What the ICT 2022 Mentorship Model actually is
The ICT 2022 Mentorship Model is a free, episode-based YouTube series released in 2022 by Michael Huddleston, the trader publicly known as the Inner Circle Trader, and it lays out his full trading methodology in a structured sequence. ICT traders treat the 2022 series as the current canonical entry point to the method, because it is more organised and more recent than his older, scattered content (The Inner Circle Trader, ICT methodology).
The model is a curriculum rather than a single strategy. Across its episodes Huddleston teaches a repeatable read of price, built from a daily bias, a liquidity map, a time window, a structure break and a specific entry object, and the community refers to the whole package as the 2022 Model.
I stress that it is a curriculum because that framing tempers everything that follows. The 2022 Model is one trader's free teaching, organised and clearly delivered, and whether the method it teaches produces a reliable edge is a separate question the curriculum itself does not answer.
What the model teaches: the sequence
The 2022 Model teaches a fixed reading order, and the order is the point. A trader sets a daily bias, maps the liquidity, waits for the right time window, reads the market structure, and then enters at a specific object, rather than hunting for any one pattern in isolation (The Inner Circle Trader, ICT methodology).
| Step | What the model teaches | Concept |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Bias | Read direction off the higher-timeframe dealing range | Premium and discount zones |
| 2. Liquidity | Map where buy-side and sell-side stops rest | Inducement and draw on liquidity |
| 3. Time | Wait for the session window where expansion clusters | Killzones |
| 4. Structure | Confirm the move with a break of structure | BOS and CHoCH |
| 5. Entry | Enter at the order block or fair value gap on the retrace | Order blocks, FVGs, displacement |
The full SMC trading strategy page walks through that sequence as one assembled setup, and each row links out to its own concept deep-dive. I treat the 2022 Model as the umbrella that introduces the sequence, and the concept pages as the place where each piece gets examined honestly.
The Interbank Price Delivery Algorithm, and why it is doctrine
The narrative spine of the 2022 Model is the Interbank Price Delivery Algorithm, or IPDA, which is ICT's name for the idea that an algorithm drives price toward liquidity to fill institutional orders. ICT traders use the term to explain why price sweeps obvious levels and returns to zones, and the whole method reads as if you are tracking that algorithm's delivery of price (The Inner Circle Trader, ICT methodology).
The IPDA is a framing, not a documented mechanism. No peer-reviewed study or tier-1 source describes an interbank algorithm operating the way ICT lays out, and the order-book data needed to confirm it is not visible on a retail chart, so the IPDA is a story the methodology tells to organise what traders observe.
I separate the story from the observation because conflating them is where the method oversells itself. The observation that price seeks liquidity and revisits levels is real and has documented anchors, but the claim that a specific interbank algorithm is doing it is doctrine the chart alone cannot confirm.
Why the 2022 Model became the reference point
The 2022 series displaced Huddleston's older content as the default entry point for a practical reason. It is shorter, it is structured into numbered episodes, and it standardises the terminology, so a new trader can follow it start to finish instead of piecing the method together from years of unsorted videos (The Inner Circle Trader, ICT methodology).
The terminology it standardised is the vocabulary the whole cluster uses. Terms like killzone, draw on liquidity, inducement and the PD array took their current, widely-quoted form in the 2022 series, which is why educator content across the SERP traces back to it as a single source.
I treat the 2022 Model as a reference point rather than a revelation. It organised and labelled ideas that are older than ICT, running through Sam Seiden's supply and demand work and Richard Wyckoff's accumulation and distribution, so the series codified a method rather than discovering one.
What the model is, and what it is not
The honest description of the 2022 Model is narrower than its marketing. It is a free YouTube curriculum by one trader, delivered informally, with no credentialing body behind it, no peer review, and no published backtest, and the supply-and-demand school that seeded its thinking was itself shut down by the FTC in 2020 over its sales practices.
The marketing around the model is louder than the model itself. Phrases like one setup for life and secret algorithm sell the idea that the 2022 Model is a hidden key to the market, when it is an organised set of chart-reading rules that a trader still has to test, execute and risk-manage themselves.
I point this out because the gap between the marketing and the reality is the single most useful thing to understand about ICT. The curriculum is free and clearly taught, which is genuinely useful, and treating it as a guaranteed system is the error that costs traders money.
What is actually proven, and what is doctrine
The honest evidence sits one layer beneath the model. Each observation the 2022 Model relies on is real and documented in its own concept page: prices revisit prior levels, which Carol Osler's Federal Reserve Bank of New York research explains through stop-order clustering; trends continue, which time-series momentum research documents; and volume clusters at session opens, which Bank for International Settlements turnover data confirms.
What is not documented is the assembled model. No peer-reviewed or tier-1 study tests the 2022 Model as a complete system and publishes a result, so the claim that following the sequence produces a reliable profit is a reasonable hypothesis built on real ingredients rather than a measured finding.
I split the ingredients from the assembly because that is where retail traders get misled. Combining sound observations does not automatically produce a tested system, and the only honest way to know whether your version of the 2022 Model works is to backtest it on your own data and treat the result as a sample.
Common misconceptions about the 2022 Model
I read the model as free and public, not secret. It is a YouTube series anyone can watch, and the idea that there is a hidden or paid version that contains the real edge is a marketing hook rather than a fact.
The full curriculum is available at no cost, and anyone charging for the secret is reselling what Huddleston published for free.
The model is also not a guarantee. A clearly taught sequence can still lose money, because every layer can fail, and the discipline of waiting for confluence is a filter that raises probability rather than a key that ensures profit.
Finally, ICT is not a credentialed methodology. It carries no regulatory or academic standing, the IPDA at its core is unverified, and the honest way to read the 2022 Model is as a structured framework to organise your chart reading, not as a validated theory of how markets work.
Where the model fits this cluster
This page is the entry point, and the concept pages are the deep-dives. Each piece of the 2022 Model's sequence has its own honest treatment elsewhere in the cluster, so once you know what the model teaches, you can drill into any layer.
The structure runs from the dealing range that sets bias, through inducement and draw on liquidity, the killzones, and the break of structure, down to the order block and fair value gap entries.
I built the cluster to mirror the model's own reading order, so a trader can follow the 2022 sequence page by page and see, for each concept, both what ICT traders mean by it and what the evidence actually supports.