One may enter when price touches a Point of Interest. Another waits for liquidity to be swept first. Someone else prefers a retracement into an FVG. The important part is not how many SMC concepts are visible on the chart, but which setup you are actually trying to trade and how you want to enter it.
This becomes even more important when turning SMC into an automated strategy. The rules have to be clear. A zone alone is not enough.
Three Different SMC Approaches
In SMC Forge I separated the main setup logic into three Strategy Modes.
POI Reaction is the simplest starting point. Price reaches a relevant SMC area and the EA looks for an opportunity around that zone. I normally use this as a baseline because it gives a clear picture of how often the selected areas actually produce setups.
Liquidity Sweep is more selective. A BUY setup requires sell-side liquidity to be taken first, while a SELL setup looks for buy-side liquidity to be swept. This can remove many basic POI reactions and gives the trade a different context.
FVG Retracement focuses specifically on price returning into an active Fair Value Gap. I use this when I want the retracement itself to be part of the setup rather than simply trading a general reaction from a zone.
None of these modes is automatically better. They are designed for different market situations.
Entry Style Can Change the Same Strategy
After choosing the Strategy Mode, the next decision is how the EA should enter.
Direct Touch enters when price reaches the valid area. It is useful for testing the strategy with minimal confirmation.
Direct Mid waits for a deeper price inside the zone. The entry can be better, but some trades will be missed if price reacts early.
Confirm Balanced waits for additional confirmation before execution. I usually compare this directly with Direct Touch to see whether the extra confirmation actually improves the behaviour of the strategy.
Confirm Strict is more selective again. It can reduce weak setups, but it can also remove good trades. Stricter does not automatically mean better.
A few simple combinations I would test first are:
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POI Reaction + Direct Touch — simple baseline.
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POI Reaction + Confirm Balanced — same setup with more confirmation.
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Liquidity Sweep + Confirm Balanced — more selective setup and entry.
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FVG Retracement + Direct Mid — focused on deeper retracement entries.
These are not profitable presets. They are useful starting points for comparison.
Timeframe Is the Next Layer
Once the basic Strategy + Entry combination makes sense, I look at Setup TF and Entry TF.
For example, H1 Setup + M5 Entry allows the larger SMC context to come from H1 while the actual execution happens on M5. In other situations, M5 + M5 may be more suitable if the goal is to capture shorter moves.
I normally test the core setup first before adding Trend Filter, sessions or other filters. Otherwise too many settings change at once and it becomes difficult to understand what actually improved or damaged the result.
This is also the idea behind SMC Forge: instead of forcing one fixed SMC method, the EA separates Strategy, Entry Mode and Timeframe so different combinations can be tested independently.
The goal is not to find the most complicated setup. It is to find a combination that fits the type of market behaviour you want to trade, then test it properly.
Previous: SMC Forge — From Discretionary SMC to Clear, Repeatable Automation
Next: POI Reaction: Direct Entry or Wait for Confirmation?
If you want to test these combinations directly in MT5, you can find SMC Forge here:
