I write every guide on this site. I share a first name with Michael Marcus — the commodities trader who turned $30,000 into $80 million and earned a chapter in Market Wizards — and no relation beyond that. He is still the reason I started. Marcus began with an account most people would dismiss as too small to be worth the effort, and what turned it into a fortune was a process he kept running for twenty years without abandoning it. That is the whole argument for learning this properly. The edge compounds. The starting balance is only where it begins.
What this site is
ICTKillzone.com is an independent educational resource covering the trading methodology developed and taught publicly by Michael J. Huddleston, better known as the Inner Circle Trader. It is a one-person project: a library of long-form written guides to concepts that mostly exist elsewhere as many hours of video.
The reason it exists is simple. Huddleston has released an enormous body of material for free — his YouTube channel holds the entire mentorship, at no cost, which is genuinely rare in this industry. But it is video-first, spread across years of uploads, and almost impossible to search when you want to check one specific thing. Meanwhile the written material that should fill that gap tends to define a fair value gap in two sentences and stop.
This site is the middle ground I wanted when I was learning: written explanations detailed enough to actually teach a concept, structured so you can look up one idea without scrubbing through a four-hour lecture to find it.
Everything here derives from Michael J. Huddleston’s public teaching, and if you are learning ICT you should be reading him directly rather than only reading me. His official site is theinnercircletrader.com; the full mentorship is free on YouTube; and he posts daily commentary and chart annotations on X and Instagram. This site is a study companion, not a replacement — and it is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to him in any way.
How I got here
I did not go looking for ICT. I went looking for an explanation of why my stop kept getting hit a few points before the move I had correctly called went exactly where I said it would. That is a very particular kind of frustration, and it is the one that leads most people to this material.
The first lecture did not convince me. It irritated me. The claim that price is delivered rather than pushed around by buyers and sellers sounded like something a person says when they want to seem like they know something you don't. I closed the tab.
I came back because the irritating claim kept being right. Not in a vague way — in the specific, checkable way where a level gets drawn before the session opens and price arrives there four hours later. I started marking those levels up front so I could not fool myself after the fact, and the hit rate was not what I expected from something I had already decided was nonsense.
The part that actually changed things was smaller than that, and it took longer to accept. I stopped reading a stop-out as bad luck. My stop was not hit because the market moved against me. It was hit because it was sitting in an obvious place, alongside everyone else's, and getting it was the point. I had spent years thinking I was trading the market. I was the fuel.
Then came the unglamorous part, which is the only part worth being honest about. Understanding an idea and being able to act on it are separated by an enormous amount of tedious work. It took me five years between seeing why a level mattered and being able to sit through a session without arguing with myself, moving a stop, or taking a setup I had already decided did not qualify. Almost none of that was learning new concepts. It was unlearning habits I brought with me.
I am not going to tell you what that made me, because this site does not publish trading records and I am not going to start with my own. What I will tell you is that the distance between knowing and doing is far longer than any course will admit, and that every guide here is written for the person I was in year two — who had the vocabulary, could name every pattern, and still could not string a month together.
There is one more piece, and since it is the only thing here I will ever ask you to pay for, you should hear it from me rather than from an ad. Somewhere around year four I stopped being able to ignore something. Price kept turning to the tick at levels that were not order blocks, not fair value gaps, and not on any chart I could find. I marked them by hand, session after session, for the better part of a year before the pattern held still long enough to describe. Eventually I could draw them before the open instead of recognising them afterwards.
I have not written that up as a guide and I do not intend to. What I have done is build a TradingView indicator that draws a small part of it — the piece I am most confident in, on live charts, with no signals and no claims about what it will do for your account. You can reasonably ask why this one thing is not free like everything else on the site. The honest answer is that the 104 guides document what Huddleston taught publicly, and this is the only part that is mine. It is also, once it ships, what is meant to keep the rest of this site free, ad-free, and not for sale to a prop firm.
That is who this site is for. If you are further along, some of it will read as obvious. If you are earlier, take the beginner path and go slowly. There is no version of this that is quick.
How the guides are written
Every article follows the same structure, so the site is predictable to use: a plain definition, the mechanics of how the concept works, a worked example with specific prices, the mistakes that most commonly break it, and a FAQ answering what people actually search for. Concepts are cross-linked, so reading about one array leads naturally into the related ones.
Where the ICT community disagrees about a definition — and it does, constantly, particularly on newer concepts — the guides say so rather than picking one reading and presenting it as settled. Where a concept is recent enough that the community understanding is still forming, that gets flagged explicitly. Terminology also drifts: ICT has explained the same idea slightly differently in 2017, 2022 and 2024, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
Worked examples use illustrative price sequences to demonstrate mechanics. They are teaching tools showing how a setup is structured — not records of trades taken, and not a claim about what any strategy returns.
What this site is not
Not affiliated with Michael Huddleston, the Inner Circle Trader brand, or any ICT-branded product. Not a signal service, a mentorship, or a course. Not financial advice — trading carries substantial risk of loss and nothing here is a recommendation to trade anything.
There are no advertisements and no affiliate links in the guides. An indicator built by the same one person is in development and will be offered separately; where it comes up, it is clearly marked as a product. The education stays free and complete either way.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, I want to fix it. ICT terminology moves, some concepts have competing definitions, and a written guide can drift from what the source material actually says. Corrections are genuinely welcome through the contact page — especially on newer concepts, where the odds of getting a detail wrong are highest. Several articles exist in their current form because a reader pointed out something imprecise.