, not a record of a real trade.

On the 1-hour chart, EURUSD rallies into the London session and runs above the previous day’s high at 1.0875. Two candles form the swing high. Candle A opens at 1.0842, closes at 1.0861 and wicks up to 1.0888. Candle B opens at 1.0860, closes at 1.0848 and wicks up to 1.0885. The highest body among them is candle A’s close at 1.0861, and the highest wick is 1.0888.

Body level (entry): 1.0861.
Wick extreme: 1.0888. The rejection block is 27 pips tall.
Mean threshold: (1.0861 + 1.0888) ÷ 2 = 1.08745.
Stop: 1.0893, five pips above the wick extreme to allow for spread.

Price then drops to 1.0790 and closes below the swing low at 1.0812 that had launched the rally, which is the market structure shift that confirms the rejection. The low at 1.0790 is now the first target, and an older daily low at 1.0745 is the second.

During the New York session, price retraces back up, trades through 1.0861 into the wicks and reaches 1.0870, below the mean threshold. The sell limit at 1.0861 is filled. Risk is 1.0893 − 1.0861 = 32 pips. The first target is 1.0861 − 1.0790 = 71 pips away, or 71 ÷ 32 ≈ 2.2R. The second target is 1.0861 − 1.0745 = 116 pips away, or about 3.6R.

For position size, take a $10,000 account risking 1% per trade, so $100. On EURUSD one standard lot is worth about $10 per pip, so the size is $100 ÷ (32 pips × $10) = 0.3125 lots, rounded down to 0.31 lots. The real risk is then 0.31 × 32 × $10 = $99.20. If the first target is hit and half the position is closed, that half earns 0.155 × 71 × $10 ≈ $110; the stop on the rest can be moved to entry.

Invalidation: an hourly close above 1.0888, the wick extreme, would have ended the idea, filled or not.

The bullish mirror

On a bullish rejection block the same steps run upside down: mark the lowest body of the swing low as the buy level, the lowest wick as the extreme, the stop a few pips below it, and the next high or buy-side liquidity as the target. The arithmetic of risk, R multiple and lot size is identical.

When rejection blocks work best

None of these is mandatory, but each one removes a reason for the zone to fail.

Higher-timeframe origin — blocks drawn on the 4-hour or daily chart tend to hold better than blocks on the 5-minute chart, which can be just noise.
A sweep in the wicks — the wicks ran through a clear prior high or low, so the stops above or below were taken before the rejection.
Alignment with bias — a bearish block in a market with a bearish daily bias, a bullish block in a bullish one.
Timing — the return to the block happens during an active session window rather than in the quiet hours. The forex kill zone guide and the kill zone time converter help you see when those windows fall in your time zone.
Clear room to the target — no large opposing zone sits halfway between the entry and the first target.

Common rejection block mistakes

Marking every wick — a single long wick on a small timeframe in the middle of a range is not a rejection block. It needs a real swing high or low.
Using the wrong body — at a swing high the level is the highest open or close of the swing candles, not the close of the last candle or the low of the range.
Stop inside the wicks — placing the stop at the mean threshold or just above the body level means a normal retest into the wicks takes you out before the idea is tested.
Ignoring the trend — selling a bearish rejection block in a strong uptrend with no structure shift is fading momentum, and the block is likely to be run.
Chasing the first move — the rejection block is used on the return. Selling the drop that created it usually means entering at the worst price.
Changing the rules mid-trade — moving the stop beyond the wick “just this once”, or switching from the body level to the mean threshold after the fact, makes your results impossible to evaluate.

Trading involves risk, and no zone or pattern removes it. Practise marking and trading rejection blocks on a demo account first, and only move to real money when your own records show the method works for you.

Rejection block checklist

Is there a clear swing high or low on a higher timeframe?
Are the wicks long compared with the bodies of the same candles?
Did the wicks sweep a prior high or low?
Have you marked the correct body level, the wick extreme and the mean threshold?
Did price leave the zone with a structure shift in the expected direction?
Does the trade agree with your higher-timeframe bias and sit in premium for sells or discount for buys?
Is the stop beyond the wick extreme with room for spread?
Is the first target at least about 2R away, with no strong opposing zone in between?
Is the position size calculated from the stop distance and your risk per trade?
Will you record the timeframe, entry type, session and outcome in your journal?

How to track rejection block trades in a journal

Rejection blocks are easy to draw in hindsight and hard to judge in real time. Tag every trade as a rejection block, and note the timeframe of the block, whether the wicks swept liquidity, which entry you used (body level, mean threshold or a lower-timeframe confirmation), the session and the R you made or lost.

After 30 or more trades the tags answer real questions: do daily blocks beat hourly ones, does the body-level entry fill too often on returns that keep going, does a sweep in the wicks change the win rate? Those answers come from your own instruments and execution.

FAQ

What is a rejection block in ICT?

A rejection block is the zone at a swing high or low between the extreme candle body and the extreme wick. A bearish rejection block runs from the highest body at a swing high to the top of the wicks; a bullish one runs from the lowest body at a swing low to the bottom of the wicks. Traders enter at the body level and place the stop beyond the wick.

What is the difference between a rejection block and an order block?

An order block is the last opposite candle before a strong move, marked across its range. A rejection block is built from the wicks of the swing itself. Both can form at the same swing, but the order block focuses on the candle that started the move and the rejection block on the area where price was refused.

Where do you put the stop on a rejection block trade?

Beyond the wick extreme: a few pips above the highest wick for a sell, a few pips below the lowest wick for a buy, with extra room for the spread. If price closes beyond that level, the rejection has failed.

Is the mean threshold of a rejection block important?

It is optional. The 50% point between the body level and the wick extreme can be used as a deeper entry with a better reward-to-risk ratio, or as a warning line if price closes through it. Use one approach consistently so your journal can tell you whether it helps.

Which timeframe is best for rejection blocks?

Most ICT traders mark rejection blocks on the 4-hour or daily chart and refine the entry on the 15-minute or 5-minute chart. Very low timeframe wicks appear constantly and rarely mean much on their own.