What is Smart Money Concepts (SMC)?
A price-action framework that reads charts through institutional order flow — liquidity raids, order blocks, fair value gaps, and market structure — popularized by the Inner Circle Trader (ICT).
Smart Money Concepts is the umbrella term for trading frameworks that model what institutional participants ("smart money") must do mechanically: accumulate size without moving price, engineer liquidity to fill large orders, and deliver price between liquidity pools efficiently.
Core vocabulary: liquidity (buyside/sellside pools), Order Blocks (institutional positioning candles), Fair Value Gaps (inefficiencies to rebalance), market structure (BOS/CHoCH), premium/discount arrays, and time-based models like the Power of Three and Killzones.
SMC vs classic technical analysis: classic TA describes patterns (triangles, head-and-shoulders); SMC explains the WHY — stop runs above equal highs aren't "failed breakouts" but engineered liquidity raids. The framework was popularized by Michael J. Huddleston (the Inner Circle Trader / ICT), whose teachings underpin most modern SMC content.