Smart Money from scratch: where to start

Updated: 7 November 2026

In short: Learn Smart Money in this order: candles and trend, market structure (swings, BOS, CHoCH), liquidity, zones of interest (order blocks and imbalances), and only then entries. Start with order blocks before you understand structure and your markup becomes guesswork.

Step 1. Structure

Learn to mark swings and see the sequence of highs and lows. BOS — a break with the trend on a candle close; CHoCH — the first break against the trend.

Step 2. Liquidity

Where the crowd's stops sit: beyond equal highs and lows and beyond obvious levels. Price often goes there first.

Step 3. Zones and entry

An order block is the last candle before an impulse that breaks structure. Mark it by its full range, lay the 0 / 0.25 / 0.5 / 0.75 / 1 grid over it and look for entries in the 0.25–0.75 band. And always — risk per trade and a stop beyond the zone.

An 8-week plan

Weeks 1–2: candles, trend, swings. Weeks 3–4: structure — BOS and CHoCH, three-level structure (higher, internal, micro). Weeks 5–6: liquidity — equal highs and lows, stop hunts, inducement. Weeks 7–8: zones of interest — order block, imbalance, the quartile grid, entries in the 0.25–0.75 zone, and your first virtual trades by plan.

Example of a quartile grid

A demand zone from 100 to 104 (using the full candle range, wicks included). The grid: 0 — 100, 0.25 — 101, 0.5 — 102, 0.75 — 103, 1 — 104. The 0 and 1 boundaries are "alarms": price has arrived, time to pay attention. The entry zone is 101 to 103. The stop goes beyond the zone, below 100. The same grid is built for any zone — an order block, an imbalance, a range, a single candle.

Typical mistakes at the start

Seeing an order block in every candle. Entering without a liquidity grab. Mixing up BOS and CHoCH. Marking zones by candle bodies instead of the full range. Trading against the higher structure. Each of these is easy to catch with answer-checked exercises — which is why every lesson in the Extremum app ends with a review of your mistakes.