What's one thing about pickleball — gear, your body, recovery, anything — that you wish someone would just fix?
Could be paddle stuff, grip, footwear, joint pain, court bags, drills that don't work, whatever's actually bugging you. Curious what people are quietly putting up with vs what the marketing tells you to care about.
Cheers.
Both have a cult. Both have haters. Both can work. Here's the comparison I wish I'd had before I picked one.
What each one actually is:
ICT / SMC — pattern-based price action. You look at the chart and identify order blocks, fair value gaps, liquidity sweeps, market structure breaks. Free. Works on any chart.
Orderflow — you look at the actual order book. Footprint charts, volume profile, delta, DOM. You see what buyers and sellers are doing in real time, not what they did 20 candles ago.
The honest pros and cons no guru tells you:
ICT pros
- Free. Works on TradingView. Zero infrastructure.
- Once you "see it," you see it on any timeframe, any instrument.
- Pattern recognition transfers to forex, futures, crypto, indices.
ICT cons
- Backtested-looking screenshots are usually picked after the move. Survivorship bias is rampant.
- "Just wait for confluence" can become an excuse to pass on every trade.
- The community is cult-y. Question anything and you're "not getting it."
Orderflow pros
- Actual data, not pattern matching. You see real auction dynamics.
- Imbalances on footprint charts give you reasons, not just shapes.
- Less hindsight bias — if 1000 contracts traded at the ask, that's not a Rorschach test.
Orderflow cons
- $100-200/mo for the data feed + platform (Sierra Chart, NinjaTrader, Bookmap).
- Steep learning curve. Six weeks before the screens stop looking like noise.
- Mostly only works on futures (ES, NQ, CL) where the data is centralized. Forex orderflow is fragmented and unreliable.
When to pick what:
- You have $500-2000 to trade with → ICT. Don't pay for orderflow tools on a tiny account.
- You're trading ES/NQ futures with $5k+ → orderflow is worth the cost.
- You're forex retail → ICT, because forex orderflow is genuinely unreliable.
- You're a beginner → ICT for the first 6 months, then optionally layer in volume profile.
The unpopular take: most "ICT vs Orderflow" debates are tribal. The best traders I've watched use both — ICT for context (where are we in the structure?), orderflow for confirmation (are buyers actually showing up here?).
Anyone here actually using both? Curious which orderflow tools (Bookmap, Sierra, NinjaTrader) people actually pay for.