The ICT playbook, translated into rules.

ICT stands for Inner Circle Trader, the brand under which Michael J. Huddleston published his methodology. Whatever you think of the marketing, the core premise is sober: markets move from one pool of resting orders to the next, and price often sweeps an obvious level — taking the stops sitting beyond it — before turning. The trader’s job is to mark where liquidity probably rests and where price is inefficient, then trade the reaction.

Stripped of the acronyms, that is a cousin of the supply and demand approach: both mark where prior aggression happened and wait for a revisit. ICT packages it with precise definitions, and the precision is what makes parts of it automatable.

Order block: the last opposite-direction candle before a strong move — the last down candle before a rally, for example. Marked because size is presumed to have entered there; revisits often react. Fair value gap (FVG): a three-candle imbalance where wick 1 and wick 3 do not overlap; an unfilled range price tends to revisit. Liquidity sweep: a push past an obvious swing high or low that takes the stops sitting there, often followed by the real move the other way. Market structure: the sequence of higher highs and higher lows (or their inverse); breaking it (a BOS, break of structure) reframes the bias. Killzones: the session windows — London open, New York open, the overlap — when these setups are treated as highest quality.

Notice what these definitions have in common: each one is checkable on the chart. A candle is or is not the last opposite candle. Wicks overlap or they do not. That rule-shape is unusual among trading styles, and it is the reason ICT survived the move from Discord screenshots to Pine scripts.

The textbook long: one, establish higher-timeframe bias (structure pushing up, or a sweep of a major low). Two, wait for a liquidity sweep — price dips below an obvious low and takes the stops. Three, watch the reaction: a displacement back up that leaves a fair value gap or an order block behind. Four, enter on the retrace into that gap or block, stop below the sweep, target the next pool of liquidity above (an old high, a session extreme).

Read that again and count the discretionary calls: which swing is “obvious”, which sweep counts, whether the displacement is strong enough. Those are the judgment parts. Everything after the entry decision — the order, the stop, the target, the management — is mechanical. Divide the workflow along that line and automation becomes obvious: the human (or the indicator) decides when, the pipeline decides how faithfully the order reaches the market.

Two routes. Semi-automatic: you keep the analysis and codify the trigger — draw the order block or gap in Pine (the building blocks are in the Pine Script tutorial), fire an alert on the touch, and let the webhook do the rest:

{
  "symbol": "{{ticker}}",
  "action": "buy",
  "lot": 0.1,
  "sl": 20,
  "tp": 60
}

Fully automatic: an indicator or strategy that detects sweeps and gaps itself and fires the alerts. Either way the alert reaches SignalForge, SignalForge reaches the EA on your MT5 terminal, and the order opens in milliseconds — the same path documented in the bridge guide, with the body fields from the JSON examples. Rehearse it on a demo account first: the paper trading guide explains why a demo terminal is the honest rehearsal. And if the setups run on a funded account, Prop Firm Shield enforces the daily loss limit across every alert the strategy fires.