BTMM (Beat The Market Maker)

BTMM was developed by trader Steve Mauro, and while it shares some vocabulary with ICT and SMC, it's a genuinely distinct framework built around a different core idea: that price moves in a repeating weekly cycle, and that a theoretical "market maker" manipulates price within that cycle to trap retail traders on the wrong side before the real move happens.

The classic BTMM cycle plays out over roughly three days. Sunday into Monday often sets up an initial move. Tuesday is where the framework expects a sharp reversal against that Monday move — often called "Turnaround Tuesday" in BTMM language. Wednesday and Thursday are then expected to continue or complete the real move for the week, with Friday typically treated as a lower-conviction day to avoid new entries.

BTMM leans heavily on a specific set of exponential moving averages — commonly the 5, 13, 50, 100 and 200 EMA — plotted together to define trend and bias at a glance. When the shorter EMAs are stacked above the longer ones in order, that's read as a clean uptrend; stacked in reverse, a clean downtrend; tangled together, no clear trend yet.

"Peak formation" is BTMM's term for specific candle and structure patterns that tend to appear right around a cycle turn — essentially BTMM's version of spotting a reversal, built specifically around its weekly-cycle theory rather than the liquidity-grab logic ICT uses for the same job.

Like ICT and SMC, none of this is universally agreed upon even among experienced traders — the idea of a single "market maker" deliberately manipulating an entire global market is a simplification many traders push back on. What's genuinely useful about BTMM, even to a skeptic, is the discipline of thinking in terms of a weekly structure instead of only the next candle — it forces you to zoom out.