Blackwood Blog

Notes on markets,
tools & what we're building

Updates on the MT5 Assistant, SMC and pattern-detection research, and how we think about giving retail traders clearer market information.

What the SMC panel is actually looking for

Break of structure, change of character, order blocks, fair value gaps — a plain-English tour of the four Smart Money Concepts our panel tracks, and why we built it around confirmation rather than prediction.

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Why we only alert on 13 candlestick patterns

There are dozens of named candlestick patterns out there. We cut ours down to 13, restricted to H1/H4, with a 70%+ confidence bar. Here's the reasoning behind keeping the list short instead of long.

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The six numbers every retail trader should track

Expectancy, breakeven win rate, risk of ruin, and three more — the formulas behind the Trading Math Dashboard, and why most traders never calculate them until it's too late.

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Built by a trader, for traders

Blackwood started as one developer's own MT5 tooling. On why we build every module against live market conditions and prop-firm style risk rules — no theory, just working infrastructure.

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