ICT (Inner Circle Trader) concepts

ICT stands for "Inner Circle Trader" — the alias of the trader who popularised this whole framework online. The core belief behind it: large institutions (banks, hedge funds) can't fill their enormous orders all at once without moving price against themselves, so they leave visible traces on a chart as they build and manage those positions. ICT trading is essentially an attempt to read those traces and position in the same direction as that institutional flow, instead of against it.

Market structure is the foundation everything else sits on. Price moves in swings — highs and lows — and ICT traders watch for a Break of Structure (BOS), where price pushes past a previous swing high or low in the direction of the current trend, confirming it's likely to continue. A Change of Character (CHoCH) is the opposite signal: price breaks structure against the prevailing trend, an early hint that a reversal might be starting.

An Order Block is usually defined as the last opposing candle before a strong, fast move in the other direction — the last down candle right before a sharp rally, for example. The theory is that this candle marks roughly where a large institutional order sat, and price often returns to "retest" that zone later before continuing, giving a lower-risk entry than chasing the move after it's already run.

A Fair Value Gap (FVG) is a gap or imbalance left behind when price moves so fast that buyers and sellers didn't get to trade evenly at every price in between — visible on a chart as a small untouched zone between three candles. ICT theory says price often comes back to "fill" that gap later, trading back through the imbalance before resuming its original direction.

Liquidity is the concept that ties it together. Above old highs and below old lows sit clusters of other traders' stop-loss orders — pools of liquidity. ICT theory holds that price is often deliberately pushed into these pools (a "liquidity grab" or "stop hunt"), triggering those stops to provide the volume institutions need to fill their own large orders, right before the real move happens in the opposite direction.

Kill Zones are specific windows of the trading day — the London Open, the New York Open — where ICT traders believe this kind of institutional activity concentrates, so that's where they focus their screen time instead of watching charts all day.