Smart Money Concepts: a working guide to how Cini FX reads the market

Every obvious high, low, trendline and round number has stop orders resting behind it. That pool of orders is liquidity, and it is fuel. A large buyer who needs size cannot simply lift the offer — they need sellers, and the densest cluster of sellers sits below the most obvious low on the chart.

This is why price so often dips beneath a support level, triggers a wave of stops, and then reverses hard. That dip is a liquidity sweep, not a breakdown. The practical rule: treat clean equal highs and equal lows as targets, not as walls. Cini FX uses the nearest opposing liquidity pool as its first take-profit level, because that is where the move is most likely to pause.

Structure is simply the sequence of swing highs and lows. An uptrend makes higher highs and higher lows; a downtrend does the opposite. Two events matter:

• Break of structure (BOS) — price breaks a swing point in the direction of the existing trend. This is continuation. It tells you to keep trading with the trend, not against it.
• Change of character (CHOCH) — price breaks the most recent structural higher low in an uptrend, or lower high in a downtrend. This is the first genuine sign of reversal.

Confusing the two flips your trade direction, which is the single most expensive mistake in SMC. A CHOCH requires the break of a structural swing — the one that actually built the trend — not any random wiggle. Breaks of minor swings are market structure shifts, useful for entry timing, but they are not reversals.

A premium/discount (PD) array is a zone price left behind that it is likely to revisit. Three matter most:

• Order block — the last opposing candle before a strong, displacing move. It marks where the large orders were absorbed. Price returning to it often finds the remainder of that interest.
• Fair value gap (FVG) — a three-candle imbalance where the middle candle moved so fast that the wicks either side never overlapped. Price inefficiency tends to get rebalanced, so these gaps act as magnets and then as support or resistance.
• Breaker — an order block that failed and was traded through. Once broken, it flips polarity and becomes resistance instead of support.

A PD array on its own is weak. A PD array sitting at a higher-timeframe level that price has already respected two or three times is where conviction comes from.

Inducement is the obvious pullback inside a move — the one that tempts early entries and leaves a neat little low beneath it. Institutions need that pool of stops to fill their own position, so they take it before the real move begins.

The practical consequence: after a change of character, mark the first pullback inside the CHOCH leg and wait. Entering before that inducement low is swept is the most common way a correct read still becomes a losing trade. It also tells you where your stop belongs — beyond the swept extreme, with a small buffer, never at the CHOCH level itself, which gets hunted on the second test.

The most reliable filter in this entire method is also the simplest: only trade levels drawn on the daily and weekly charts, and only in the direction of the daily bias. Levels drawn on 15-minute charts fail the large majority of the time, because they were never meaningful to anyone with size.

Cini FX therefore splits the job. Daily and weekly charts supply the levels and the directional bias. The 4-hour chart supplies the structure break for gold, forex and equities; crypto uses the daily for structure because it is noisier. Then the lower timeframe — 15-minute for most markets, 4-hour for crypto — supplies nothing but entry timing.

Never enter on the breakout candle. The break proves intent; the retest proves acceptance. Cini FX waits for price to return into the zone and then demands a fully closed confirmation candle of one of three kinds:

• Rejection wick — a wick at least 1.5 times the body, closing back above the reclaimed level.
• Engulfing candle — the current body fully engulfs the previous one, both inside the zone.
• Inside-bar breakout — compression followed by expansion in the expected direction.

The entry zone itself is a Fibonacci golden pocket — the 61.8% to 79% retracement of the displacement leg — rather than a fixed pip distance, so it scales with volatility. The confirmation window is three candles. If nothing closes correctly in those three candles, the setup expires and is never taken late.

The weakness of discretionary SMC is that every rule is a matter of opinion. Cini FX converts the whole read into five gates, each scored out of 20:

• Daily bias — moving-average stack, daily structure and weekly context.
• Level quality — timeframe, number of prior reactions, round-number confluence, how long it has gone untested.
• Break quality — body size relative to average range, where the candle closed, clearance beyond the level, volume expansion.
• Fibonacci — depth of the retracement and whether it overlaps a PD array.
• Confirmation — which of the three candle types appeared, if any.

Every gate has a minimum. Fail one, and there is no trade regardless of the total. Pass all five and the total decides the risk: 75 to trade at all, 85 for a larger allocation, 95 for the maximum. Everything else is a no-trade, and a day with no signals is a normal day.

No edge survives poor sizing. The engine caps risk per trade, caps the loss allowed in one day, caps combined open exposure, limits concurrent positions to three, and trips a kill switch after three consecutive losses or when the daily loss limit is reached. Correlated setups — two euro longs, Bitcoin and Ethereum together — are either merged into one position or halved.

Profit is taken in structure, not in hope: 35% at the first target with the stop moved to break-even, 40% at the second with the stop trailed to the first, and the final quarter left to run.

• Calling every counter-trend break a CHOCH when it is only a minor swing break.
• Trading a change of character at a random price rather than at a higher-timeframe level.
• Entering before the inducement has been swept.
• Placing the stop at the structure level instead of beyond the swept extreme.
• Taking a retest that opposes the daily bias.
• Treating a 15-minute level as if it mattered to anyone but you.

The dashboard runs this entire sequence automatically on nine markets, publishes an entry, stop and three targets for each, and logs every setup — including the ones it rejected and why — in the journal.

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See how the model trades gold (XAUUSD) specifically

Educational material only. Nothing here is financial advice; trading carries risk of loss.