The Smart Money V2 strategy applies institutional trading concepts — the same techniques used by banks, hedge funds, and market makers — to identify high-probability entries. It detects where institutional players are accumulating or distributing positions by analyzing Order Blocks, Fair Value Gaps, and Liquidity Sweeps.
Category: Smart Money Concepts (SMC) Timeframe: Single (5m default) Best Regime: Trending markets Typical Hold Time: 1-4 hours Min Confidence: 0.70
An Order Block is a consolidation zone before a strong impulsive move. It represents an area where institutional players accumulated their position. When price returns to this zone, there is high probability of a reaction because those same players will defend their position.
VECTRA detects Order Blocks by identifying:
Strong impulsive candles with volume above 1.3x average
The consolidation zone (high/low range) before the impulse
Volume confirmation at the OB level
OB Mitigation Tracking: Once an Order Block has been "used" (price touched it and reacted), it is marked as mitigated and will not generate another signal for 24 hours. This prevents repeated entries on exhausted zones.
A Fair Value Gap is a 3-candle pattern where the wicks of candle 1 and candle 3 don't overlap, leaving a "gap" in price. This gap represents an imbalance between buyers and sellers that the market tends to fill.
VECTRA scores FVG quality based on:
Gap size relative to ATR
Whether the gap is in a premium or discount zone
Partial fill percentage (50-70% fill is optimal)
Liquidity Sweeps occur when price briefly breaks a key level (where stop losses are clustered), triggers those stops, and then reverses. This is the classic "stop hunt" pattern used by institutional players.
The strategy incorporates ICT (Inner Circle Trader) Killzone timing to identify the highest-probability trading windows:
London Open
07:00-10:00
×1.08
NY Open
12:00-15:00
×1.10 (Best)
London Close
15:00-17:00
×1.05
Asian Range
01:00-05:00
×0.90
Off-Killzone
Other
×0.85
Mirror logic in Premium Zone with bearish confirmations:
Stop Loss: 1.5× ATR below entry (longs) or above entry (shorts)
Take Profit: 3.0× ATR — targets nearest liquidation cluster when available
R:R Ratio: Minimum 2.0 required
Smart Money V2 includes an optional MTF mode (used by Smart Money MTF strategy) that adds Higher Timeframe bias analysis. When enabled, the strategy internally performs HTF trend analysis via EMA alignment and structure detection before applying it to the LTF signal generation.
swing_lookback
50
Candles for swing point detection
ob_volume_threshold
1.3
Min volume ratio for OB confirmation
min_confidence
0.70
Minimum confidence to emit signal
mitigation_expiry_hours
24
Hours before mitigated OB reactivates
cooldown_seconds
900
15-min cooldown between signals per symbol
use_killzone_filter
True
Enable ICT Killzone timing