Smart Money Concepts and ICT-derived vocabulary — Change of Character, Break of Structure, order blocks, fair value gaps — gives traders a genuinely useful shared language for describing price action. The problem isn't the vocabulary itself. It's that most traders use these terms consistently in conversation and inconsistently in their actual journal, which quietly breaks the one thing that makes the vocabulary useful in the first place: the ability to check, across many trades, whether a specific concept actually correlates with better results.
Why "I traded a CHOCH setup" isn't specific enough for a journal
In casual conversation, "I traded a CHOCH setup" communicates enough for another trader to picture roughly what happened. In a journal meant to produce real statistics, it's not specific enough, because it conflates two different things: the entry model (what kind of move you were betting on — most commonly a reversal, since CHOCH by definition marks a character change against the prior trend) and the confirmation (the specific structural event — the CHOCH itself — that had to occur before you were allowed to act). Blending these into one label means you can never separately ask "how do my reversal trades perform" versus "how much does requiring a clean CHOCH specifically improve my results, compared to trades without one."
Separating entry model from confirmation, concretely
Reversal and Continuation are entry models — the underlying directional hypothesis. CHOCH, BOS, and a second confirming leg are confirmations — the specific, checkable evidence required before entry. An order block or fair value gap is often better modeled as part of your setup's defined entry zone rather than a confirmation on its own, since it typically describes where you're willing to enter, not whether the move you're betting on has actually been confirmed to be happening.
This is precisely why mysetuplap separates entryModel and confirmationId into two distinct fields on every trade, rather than folding SMC/ICT vocabulary into a single free-text setup description — a trader logging a reversal trade can specify entryModel as "Reversal" and separately log confirmation as "CHOCH," which makes both concepts independently filterable in Analytics, instead of only retrievable by searching notes for a specific term.
Why "clean" confirmation needs a stricter definition than it usually gets
The vaguest part of most SMC/ICT-based playbooks is exactly the part that matters most: what counts as a "clean" CHOCH or BOS, specifically enough that it's the same standard every time, not a looser standard after a losing streak and a stricter one after a winning streak. A useful test is whether the confirmation is defined precisely enough that a different trader, looking at the same chart with no other context, would agree it happened. "Price broke structure" passes that test if the specific structural level being broken is named in advance. "It felt like a break" does not.
Confirmations belong in your Playbook, not just your memory
Because confirmation vocabulary gets used loosely so easily, it benefits specifically from being defined once, in writing, in a Playbook entry's required confirmations — rather than re-decided, semi-consciously, trade by trade. A PlaybookEntry that explicitly links to specific Confirmation records (mysetuplap's PlaybookConfirmation join) means a setup's confirmation requirement is fixed and checkable, not something that drifts based on how the last few trades using that vocabulary happened to go.
What this actually buys you
Once entry model and confirmation are separated, cleanly defined fields rather than blended vocabulary, genuinely new questions become answerable: does requiring a CHOCH before entry meaningfully improve win rate compared to entering on structure alone, for this specific trader, in this specific market? Do Continuation trades built around a BOS confirmation outperform Continuation trades without one? These are exactly the questions SMC/ICT vocabulary is supposed to help answer — and they're only answerable once the vocabulary is logged precisely enough, trade after trade, to actually be measured rather than just described.
