The Glossary

The single clock the whole framework is pinned to: the trading day — and therefore the Daily Cycle’s four quarters — begins at 18:00 New York time, the futures re-open. Every quarter boundary, every True Open and every reset is measured from it.

Each six-hour session is one 90-minute Cycle — it divides into four 90-minute quarters, the intraday rung most execution reads run on. The 90-minute Cycle and the Session are the same rung; its Q2 open is the True Session Open. The same AMDX roles apply, one scale down.

The first quarter’s role: a tight range while positions are quietly built. This range becomes the cycle’s Defining Range.

The default order of roles the four quarters play: Accumulation, Manipulation, Distribution, then X — continuation or reversal. The reason a quarter tells you something rather than nothing.

The unit of Quarter Sequence: three or more adjacent cycles sitting in aligned quarters, read from the higher timeframe down. A chain is the door — the synchronised window worth watching. "Adjacent" is literal: consecutive rungs of the ladder, nothing skipped.

Change in State of Delivery — the moment price stops delivering one direction and starts the other. In its generic form, a body close back through the prior delivery leg (a run of same-colour candles): delivery has changed hands. Single-asset, with no cross-market or time context — the blunt base that the tCISD refines.

The fourth quarter’s role — the "X": ambiguous by design. It either extends the Q3 move or turns against it, and needs context to read.

The divergence at the heart of a PSP — the moment correlated markets stop moving together. It is the same idea that powers an SSMT, applied at the swing: the crack is what makes the swing point precise rather than ordinary.

One cycle in the nested timeframe ladder — Weekly, Daily, 90-minute, Micro and finer — each divided into its own four quarters. Every cycle’s quarter sits inside the cycle above it, which is what makes chaining possible.

Q1’s range read as the cycle’s energy budget: the accumulation range that sets the scale for the move — and the map of where it expands to.

Price below an open: the market can afford to be bought — a long lean, with premium as the target.

The third quarter’s role: where the real, intended move plays out, away from the Q2 trap. Watch for a Sequential SSMT — one or two assets sweep the Q2 low or high while a correlated asset holds. Once the SSMT confirms, the move usually follows.

The triad’s odd-one-out — the market whose action opposed the other two on a key. It comes in two modes: a Diverger (Swept) broke its previous-quarter extreme while the two Peers held (~⅔ of keys); a Diverger (Held) refused to break while the two Peers swept (~⅓). Either way, the odd-one-out marks the extreme of relative strength — weakest when it broke, strongest when it held — and it is the chart execution reads reference.

The framework’s central metaphor: Quarter Sequence Chains are the doors. SSMT Divergence is the key. An open chain with no key — or a key with no open door — is noise.

An experimental 16-year extension whose quarters are the four-year Cycles. It is not doctrine — treat it as an exploratory rung of the ladder, not a rule.

When the Peers also break their reference, the divergence is invalidated — nothing holds against the odd-one-out, and the SSMT is dead. The read is over.

The inverse tCISD — a failed tCISD read the other way. When a tCISD is invalidated (price closes back through its body against the SSMT), that failure is itself a continuation entry in the opposite direction: the manipulation is over and the higher-timeframe move resumes.

The engineered Q2 fake-out: a push beyond the Q1 accumulation range designed to take out early positions.

The second quarter’s role: the engineered "Judas" move beyond Q1’s range that traps breakout traders. Its opening price is the cycle’s True Open.

The rung below the 90-minute Cycle: each 90-minute quarter divides into four 22.5-minute quarters. Read on low-timeframe charts.

The Micro Cycle’s Q2 open — a 90-minute Cycle’s 22.5-minute quarters carry their own True Open.

Finer still: each Micro quarter divides into quarters of roughly 5.6 minutes. Only resolvable on the lowest timeframes, such as 15-second charts.

The Nano Cycle’s Q2 open — finer still, read on the lowest timeframes.

The cycles sit inside one another. Every quarter of a cycle is itself a full cycle one level down — a Daily quarter contains a whole 90-minute cycle, which contains a Micro, and so on: the same four-quarter shape repeating at every scale. This fractal nesting is what lets one quarter line up across several timeframes and form a chain.

The two markets that agreed with each other on a key — the majority pair the Diverger opposed. On a Swept key the Peers held while the Diverger broke; on a Held key the Peers swept while the Diverger refused. Their agreement is what makes the Diverger’s odd action meaningful — no agreement, no divergence.

Price above an open: the market can afford to be sold — a short lean, with discount as the target.

A three-candle swing where the correlated triad’s candles disagree — one market prints a reversal candle its peers don’t. The precise trigger inside the window the chain and the opens have already framed.

The single exception to same-quarter alignment: a higher cycle’s Q4 may link to the cycle below’s Q1 — continuation handing off into fresh accumulation. It is the only cross-quarter link a chain is allowed to use.

The private research software behind this site. It rebuilds the Quarter Sequence clock from raw market data and tests each claim against years of it, so what you read here has been checked rather than assumed. Not a public product.

An SMT divergence that fires inside a live Quarter Sequence Chain — three or more adjacent cycles in the same quarter — not at a lone quarter extreme on its own. The chain qualifies it, the key turning in an open door: no open chain and the divergence is noise; inside a live chain it carries the sequence’s confluence.

A tCISD that confirms a QS SMT — an SSMT that printed inside a live Quarter Sequence chain. Same body-close-back mechanic as a tCISD, but its parent divergence was chain-qualified. The chain requirement lives in the SMT upstream, so the qsCISD itself need not be in a live chain when it fires — it inherits the chain’s pedigree. The highest-conviction confirmation in the framework.

The ladder extended above the year: a four-year Cycle whose quarters are the years themselves.

One of the four equal divisions of a cycle — labelled Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. Not just a slice of time: each quarter carries a behavioural role.

The high or low a quarter prints — the wick, by default. Once the quarter closes its extreme is locked, and the previous quarter’s locked extreme is the reference an SSMT is measured against: one market sweeps it, a correlated one refuses. Hidden SSMT reads the body extreme instead of the wick.

Quarterly Theory read in sequence — the nested quarters chained across timeframes, and the discipline of only acting when they agree. The refinement that removes Quarterly Theory’s degrees of freedom.

The framework the whole site is built on: time divides into four quarters, and it does so on every timeframe at once — the year into quarters, the day into sessions, each session into 90-minute blocks, and so on down. A single fractal idea, repeated at every scale.

One of the Daily Cycle’s four quarters: Asia, London, NY AM and NY PM. The four sessions are the trading day’s Q1–Q4.

Plain Smart Money Technique divergence: correlated markets disagreeing at a swing. SSMT is the sequential refinement — the same disagreement, but anchored to previous-quarter extremes and read across consecutive quarters.

The key. One or two assets in a correlated triad sweep the previous quarter’s extreme while the rest refuse to follow. The refusal is a crack in correlation. Read as one quarter hands off to the next, inside an open chain.

An SSMT is pending the moment one asset breaks while a peer holds — live, adjusting tick by tick. It is confirmed when a later candle closes back through the divergence, and invalidated when the Peers also break and the divergence closes.

Two or more True Opens from different cycles read together instead of one at a time — the faster cycles’ opens sitting in order against the slower ones. Price on the same side of two is a workable lean; three or more is the preferred read. Above the stack is premium, a short lean; below it, discount, a long lean.

Price trading through a level. A wick alone qualifies; a close through it is a stronger sweep.

The same True Opens, in the same order, on all three markets of a correlated triad. One market stacking its opens is a read; all three stacking the identical opens the identical way is the triad agreeing on structure. Because a True Open is fixed by the clock the moment it prints, that agreement holds until the next one prints — it does not flicker with price.

The clean confirmation of an SSMT: a body close back through the body of the candle that created the SSMT — above its body high for a bull, below its body low for a bear. A close, not a wick. (A generic ICT CISD references a prior delivery leg’s open; the tCISD is anchored to the SSMT candle — a Quarterly Theory community refinement.)

The set of three correlated markets a divergence is read across — for index futures, NQ · ES · YM. Divergence is strictly a cross-market read: you cannot see it on one chart alone.

The Daily Cycle’s True Open, taken at 00:00 New York — the open of the day’s second quarter. Also known as the midnight open.

The Monthly Cycle’s True Open — the open of the month’s Q2, measured the same way at every scale.

A cycle’s Q2 opening price — the level the rest of that cycle is measured against. Price above it is premium; price below it is discount.

Each session’s Q2 open — the 2nd of its four 90-minute blocks; the True Open one rung below the day. One per session: the True Asia, True London, True NY-AM and True NY-PM Opens.

The Weekly Cycle’s True Open — the open of the week’s Q2.

The Year Cycle’s True Open — the broadest open on the ladder. It sets the widest lean; the lower opens time the entry.

The rotated profile: the same four roles shifted forward by one quarter, so the cycle opens on the X phase instead of accumulation. The True Open stays anchored to Q2 chronologically in both profiles.