Trading Timer: The Free macOS Companion App for ICT Traders

Most trading mistakes are not chart-reading mistakes. They are time mistakes. Entering a 30-minute setup ten seconds before the bar closes. Holding through the back half of NY PM when the move is already done. Loading the rifle thirty minutes before NFP. Almost everyone who trades ICT or SMT methodology has lost money to bad timing -- not bad analysis.

So we built a small, free tool to fix that. Trading Timer is a native macOS menu-bar app that lives quietly in the top of your screen and keeps you aligned with the cycles that actually matter: the 3-minute, 10-minute, 30-minute, and 90-minute intraday bars, the four ET sessions (Asia, London, NY AM, NY PM), and the red-folder economic news on the ForexFactory calendar. It is the companion app to The SMT Detector indicator -- the cycle clock that runs alongside your chart.

This post explains what Trading Timer does, why we built it, how to install it, and how to use it inside a typical ICT/SMT workflow.

Why a Timer App at All?

The SMT Detector indicator already shows you where divergence is occurring on each cycle. What it cannot do -- because it lives inside TradingView -- is interrupt you when you are looking at the wrong cycle, the wrong session, or the wrong day. That gap is where a lot of preventable losses come from.

A few patterns we kept seeing on our own charts:

• Entering mid-bar. You spot a 30m SMT divergence forming. You click buy. The bar closes 18 seconds later and the wick reclaims your entry. The setup was real -- you just acted on it 18 seconds too early.
• Trading the dead zone. The 4:00 PM -- 6:00 PM ET gap between NY PM close and Asia open is a liquidity desert. SMT signals during this window are usually noise (we covered why in our ICT Kill Zones guide). But it is easy to forget what time it is when you are focused on a chart.
• Holding past your session. A trader who is sharp in NY AM is often a tired trader in NY PM. Without a session timer, you do not know when "your" window is over.
• Trading the day before NFP. Red-folder news days are typically a no-trade in ICT discipline -- both the day of the event and, for some setups, the day before. ForexFactory has the calendar, but nobody wants to keep an extra browser tab open.

Trading Timer is a single small app that addresses all four of these at once. No charts, no order flow, no market data -- it is purely a discipline tool.

What Trading Timer Does

1. Tracks every ICT cycle in real time

The cycle engine runs the same intraday timeframes that ICT traders watch:

Cycle	Anchor	What it tells you
3-minute	Top of hour	Scalp bar close
10-minute	Top of hour	Short-term momentum bar
30-minute	Top of hour	Primary intraday setup bar
90-minute	18:00 ET (CME session open)	The ICT macro cycle -- 16 bars per 24h
Asia / London / NY AM / NY PM	ET session windows	Where smart money is currently active

Each cycle has its own progress ring and a countdown to the next close. You can show or hide cycles individually. You can also choose whether each one fires a notification, plays a sound, and how many times the sound repeats -- because a 3-minute bar close does not deserve the same attention as a 90-minute close.

2. Floats over every other window, on every Space

The mini-HUD ("minimal view") is a small floating window with six layouts to choose from -- two concentric rings, a 2x2 dial grid, an Apple-Watch-style sunburst, a horizontal bar layout, a single big countdown, or a compact rings-plus-numbers view. Pick the one that fits the corner of your monitor.

The HUD uses macOS's "above-fullscreen" panel mode, so it stays visible over TradingView in fullscreen, over Ninja, over your video calls, and across every Space. It does not steal focus, does not appear in Mission Control, and is skipped by Cmd+Tab. It is just there, like a watch face.

3. Pulls the ForexFactory economic calendar daily

On launch and every 24 hours after, Trading Timer fetches the high-impact economic events for the current week from the public ForexFactory calendar feed. You filter by currency (USD, EUR, GBP, etc.) and by impact (Red / Orange / Yellow). The card shows the next event, the time-to-go, and any events in your selected window.

If the cycle math says you are 12 minutes from the next 30m close and the news strip says NFP fires in 38 minutes -- you can see both facts in one glance, before you click buy.

4. Enforces a no-trade rule on red-news days

This is the feature we use most. When a high-impact USD event is scheduled for the same day or the next day, the app surfaces a prominent NO-TRADE DAY banner in the main window and adds a red border with a ⚠️ badge to the floating HUD. It is a passive reminder, not a hard block -- but it is hard to miss, and that is the point.

5. Three independent attention channels

Every event can be delivered three ways, and each can be muted independently:

• Notification banner -- standard macOS notification, color-coded by event type.
• Sound -- pick from Glass, Ping, Pop, Tink, Hero, Sosumi, Submarine, Morse, or silent. Per-cycle repeat counts (e.g. play Hero three times for the 30m close).
• HUD flash -- a silent, 1.5-second colored pulse on the floating window. Green for opens, orange for closes, blue for cycle bar close, yellow for 30-second pre-warnings.

The combination matters. In a meeting? Mute notifications and sound, keep HUD flash. Heads-down focused? Mute everything except the 90m and Session events. The discipline is yours to design.

6. Smart power management

The app has three lifecycle states -- ACTIVE, IDLE, SLEEPING -- driven by your schedule. Inside your trading window it ticks every second; outside it drops to 30 seconds; deep off-session it sleeps at 5-minute checks and hides the HUD entirely. Near-zero CPU when you are not trading.

A Typical Workflow with the SMT Detector

Here is how the two tools actually fit together on a normal NY AM session:

1. 06:55 ET -- Trading Timer's NY AM session ring is at 95%. Banner says "NY AM opens in 5 minutes". You finish your coffee and open your charts.
2. 07:00 ET -- Green flash on the HUD as NY AM opens. The SMT Detector indicator on your NQ chart is now live in its highest-quality session.
3. 07:23 ET -- The SMT Detector fires a bullish 30m SMT divergence between NQ and ES. You note it, but Trading Timer's 30m ring says you are 7 minutes from the bar close. You wait.
4. 07:30 ET -- Blue flash + bar-close sound. The 30m has closed. The SMT label is now confirmed (no repaint). You execute the trade with a clean entry on the open of the next bar.
5. 08:00 ET -- Trading Timer says NFP fires in 30 minutes -- the news strip has been red all morning. You flatten the position into the cash close and step away. No FOMO trade after the release.

None of this is magic. It is just timing applied as a system instead of as a memory test. The SMT Detector handles the "what" -- which cycle is diverging, on which pair. Trading Timer handles the "when" -- when to look, when to wait, when to step away.

How to Install Trading Timer

The app is delivered as a .dmg on our Whop store -- the same place you get the indicator. The download is free and does not require a subscription. The steps:

1. Open https://whop.com/the-smt-detector/ and grab the free Trading Timer download.
2. Open the .dmg and drag Trading Timer to your /Applications folder.
3. Launch it. macOS will prompt for notification permission -- accept it (otherwise alerts are silent).
4. Open Preferences and set your trading schedule (days + start/end times in your local timezone).
5. Pick a HUD layout you like and toggle "Start at Login" if you want it to launch automatically.

It is a universal binary (Apple Silicon + Intel) and works on macOS 12 or later. Updates are checked automatically once a day; when a new version is available, an in-app banner points you back to Whop to grab the latest .dmg.

Common Questions

Is Trading Timer really free? Yes. No trial, no paywall, no upsell. It is a community tool that pairs with the SMT Detector indicator -- our way of saying thank you to traders who chose us over a $40-plus monthly competitor.

Does it work on Windows? Not yet. The first build is macOS-only because of the native menu-bar integration and macOS-specific vibrancy effects. A Windows port is on our roadmap; the Tools section on the homepage will be updated when it ships.

Does it need market data? No. Trading Timer is purely a clock + calendar utility. It never connects to a broker, never reads market prices, never sees your trades. The only network traffic is the daily ForexFactory calendar fetch and the once-a-day version check.

Will it replace TradingView alerts? No -- it is complementary. TradingView alerts tell you what just happened on a chart. Trading Timer tells you when the next opportunity window opens, which is information the chart cannot easily surface on its own.

Can I customize which cycles fire alerts? Yes. Every cycle has a Show toggle and a Notify toggle. The 3m cycle is enabled but silent by default; the 30m and 90m are enabled and audible. You can rewire all of this in Preferences without touching code.

Is there a confluence detector built in? Not yet -- right now each cycle fires independently. Confluence detection (when 2+ enabled cycles close within ~30 seconds) is on the v0.2 roadmap. The same goes for higher-timeframe cycles (Daily / Weekly / Monthly / Quarterly / Yearly).

What's Next

Trading Timer is v0.1 -- the bones are in, but we are actively shipping. The next few releases will add:

• Higher-timeframe cycles for swing traders (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly).
• Confluence alerts -- a single high-priority banner when two or more cycles close within seconds of each other.
• A trade-journal companion that drops timestamps and screenshots into a daily log.
• A Windows build, once we have a clean way to handle the vibrancy + always-on-top behavior cross-platform.

All of these will roll out via the same in-app update banner. Existing installs will be notified automatically; nothing to do on your end except hit "Open Whop" when the banner appears.