What is smart money? — the footprints big players leave on a chart

In plain words

Some market participants move very large amounts of money — institutions, funds, holders of big positions on exchanges. They are often called smart money or big players.

A big player cannot buy or sell everything at once. Buying too much at once pushes the price up, so they could not fill the whole order at the price they wanted. Instead they split the order and trade when others are moving the other way.

When that much money moves, it leaves footprints on the chart. SMC (Smart Money Concepts) is a set of ways to read those footprints.

The concept

SMC looks at three things.

1. Market structure — is price making higher highs and lows (up) or lower ones (down), and does that flow continue (BOS) or turn (CHoCH)? → Part 2
2. Zones big players leave — places price moved through so fast they were left empty (FVG), and the last candle before a big move (order block). → Parts 3 and 4
3. Liquidity — where many traders are likely to keep stop orders: equal highs and lows (EQH · EQL), yesterday’s and last week’s highs and lows. Big players fill their size against those orders. → Parts 5 and 7

Add premium · discount (Part 6), which splits price into an expensive half and a cheap half, and you have everything in our chart’s SMC menu.

Above is a real Bitcoin daily chart (June 2024 – November 2025) with only our SMC “Swing” structure turned on. Price broke its previous high three times (the markers) and the uptrend continued. That is what SMC means by “structure”.

An analogy

Picture a snowy mountain path. When an elephant (a big player) walks by, it leaves deep footprints. A rabbit’s (a retail trader’s) prints are soon covered.

• Market structure is the direction the elephant is walking.
• FVGs and order blocks are where the elephant took big steps. It often comes back the same way.
• Liquidity is the burrow where the rabbits gather. The elephant goes where the food (orders) is.

Footprints cannot tell you for sure where the elephant goes next. But you get lost far less than walking blind.

In practice

People who use SMC usually read a chart in this order.

1. The big flow first — on the daily or 4-hour chart, is the swing structure up or down?
2. Find zones — in that direction, look for an FVG or order block price may come back to.
3. Confirm on a smaller flow — when price reaches the zone, check whether the internal structure turns (CHoCH) on the 1-hour or 15-minute chart.
4. Plan for being wrong first — if the zone breaks, the idea was wrong. That is where the stop goes.

Part 8, “Practice”, walks through this order on a real chart.

Going deeper

Why look at “structure”?

Indicators such as RSI or moving averages are second lines computed from price. SMC looks at the shape of price itself — highs, lows, gaps. It reacts without that delay, but different people easily draw different lines on the same chart.

Our chart fixes the rules for highs and lows in code to remove that “different for everyone” part. The same candles always give the same lines, whoever looks.

Watch out for

• Each timeframe has its own structure. The 1-hour can be down while the daily is up. Decide which flow you follow first.
• Not every zone holds. A zone is a candidate where price may react.
• News and big events run straight through structure (like the crash of 10–11 October 2025).

On our chart

In the coin detail’s Chart tab, press the SMC button to open its menu.

• Structure — one of “Off / Swing / Swing + internal”. It starts Off.
• Add-ons — FVG · Order blocks · EQH · EQL · Premium · Discount zones · Previous day/week high·low. FVG and order blocks start on.

Your choice is remembered on this device and applies to every chart in the Chart tab (single, 2×2, 4×4).

Our chart counts closed candles only: the candle still forming is left out, so you are not misled by signals that appear and vanish inside it. It also counts only within the candles the chart received (500 from Binance), so very old highs and lows may not show.

Next: the backbone of SMC, market structure — BOS and CHoCH.