Concept family
Smart Money Concepts / ICT
Order blocks, fair value gaps, liquidity, premium/discount, and the named ICT models.
Smart Money Concepts (SMC) reads price as the footprint of institutional order flow. Instead of averaging price into oscillators, it maps the levels where size must transact — order blocks, imbalances, resting liquidity — and follows how price is delivered between them. The vocabulary was popularized by the Inner Circle Trader (ICT) methodology and became one of the most-searched approaches to technical analysis of the past decade.
This family holds the full grammar: the order-block taxonomy, the imbalance family around fair value gaps, liquidity concepts from sweeps to inducement, the premium/discount framework, displacement and delivery models, and the named ICT playbooks — each concept linked to every implementation of it in the Library.
Start here
Smart Money Concepts
The methodology itself: what SMC is, where it came from, and how the pieces fit together.
3 indicators
Fair Value Gap
The three-candle imbalance — the most implemented SMC concept in the Library.
54 indicators
Liquidity Sweep
The stop-run above or below a key level that fuels the real move.
40 indicators
The methodology
Order blocks
The last opposing candles before a displacement — zones where institutional orders are assumed to rest, refined into breaker, propulsion, rejection, and mitigation variants.
Imbalance taxonomy
Fair value gaps and their relatives — spans of one-sided delivery the market may revisit and rebalance, from opening gaps to volume imbalances.
Liquidity concepts
Where stops and resting orders pool — equal highs and lows, sweep and grab mechanics, inducement — and how price is drawn toward them.
Premium/discount framework
Dealing-range logic: buy discount, sell premium, with optimal trade entry and standard-deviation projections as its best-known applications.
Displacement & delivery
How intent shows up as aggressive moves — and how the market re-delivers price between the levels those moves create.
Named ICT models
The packaged playbooks — Silver Bullet, session profiles, one-shot-one-kill — that compose the concepts above into complete trade plans.
Time components (→ time-seasonality)
Killzones, macros, and session anchors — the when that gates every where in this family.