ICT Concepts
ProprietaryOne trader's framework, taught commercially. Worth understanding; worth knowing what it is.
Popularised by the Inner Circle Trader through online courses and video from the 2010s.
What it claims
Its session-timing elements are built around London and New York. NEPSE trades one four-hour session, so those windows do not exist here. That price is engineered by institutional participants to specific levels at specific times, and that a trader who learns the model can anticipate those moves.
How it works
- 1Shares most of its vocabulary with Smart Money Concepts: order blocks, fair value gaps, liquidity.
- 2Adds time-of-day 'killzones' — windows when moves are said to be most likely.
- 3Treats obvious highs and lows as liquidity deliberately targeted before a real move.
- 4Uses a top-down read from higher timeframes down to the entry timeframe.
What it is, stated plainly
ICT refers to the body of trading material popularised by a teacher known as the Inner Circle Trader, taught through online video and courses from the 2010s onward. It overlaps heavily with Smart Money Concepts and adds a strong emphasis on timing.
We cover it because people ask about it constantly and because understanding the vocabulary genuinely helps when reading trading discussion. We also state clearly what it is, which most material about it does not.
The core ideas
The market-structure vocabulary is shared with SMC — order blocks, fair value gaps, liquidity, break of structure. What ICT adds is a claim about time.
- Killzones — specific windows of the day when significant moves are said to be most likely.
- Liquidity as a target — the idea that price is deliberately driven to obvious highs and lows to trigger stops before the real move.
- Top-down analysis — establishing bias on a higher timeframe, then executing on a lower one.
- Dealing ranges — splitting a range into premium and discount halves and only buying in the lower half.
Liquidity sweep
Some of these are ordinary good practice dressed in unusual language. Top-down analysis is standard. Not buying at the top of a range is standard. The distinctive claims are the timing windows and the degree of intent attributed to institutions.
Judging it fairly
Being proprietary does not make something wrong. Plenty of useful trading knowledge is taught commercially. But the absence of an independent standard has practical consequences you should be aware of:
- 1Nothing can be checked against a definition, because there isn't one. If a rule fails, it can always be said to have been applied incorrectly.
- 2Results are self-reported. There is no body of independent testing to consult.
- 3The teaching and the selling are the same activity, which is a conflict of interest worth naming.
The reasonable position is neither dismissal nor deference. Learn the vocabulary — it is genuinely current and you will meet it everywhere. Take any specific rule and test it yourself on real data before risking money. And treat confident presentation as a reason for more scrutiny, not less.
Why the timing part does not apply here
The structural ideas — liquidity above old highs, ranges having expensive and cheap halves — transfer better, because they describe how order books behave rather than when particular banks are open. Even those need testing on a market with daily circuit limits, which forex does not have.
How much weight it can carry
We include this because people ask about it, and understanding the vocabulary is genuinely useful when reading trading discussion. But be clear on what it is: proprietary course material from one individual. It has no encyclopedic entry, no independent standard, no published evidence base, and no agreed definitions — searching an encyclopedia for the term returns unrelated results entirely. That does not make it worthless, and it does not make it established either. Judge it as one trader's framework, test any rule yourself before risking money on it, and be especially careful with anyone selling access to it.
Proprietary. Taught commercially, with no independent standard, no agreed definitions and no published evidence base. Worth understanding; worth knowing what it is.
On NEPSE specifically
The time-based elements are built around London and New York sessions. They have no meaning for a market trading 11:00 to 15:00 Nepal time.
The vocabulary
The 8 terms you need to follow any discussion of this method.
- ICT conceptsalso: Inner Circle Trader
- A body of trading material popularised by the Inner Circle Trader. It is proprietary course content with no independent standard, no encyclopedic entry and no peer-reviewed evidence base — treat it as one trader's framework rather than established theory.
- Smart Money Conceptsalso: SMC
- A modern repackaging of Wyckoff-style ideas about where large orders sit, taught largely through paid courses and video. Its vocabulary is new; the underlying observations are a century old.
- Order block
- In smart-money terminology, a price zone where large orders are presumed to have been placed, expected to matter again if revisited. It is an inference from the chart, not observed order data.
- Fair value gapalso: FVG, imbalance
- A gap between candle wicks that some traders treat as an imbalance price will return to fill. A restatement of the older idea that gaps tend to get filled.
- Liquidity sweepalso: Stop hunt
- A move that pushes just beyond an obvious high or low — where stop orders cluster — before reversing.
- Break of structurealso: BOS
- A move past a prior swing high or low, read as the trend continuing.
- Change of characteralso: CHoCH
- The first failure to make a new high or low in the prevailing direction, read as a possible trend change.
- Timeframe
- The period each candle or bar represents — daily, weekly, hourly. The same chart can look bullish on one and bearish on another.
What the research says
We found no papers testing this method. Searching arXiv’s quantitative-finance archive for it returns nothing. That does not prove the method does not work — but it does mean nobody has published a test of it there, and you should weigh it accordingly. By contrast, the indicators page lists a dozen.