An order block is the institutional footprint smart-money traders hunt on a chart. In Inner Circle Trader (ICT) language, it is the last opposite-color candle before a strong displacement move that breaks market structure, often a single red body sitting beneath a 6% impulsive rally or a single green body capping the high before price collapses. Price tends to return to that candle before the next leg, which is why traders treat it as a high-conviction reaction zone.

The block is one of the cleanest concepts inside Smart Money Concepts (SMC), and it pairs naturally with the fair value gap framework that fills the imbalance left on the displacement leg. Here is what an order block actually is, how to identify one without overfitting,…