What are Smart Money Concepts (SMC) strategies?

Smart Money Concepts is a price-action framework — order blocks, fair value gaps, liquidity sweeps, market-structure breaks — that frames price moves as the footprint of large institutional orders. Practically, SMC strategies buy or sell at zones where 'smart money' supposedly accumulated, with structure breaks as confirmation.

Stripped of narrative, SMC rules are testable price patterns like any others, and that's how they should be treated: we implement order blocks, fair value gaps and market-structure indicators as ordinary strategy building blocks you can backtest and validate. Some SMC configurations test respectably; the framework's mystique is not evidence, the out-of-sample numbers are.