The ICT Vs SMC Origin Story: Birth Of Two Trading Methodologies
To truly appreciate the significance of the ICT vs SMC Origin Story, it’s essential to dive deep into its components.
Every Powerful Idea Has a Beginning
Understanding the ICT vs SMC Origin Story is essential for grasping the evolution of trading strategies.
The ICT vs SMC Origin Story illustrates how two distinct trading methodologies emerged from the same foundational principles.
In this exploration of the ICT vs SMC Origin Story, we will uncover the key influences that shaped these methodologies.
Welcome back to Day 2 of the ICT vs SMC series. Yesterday we broke down what these two methodologies actually are and how they relate to each other. Today we go deeper — into the story behind it all.
Because before you mark up a single order block or draw a fair value gap, you should know where these ideas came from and who built them. Understanding the roots will change how you see everything on a chart.
Let’s get into it.
As we delve into the ICT vs SMC Origin Story, it’s crucial to recognize the impact of early experiences on the development of these strategies.
The Man Behind It All: Michael J. Huddleston
The entire ICT and SMC world traces back to one person — Michael J. Huddleston, born and raised in St. Joseph, Michigan. He didn’t come from money or finance. His uncle, who had found success trading commodities, consistently encouraged him to look into futures and options trading. Michael was skeptical at first — and his actual career started with servicing vending machines.
That’s not an exaggeration. The man whose ideas now dominate trading YouTube, Reddit communities, and prop firm prep courses around the world started out servicing vending machines.
This phase of the ICT vs SMC Origin Story highlights the trials faced by traders and the lessons learned from them.
Ultimately, these experiences laid the groundwork for the comprehensive ICT vs SMC Origin Story that we discuss today.
How It Actually Started — Getting the Timeline Right
Here’s something most blogs get wrong about Huddleston’s story, and we want to give you the accurate version.
His trading journey didn’t begin with Larry Williams. It began when he came across an advertisement for a trading course in Entrepreneur magazine. He enrolled, got into the markets, and suffered early, painful losses — including a 50% loss on Orange Juice Options that stung badly enough to send him back to the drawing board.
It was after those early losses that he sought better education and enrolled in courses taught by Larry Williams. That improved his approach significantly. He developed a system using stochastic divergence to go long on the hourly timeframe — and in the raging bull market of the mid-1990s, it worked. He went on a nine-month winning streak and started believing he had cracked the market.
Then conditions changed. And nearly everything he had built evaporated.
That painful experience — gaining and losing — became the foundation of everything he would later teach. He spent years rebuilding, researching, and developing a completely different way of reading the market.
Alt text: Timeline diagram showing Michael Huddleston’s trading journey from early life in Michigan through losses, Larry Williams courses, a 9-month winning streak, a market shift reversal, years of research, and the birth of the ICT framework in the early 2000s.
How the “Inner Circle Trader” Name Was Born
The understanding of this ICT vs SMC Origin Story is critical for anyone looking to master trading methodologies based on these principles.
Here’s a detail most people don’t know. The name had no deep philosophical meaning behind it. Huddleston came across a course that Larry Williams ran called the “Inner Circle Workshop” — and simply liked the phrase. He took it, made it his own brand, and began presenting his work under the title Inner Circle Trader.
That’s it. One of the most recognised names in retail trading was born because a phrase sounded cool to a Michigan trader rebuilding from losses.
Richard Wyckoff’s influence is also a pivotal element in the ICT vs SMC Origin Story, showcasing the evolution of market analysis.
What He Actually Built
What Huddleston created was not just another set of indicators or patterns. He built a completely different explanation for why price moves. His argument: markets are not random, and they don’t move simply because of supply and demand pressure. Instead, institutional players — banks, hedge funds, large operators — algorithmically engineer price movement to hunt retail stop losses and accumulate liquidity before making their real move.
Thus, the ICT vs SMC Origin Story is not just about techniques; it’s about the legacy of market understanding.
As the ICT vs SMC Origin Story unfolds, we see how these methodologies became accessible to a broader audience.
From this came the core ICT tools: Order Blocks, Fair Value Gaps, liquidity pools, market structure analysis, and his concept of the Interbank Price Delivery Algorithm (IPDA).
Tomorrow, we will further explore the implications of the ICT vs SMC Origin Story on modern trading practices.
Understanding the full context of the ICT vs SMC Origin Story will enhance your trading strategies significantly.
Join us as we unravel the complexities of the ICT vs SMC Origin Story and its relevance in today’s market.
Anticipate more insights from the ICT vs SMC Origin Story that will guide your trading journey.
The Wyckoff Foundation
No origin story for ICT or SMC is complete without mentioning Richard Wyckoff — a stock market analyst and educator from the early 1900s who was the first to formally map out how large operators move markets through predictable phases of accumulation, markup, distribution, and markdown.
Huddleston built on those foundational ideas and modernised them with new terminology and precision tools. The connection is direct: what Wyckoff called a “Spring” — a false move below support to trap sellers — SMC traders today call a liquidity grab. Same concept, a century apart.
Where SMC Fits In
As Huddleston’s teachings spread through YouTube and trading communities, educators began simplifying and repackaging his ideas into what the community now broadly calls SMC. The core principles stayed the same — the terminology got cleaner, the learning curve got lower, and millions of beginner and intermediate traders found an entry point into institutional thinking they previously had no access to.
Up Next — Day 3
Now that you know the full origin story, tomorrow we tackle the concept that both ICT and SMC are built on — and the one thing every trader using either methodology must get right before anything else works: market structure.
If your market structure reading is off, every order block, every FVG, every setup becomes noise. Day 3 will fix that.
→ See you on Day 3.
