Practical ICT Strategies – 7th Edition: Rebuilt From the Ground Up

The 7th Edition of Practical ICT Strategies is live, and it is the first edition I have felt was genuinely worth announcing on the blog.

I have put out six editions before this one and stayed quiet on almost all of them, because I only write a post when the change actually earns your time. This one does. The 7th is not the 6th with a few chapters bolted on. I rewrote it from the first page.

Chapters were reordered, some were cut, several were added, and the whole book was rebuilt around one idea I kept getting wrong in the earlier editions: a reference book and a teaching book are not the same thing.

The problem with the previous editions

The first six editions were organised the way I think about ICT, not the way a new trader learns it.

They were grouped by category: all the PD arrays in one section, all the liquidity concepts in another, all the market profiles in a third. That is perfect if you already know ICT and want to look something up. It is painful if you are starting out, because chapter 9 quietly assumes something that is not taught until chapter 31.

I watched this happen in the comments for two years. Someone would read the order block chapter, understand it perfectly, then ask a question that showed they had no idea where in the range that order block was supposed to sit. The information was all there. The order was wrong.

So the 7th Edition is sequenced. Every chapter is built only from what the chapters before it already taught. Nothing points forward, and nothing assumes knowledge you do not have yet.

What I removed, and why it matters more than what I added

This is the part I expect some pushback on, so let me be blunt about it. I removed the following from the book entirely:

• HH / HL / LH / LL labelling and BOS
• CHoCH (Change of Character)
• Candle Range Theory (CRT)
• Inducement (IDM)
• Single Candle Order Block (SCOB)

None of these are ICT concepts. They come from the wider SMC community, and several are recent inventions that got bolted onto ICT by people repackaging his material.

I have nothing against traders who use them. Some are genuinely useful. But if you buy a book called Practical ICT Strategies, you should get ICT, taught the way Michael Huddleston teaches it, not ICT blended with whatever is trending on YouTube this year. That blend is exactly what makes the method so confusing to learn, because the two frameworks define market structure differently and quietly contradict each other.

So the book now teaches market structure the ICT way: swing highs and swing lows, the short, intermediate and long term hierarchy, and Market Structure Shift confirmed by CISD. No BOS, no CHoCH. If that is not what you are looking for, this book is not for you, and I would rather tell you now than take your money.

What is new in the 7th Edition

A proper introduction chapter. Chapter 0 covers who the book is for, who it is honestly not for, why most traders fail, ICT versus ordinary price action, and a twelve week road map for working through the rest. Five minutes there saves you months later.

The PD array toolkit, split and rebuilt. The blocks and the gaps are now two focused chapters instead of one long list. Order block, breaker, mitigation, rejection, propulsion and hidden order block in one. FVG, inverse FVG, implied FVG, balanced price range and liquidity void in the other. Each one taught with the same routine, so you learn the rhythm once and apply it to all of them.

A clear breaker versus mitigation distinction. This is the single most misunderstood pair in ICT, and the older editions blurred it. The rule is now stated plainly: a breaker requires a liquidity sweep, a mitigation block does not. No sweep, no breaker. For the mitigation block, price simply fails to make a higher high or a lower low, the failed leg becomes the block, and the last opposite candle is the sensitive part.

Top-down analysis, done properly. The old version was two paragraphs. It is now a full chapter with the complete timeframe ladder: what to do when the daily and the four hour agree, what to do when they disagree, and exactly where the entry comes from in each case.

New models. Venom Model 2025, the Reaper Inversion Fair Value Gap, the Enigma Fair Value Gap, the Suspension Block, and the Unicorn Model with SMT divergence, all updated for how price is actually delivering in 2026.

SMT divergence, corrected. Earlier editions were loose about correlation. The 7th separates positively and negatively correlated pairs and shows the divergence for each. Positively correlated: one asset makes a higher high while the other makes a lower high instead of matching it. Negatively correlated: one makes a higher high while the other makes a higher low instead of the lower low it should. The chart examples now match the explanation.

Weekly and intraday profiles, one at a time. Each weekly profile is shown for a bullish day and a bearish day separately, with its own chart. The intraday buy and sell profiles are separated the same way.

Execution and risk as a real section, not a footnote. Building a trading plan and daily routine, position sizing and drawdown rules, psychology and journaling, and a backtesting process. Four chapters. Most traders skip this material, and most traders do not last. The two facts are related.

What is inside

283 pages. 31 chapters plus three appendices, arranged as a path you can actually follow from start to finish.

Start here. The introduction and what ICT trading actually is.

Part 1, foundations. Market structure, MSS and CISD, displacement and the fair value gap, premium and discount with OTE and consequent encroachment, liquidity, the PD array toolkit of blocks and gaps, time and price, and a top-down analysis capstone. Nine chapters, read in order.

Part 2, the strategies. Daily bias, Optimal Trade Entry, the order block strategy, Turtle Soup, the Silver Bullet, the Judas Swing, the Power of 3, the Unicorn Model with SMT, the market maker buy and sell models, weekly and intraday profiles, session scalping, low frequency swing trading, the Bread and Butter intraday model, the full intraday framework, Venom Model 2025, and advanced PD array plays.

Part 3, execution and risk. Trading plan and routine, risk management, psychology and journaling, and backtesting.

Appendices. An A to Z glossary, the ICT 2024 mentorship model, and complete killzone, Silver Bullet and macro time tables in both EST and GMT.

Look inside the book

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Part 2 is a menu, not a checklist

This matters, so I want to be clear about it. There are sixteen strategy chapters, and you do not need to trade all of them. You are not supposed to.

Pick the one that fits your schedule and your temperament. If you have a full time job and can only look at charts in the evening, the low frequency swing model suits you and the Silver Bullet does not. If you can sit at the New York open, the opposite is true.

Read one, backtest it across fifty setups, and only then look at a second. A trader with one model and five hundred repetitions beats a trader with sixteen models and none every single time. That advice is in the book too, and it is the part I most want people to actually follow.

Who this is not for

Same as always, and I would rather lose the sale here than in a refund request later.

It is not for anyone expecting instant profits, guaranteed win rates, or a system that prints money without screen time. It is not for someone who has never read a candlestick chart, because the book assumes that much. And it is not for traders who want signals handed to them rather than a method they can run themselves.

ICT is a probability framework, and the final chapters are honest about where it loses its edge: low liquidity sessions, news driven dislocations, ranging instruments, and why a win rate above 70 percent is not a realistic target.

Existing customers, and lifetime free updates

If you have ever bought any edition, the 7th is already yours, free. It is sitting in your inbox right now. You do not need to do anything.

And the deal just got better. From now on, every customer gets lifetime free updates. Not one year, not the next edition only, but every future edition for as long as the book exists, at no extra cost. You buy it once, and you never pay for an update again.

Get the 7th Edition

The book is a single PDF. Instant download, works on any device, and yes, you can print it. Your purchase includes lifetime free updates, so this is the last time you ever pay for it.

Everything on this blog stays free, the way it always has. The book simply exists for people who would rather have the whole method in order, in one place, than assemble it from a hundred separate articles.

And if you read it, tell me what is missing. The 8th Edition gets built out of your comments, the same way this one did.