Market Maker Manipulation, Liquidity, Order Block, Imbalance, Structure

Learn how market maker manipulation, liquidity grabs, order blocks, and imbalances influence price action and impact your trading entries using Smart Money Conc

Published · Updated · Methodology: SMC

Part of: Order Blocks

  • Methodology: SMC
  • Content type: educational

Source video

Decoded from: POR ESTO FALLAN TUS ENTRADAS; MANIPULACIÓN MARKET MAKER,LIQUIDEZ,ORDER BLOCK,IMBALANCE,ESTRUCTURA by It's Smart Money — watch the original

Strategy overview

In Smart Money Concepts, an order block is the candle or zone where large orders are presumed to have been positioned before a strong directional move. What makes this entry different from most order block material is its direction of travel: it is not a lesson on how to place an entry, but a diagnosis of why entries fail. The title of the source video — "POR ESTO FALLAN TUS ENTRADAS" ("this is why your entries fail") — sets the frame, and the order block appears inside it as one exhibit among several rather than as the answer.

The video, from the Spanish-language channel It's Smart Money, strings five terms together in its own title: market maker manipulation, liquidity, order block, imbalance, and structure. Read as a chain rather than a checklist, that sequence describes a fairly specific worldview — one in which the failed entry is not a mistake of technique but the intended outcome of someone else's positioning, and where the retail order sitting at an obvious level is itself the liquidity being collected. That framing puts the order block in an unusual role: less a place to buy, more a piece of evidence for reconstructing what already happened to a trade that went wrong.

No rule set was extracted for this entry, so this page does not carry a mechanical breakdown of the setup. What it catalogs is the vocabulary the video works in and how those five concepts relate to one another; the specific demonstrations, timeframes and market examples stay with the source. If the diagnostic angle is what interests you, the video itself is the place to see it argued — and anything you take from it still has to be defined precisely enough to test before it can be trusted.

Topics

market maker manipulation · liquidity trading · order block strategy · imbalance trading · market structure · smart money concepts · smc strategy · price action trading · trading strategy · advanced trading concepts · tradingview strategy · pine script

Frequently asked questions

What is an order block in Smart Money Concepts?

An order block is a candle or price zone that SMC traders read as the origin of a strong directional move, on the assumption that significant orders were positioned there. It is used as a reference area where price may react if it returns.

What does "market maker manipulation" mean in this context?

It refers to the SMC idea that price is deliberately driven through obvious levels to trigger resting stop orders before moving in the intended direction. In this video's framing, that mechanism is offered as the reason entries placed at obvious levels fail.

How do order blocks and imbalances relate to each other?

They describe two sides of the same fast move: the order block marks where the move originated, while the imbalance (or fair value gap) is the inefficient stretch of price the move left behind. Both are used as reference areas for a potential return.

Does this page include the video's entry rules?

No — no rule set was extracted for this entry, so the page covers the concepts and the source rather than a step-by-step method. Strategy Decoder marks which strategies have a decoded structure available and which, like this one, are cataloged by concept only.

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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