ICT (Inner Circle Trader)

ICT is Michael Huddleston's methodology, and it is actually what most SMC concepts were built on. The difference is that it goes deeper and adds a crucial element: time. Not just where price will move, but when.

It works with trading sessions (London and New York), specific windows of the day called killzones where institutional moves happen, and concepts like the Judas Swing: the deceptive move at the start of a session designed to trap people before the real move.

From the picture: the market is quiet before London, then liquidity comes in at the London open, and into New York you sometimes get a move against the true daily direction first (the trap), then the real trend of the day shows itself. The trader who is glued to the screen from morning to evening, with no idea which session they are in, is fighting the market in dead hours.

There is also a daily shape that repeats a lot: Asian range, expansion that breaks the range, then a partial retrace into the midpoint or the broken edge. You do not have to worship the name. You do have to start seeing the day as a structure, not as a pile of random candles.

It is a huge methodology with a lot of terminology, and the original content runs hundreds of hours. Our advice if you want in: take one concept, test it on the chart for weeks, then move to the next. People who try to swallow everything at once get lost, and a month later they hate the whole method.