ICT Strategy

Learn the core concepts of the ICT (Inner Circle Trader) strategy, a popular methodology focused on understanding market maker behavior and institutional order

Published · Updated · Methodology: ICT

Part of: Prop Firm Trading

  • Methodology: ICT
  • Content type: educational

Source video

Decoded from: How I passed my $50,000 FTMO Challenge - FULL ICT STRATEGY by Liam Merrilees — watch the original

Strategy overview

Prop firm challenges ask a trader to hit a profit target while staying inside strict loss limits, which means the method used matters less for its upside than for how tightly it can be controlled. This entry catalogs a video where that method is ICT — the Inner Circle Trader approach to reading price through liquidity and market structure — presented by Liam Merrilees as the full framework he used during a $50,000 FTMO Challenge attempt.

The angle worth noting is that the video is framed as a methodology walkthrough rather than a rules-and-risk discussion. Its title promises the "FULL ICT STRATEGY", which places the emphasis on the vocabulary itself: where liquidity rests, how structure shifts, and what the trader treats as a signal that one side of the market has taken control. ICT tends to attract traders working under evaluation conditions because its concepts come with visible invalidation points on the chart, and the useful question when watching a video like this one is which parts of that toolkit actually carry the workload and which are context.

This page catalogs the source rather than a mechanized rule set — the account is a first-person walkthrough of one trader's process, not a tested system with a published record. Treat it as a case study in how ICT concepts get assembled into a single coherent approach, and validate any variant of it on your own data before putting it in front of an evaluation.

Topics

ict trading · ict strategy · inner circle trader · trading strategy · pine script · tradingview strategy · price action · order block · market maker · institutional trading · forex strategy

Frequently asked questions

What is an ICT strategy?

ICT (Inner Circle Trader) strategies read price through liquidity and market structure rather than indicators — identifying where stop orders accumulate, how price runs through those levels, and how imbalances and structure breaks signal which side currently holds control.

Which ICT concepts typically appear in this kind of approach?

ICT-based methods are usually built from a small set of recurring components: liquidity sweeps, fair value gaps, market structure and its breaks, and session timing. The source video is presented as a complete walkthrough of the trader's own ICT method, so the specific combination he relies on is described there.

Does a passed FTMO challenge mean an ICT strategy works?

No. A single completed evaluation documents one outcome under one set of market conditions and says nothing about expectancy over time. The transferable part of a video like this is the framework and how its pieces fit together, not the result attached to it.

How can I evaluate an ICT-based approach before trading it?

Define each concept in mechanical terms, then test it on historical intraday data across different market regimes before risking capital or an evaluation fee. Strategy Decoder catalogs video-sourced strategies like this one so you can compare how different traders structure the same underlying methodology.

About this strategy page

This trading strategy was decoded by Strategy Decoder's AI from a public YouTube trading video and turned into a structured, reviewable specification. In the interactive app this page shows the full entry and exit logic, risk management settings, the indicators involved with their parameters, AlgoWizard-compatible logic and a Pine Script export ready for TradingView backtesting — plus an automated backtest verdict when one has been computed for this strategy.

Strategy Decoder catalogs 2,229 decoded strategies. Each one is extracted with confidence scoring, cross-linked to the indicators it uses, and kept up to date as new videos are processed daily. Load this page with JavaScript enabled to use the interactive tools, or start from the strategy explorer to filter by methodology, market and timeframe.

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