The pillar guide
Smart money concepts (SMC): the complete guide
Smart money concepts (SMC) are a vocabulary for reading price charts. They describe where a trend continues or changes (structure), where stop orders tend to rest (liquidity), where price moved too fast to trade both ways (imbalance), and when these moves tend to happen (sessions). The vocabulary is widely used and also contested.
This page is the map. It lists every concept ForexLens teaches, in the order the course teaches them, with a one-line summary and a link to the full guide. Each guide gives a direct answer, the exact rule our games grade against, a worked example on a generated chart, the usual mistakes and an honest note on the evidence.
Much of this vocabulary was popularised by retail trading educators under the name ICT, and it overlaps with older ideas such as support and resistance, supply and demand zones and Wyckoff-style accumulation and distribution. We teach the definitions precisely, because a precise definition can be checked, and we keep the claims about who moves price, and why, at arm's length. For the other side of the story, read how FX dealers and the 4pm fix actually work and whether SMC works.
The concepts, in learning order
Six floors make up the Core course. Two more groups go further: context, and how the market works behind the concepts.
Structure
Swings, trend and the moment a trend is said to change.
Liquidity
Where stop orders tend to rest, and what a raid on them looks like.
Imbalance
Fast moves and the gaps they leave behind.
Value
Cheap or expensive inside a range, and where price is drawn next.
Time
When the moves that SMC describes tend to happen.
The Model
Putting it together, sizing it, and testing it against reality.
Advanced: context
Failed blocks, the two kinds of liquidity and reading more than one timeframe.
Institutional: how the market really works
What dealers, benchmarks and the evidence say about the story behind the concepts.
How the concepts fit together
On their own the concepts are labels. SMC traders chain them into one sequence, which is what the last Core floor teaches:
- Frame the chart. Mark the swings and name the structure: is price making higher highs and higher lows, or lower ones?
- Find the liquidity. Mark the pools above old highs and below old lows, and decide which one is the draw.
- Wait for a sweep. Price trades through a pool and closes back: a liquidity sweep, often inside a kill zone.
- Wait for confirmation. A change of character by a body close, made with displacement that leaves a fair value gap.
- Define the trade. Entry at the gap, in discount for a long or premium for a short, stop beyond the sweep, target at the opposing pool.
- Size it. Position size comes from the stop distance and a fixed fraction of the account, before anything else.
That chain is the entry model. It is a checklist for describing a setup and controlling risk. It is not a prediction, and a completed checklist is not a winning trade.
What SMC is not
SMC is not a proven account of what banks or funds are doing. A retail chart shows prices, not who traded or why, and the same candles usually have a plainer explanation: thin liquidity, a news release, a benchmark window, a cascade of stop orders. We know of no robust independent study showing that these patterns, as taught, give retail traders a durable edge.
What the vocabulary does give you is a precise way to describe a chart and a consistent place to define risk. That is worth learning properly, which means learning the exact rule, practising it until you apply it the same way every time, and then testing it honestly. Most retail traders lose money, and no vocabulary changes that by itself.
Smart money concepts: common questions
What are smart money concepts in simple terms?
They are names for things on a price chart. Structure is the pattern of swing highs and lows. Liquidity is where stop orders are likely to rest, above highs and below lows. An imbalance is a fast move that left a gap. SMC traders combine these to decide where a move might start, where to put a stop and where to aim. The names describe what price did. They do not prove who did it.
What is the best order to learn smart money concepts?
Structure first, because every other concept is defined against swings: swing highs and lows, then break of structure and change of character. Then liquidity, then imbalance (fair value gaps and order blocks), then value, then time. Only then the full model and position sizing. That is the order of the six floors.
Is there an AI that finds smart money concepts on a chart?
Tools that mark swings, gaps and order blocks automatically are rule-based detectors, and that is what the Lens on ForexLens is: fixed rules, written as code, applied to a chart. It does not predict anything, and it is not machine learning. A detector can tell you whether three candles form a fair value gap. It cannot tell you whether price will come back to it. Be careful with any product that claims an AI knows where smart money will trade.
Do smart money concepts work on stocks, gold, indices and crypto?
The definitions are about candles, so they can be applied to any chart with an open, high, low and close. Whether they are useful there is a separate question, and markets differ in ways that matter: spot forex has no central exchange, stocks gap overnight, crypto trades through the weekend. ForexLens teaches the concepts on simulated forex prices.
Can I learn smart money concepts for free?
Yes. Every guide on this site is free to read, and the games are free to play: the first one needs no account, and a free account opens the rest. There is nothing to buy here, no signals and no broker links. Start with market structure.
Read less, mark more
The first game takes about three minutes and needs no account.