The Most Important ICT Concepts — A Complete Map of the Method (Start Here)

From the outside, the ICT method looks like an ocean: hundreds of hours of recordings, dozens of abbreviations, and every tutorial assumes you've seen the five before it. It's easy to drown in — and most people do, learning random concepts in random order. This article is a map of the whole: what's foundation, what's superstructure, what's decoration, and in what order to work through it. Every concept here gets a short explanation and a link to the full article — treat this page as the table of contents for our entire ICT section.

Before you start: what ICT is actually about

The whole method stands on a single premise: price doesn't move randomly or "from support to resistance" — it is delivered from liquidity to liquidity, so that big capital can build and unwind positions on other people's stop-losses. ICT calls this mechanism the IPDA algorithm. Whether a mysterious algorithm is genuinely wired into the banks is a matter of faith, not evidence; but the practical framework that follows from it is testable: the market regularly sweeps the obvious levels before the real move, leaves imbalances along the way, and returns to them at repeatable times. Everything below is built on that framework.

Layer 1: market structure — the language of the chart

Before you draw your first zone, you have to be able to say which way the market is flowing. That's what market structure is for: the sequences of highs and lows that arrange themselves into an uptrend, a downtrend or consolidation. The building block of structure is the swing low/high formation — three candles, with the middle one marking the extreme.

Three key events are read off structure:

• Break of Structure (BOS) — a swing break in the direction of the trend; confirmation of continuation.
• Change of Character (CHoCH) — a break of the counter-trend swing; the first reversal signal. We take apart the differences between them in BOS vs CHoCH.
• Market Structure Shift (MSS) — a structure shift on the lower timeframe which, after a liquidity sweep, acts as the entry trigger. The more modern, candle-based version of this signal is CISD — you'll find the comparison in CISD vs MSS.

Without fluent structure reading, the rest of the method doesn't work — all the zones and time windows only refine what structure says first.

Layer 2: liquidity — the fuel of every move

The second layer answers the question "where is price going, and what for". ICT's answer: for liquidity — the clusters of stop-losses and resting orders. Buy-side liquidity (BSL) hangs above old highs, sell-side (SSL) below old lows, and the densest clusters — liquidity pools — form at the equal highs and lows that everyone can see.

This layer is also home to the concepts that separate good targets from bad ones: the split into internal and external liquidity (IRL/ERL), the distinction between a sweep and a run (level collected and price returns vs price runs on through), paths of low and high resistance (LRLR/HRLR) and inducement — the bait the market sets for the impatient, including right after a BOS. Completing the picture is the liquidity void: the vacuum left by a too-fast move, which price likes to revisit.

Layer 3: PD Arrays — the zones where you enter

Once you know which way (structure) and what for (liquidity) the market is going, you still need a place to enter. That's what the PD Arrays are for — the family of price zones organized by the PD Array Matrix. The two most important:

Fair Value Gap (FVG) — the three-candle imbalance gap, the universal zone for price to return to. A whole family has grown around it: valid vs weak FVGs, the bullish and bearish flavors BISI/SIBI, the flipped Inversion FVG, the hidden Implied FVG, the gap's midpoint Consequent Encroachment, the two-gap overlap BPR and the first presented FVG of the session.

Order Block (OB) — the last opposing candle before the impulse; the institutional order zone in its bullish and bearish versions. Its mutations cover nearly every situation: the Breaker Block (an OB after the break), the Mitigation Block, the Rejection Block, the Propulsion Block, the Reclaimed OB, the one-candle SCOB and the Hidden OB.

The signal that a zone is "real" is displacement — a move with conviction, large bodies and gaps along the way. A zone without displacement is just a pretty rectangle. This is also the place to knock out the most common beginner reflex right away: the goal is not to mark every zone on the chart, but to pick the one or two that lie on the path to the liquidity target and were created by an impulse that broke structure. The rest is decoration.

Layer 4: premium, discount and refining the entry

The same zone can be a great entry or a terrible one — depending on where it sits in the current range. The range splits into halves: above 50% is premium (expensive — the selling zone), below it discount (cheap — the buying zone). Inside the correct half, the entry is refined by the Optimal Trade Entry — the 62–79% retracement of the impulse, drawn using ICT Fibonacci levels. The boldest enter from the very edge of the gap with the IOFED technique.

Layer 5: time — half the edge

This is the layer that separates ICT from plain price action: a good level at the wrong hour is worthless. The rhythm of the day is set by the killzones — four session windows in which institutional capital operates (the two that matter most: London 2:00–5:00 AM ET and New York 7:00–10:00 AM ET). Inside them tick the Macro Times — the algorithm's twenty-minute windows.

The day as a whole is described by Power of 3 (AMD): accumulation overnight (measured by the Asian Range and the CBDR), manipulation at the open — the Judas Swing — and distribution in the true direction. How the phases assemble into scenarios is shown by the intraday profiles; at the weekly scale the same job is done by the weekly profiles and the weekly range expansion model. You set today's direction via the Daily Bias (there's also a faster trick), walking down the timeframes with top-down analysis. Separate time-based magnets are the opening gaps NDOG and NWOG.

Layer 6: setups — ready-made combinations of the blocks

Only at the very end come the "strategies", i.e. repeatable combinations of the layers above:

• Silver Bullet — the one-hour window for an FVG entry in the direction of the bias (the most popular: 10:00–11:00 AM ET); plus the killzone overlap variant.
• The 2022 Model — the complete sweep → MSS → FVG entry sequence; the most frequently recommended starting point.
• Turtle Soup — playing against false breakouts of equal extremes.
• Unicorn — a breaker and an FVG in one spot.
• Venom — the sweep in the 90-minute opening windows.
• Weekly and session models: One Shot One Kill, One Trade Setup for Life, Bread & Butter buy and sell, the Friday Seek & Destroy and TGIF.
• Scalping and intraday: 20 pips a day, ICT scalping, the intraday strategy.

On top of these come the advanced concepts, which raise accuracy but replace nothing: SMT Divergence (divergence between correlated instruments), the market maker models MMBM and MMSM, order flow, RDRB and the gaps Vacuum Block and Breakaway Gap. Save them for later — without layers 1–5 under your belt, they're just noise.

How this differs from classical technical analysis

It's worth pausing on the question everyone coming to ICT from a classical education asks: how is this actually different from support, resistance and chart patterns? In three ways. First, the inverted logic of levels: where the classics see "strong support" (equal lows), ICT sees a magnet for stop-losses — a level more likely to be swept than defended. Second, the time layer: classical analysis is blind to the clock, while ICT claims the same zone behaves differently at 3:00 AM than in the middle of a killzone. Third, the causal narrative: instead of "supply and demand" — price being delivered to liquidity.

That doesn't make the classics worthless — a good chunk of ICT concepts are their refinement (an Order Block is often just a well-defined supply/demand zone, and Turtle Soup was traded long before ICT under the name of the false breakout). It does mean, however, that the two languages shouldn't be mixed in a single analysis: either you're trading the bounce off support, or the sweep of support — those are opposite trades at the same level, and mixing the frames ends with entering both directions at once.

How the layers assemble into a single trade

Theory aside — here's how the blocks combine in practice on a model bearish BTC day. In the evening you check the daily timeframe: structure is printing lower highs and lower lows, the last move is a BOS down, and a few percent lower sits a liquidity pool under equal lows — you have a direction (layer 1) and a target (layer 2). In the morning you mark the overnight Asian Range and a fresh H1 FVG that sits in the premium zone of the current range — you have an entry candidate (layers 3 and 4).

Now you wait — not for a price, but for an hour. At 2:00 AM ET the London killzone opens (layer 5): price breaks the high of the overnight range, enters your gap in premium and breaks structure down on M5 — a sweep, a PD Array and an MSS in one place and at the right time. You enter short on the retrace, stop above the swept high, target at the liquidity pool under the equal lows. What you've just read is essentially the 2022 Model — and the best proof that ICT "setups" aren't magic, just the sum of layers you can name one by one.

Notice, too, what this scenario did not contain: no indicator, no textbook candlestick pattern, no "feel for the market". Every element of the decision — direction, target, zone, hour, trigger — comes from a specific, named layer of the method. That's exactly why the learning order matters: if you can't read structure, you won't recognize an MSS; if you don't see liquidity, you won't tell a sweep from a breakout; if you ignore time, you'll trade the same zones in the dead hours.

The most common mistakes in learning ICT

• Learning backwards from the setup. Watching a Silver Bullet video and trading it starting tomorrow is the shortest road to burnout. A setup without the layers underneath is copying other people's entries without understanding the context.
• Collecting concepts instead of testing them. Knowing twenty kinds of Order Block gives you no edge; the tested statistics of one — does. Fewer terms, more journal.
• Drawing everything at once. A chart with fifteen zones, ten gaps and five liquidity levels isn't analysis — it's camouflage for the absence of a decision. One bias, one target, one or two zones.
• Ignoring the time layer. The most common omission: layer-3 zones traded at random hours give random results, and the blame lands on "the method not working".
• Changing market and timeframe every week. The statistics of windows and behaviors are instrument-specific. One market, one execution timeframe, one quarter — conclusions only after that.
• Confusing narrative with edge. "The algorithm collected liquidity" sounds smart after the fact; an edge is only a repeatable scenario you wrote down before the move and are testing on data.

The learning plan: 6 steps

1. Structure — market structure, BOS, CHoCH, MSS. Until you read the trend without thinking.
2. Liquidity — BSL/SSL, pools, inducement. Until you see where the stops hang on every chart.
3. PD Arrays — FVGs and OBs with displacement. Until you can tell a zone worth your attention from a rectangle.
4. Premium/discount and OTE — until you stop buying expensive in an uptrend.
5. Time — killzones, PO3, daily bias. Until your entries start landing inside the windows, not between them.
6. One setup — ideally the 2022 Model or the Silver Bullet. One instrument, one window, a minimum of three months of a trade journal — with the reason for entry written down and a conclusion after every position, because without that you won't tell edge from luck.

And an honest note to finish, in the no-hype spirit: ICT is a coherent language for describing the market and an excellent frame for building your own edge — but it is not a money machine or secret knowledge. No concept on this list exempts you from risk management, testing on data and keeping a journal. The method gives you the map; discipline decides whether you reach the destination. You'll always find this map's abbreviations in our ICT glossary, and the story of the man who invented it all — in the article who is ICT.

FAQ

Rafał — Krypto Bez Ściemy

Trader and founder of Strefa Tradingu. He’s been breaking crypto down on YouTube for years — no hype, no signals, with a focus on market structure and risk management.

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