ICT Mentorship Core Content - Month 1 - What To Focus On Right Now

The market is composed of two diametrically opposed perspectives — smart money (liquidity providers/banks) who understand and exploit the uninformed, and uninformed/speculative money who rely on indicators and deny the existence of market manipulation (0:30-3:00). Understanding both perspectives creates what ICT calls the "market efficiency paradigm," and traders must adopt the smart money view to succeed.

Uninformed traders believe indicators drive price action (e.g., overbought/oversold signals cause reversals), but ICT explicitly states indicators obscure smart money activity and should be removed from charts entirely (2:00-3:30). Instead, indicators can be used in reverse — to understand what uninformed traders are thinking, which becomes useful for sentiment analysis.

ICT asserts that currency prices are set by central banks who printed the money, analogous to a store owner setting prices on their own goods (5:00-6:00). He cites the Swiss Franc/Euro de-pegging as concrete evidence that price can be moved instantaneously and at will by institutional entities.

All price action can be categorized into four modes — retracement, expansion, reversal, and consolidation (7:00-7:30). The entire 12-month mentorship builds frameworks around understanding these four principles, and students are told not to skip foundational work to jump to specific patterns.