Smart Money Concepts
Order blocks, fair value gaps, and the institutional footprints that precede major price moves.
Smart Money Concepts (SMC) is an approach to market analysis that focuses on identifying the footprints of institutional order flow — the large players whose buying and selling actually moves markets. This module teaches you to read those footprints before price moves, not after.
Lessons
Order Blocks and Institutional Footprints
Order blocks are the price zones where institutional traders placed large directional orders. When price returns to these zones, the unfilled portions of those institutional orders often cause significant reactions.
Fair Value Gaps and Price Imbalances
Fair value gaps are price areas where the market moved so fast that no two-sided trading occurred. Price often returns to these imbalances before continuing in the original direction.
Liquidity Sweeps and Stop Hunts
The most consistent pattern in institutional price behavior: move price to where retail stop orders cluster, trigger those stops to fill institutional orders, then reverse decisively. Learning to identify these sweeps changes how you read every major price move.
ICT Kill Zones and Optimal Trade Entry
ICT Kill Zones are specific time windows within each trading session when institutional order flow creates the most reliable, highest-probability price action setups. Trading outside these windows is statistically disadvantageous.