Introduction to Smart Money Concepts (SMC)

Smart Money Concepts (SMC) is a trading framework built around the idea that large institutional players — banks, funds — leave identifiable footprints in price action, and that retail traders can learn to read those footprints instead of only using traditional indicators.

Core SMC ideas include market structure (the sequence of highs/lows that defines a trend), liquidity (areas where a cluster of orders are likely sitting), and imbalance (price moving so fast in one direction that it leaves a gap in normal two-way trading).

SMC isn't a single indicator you can turn on — it's a way of reading raw price action. It takes longer to learn than a standard indicator, but the goal is understanding why price moved, not just that it moved.