This is correct and one of the few times I’ve read someone else explain it this way, however it’s not quite that simple. True you have to follow the institutional money flows, what most retail do is trade against other retail and pick up the small morsels the institutions leave behind (which are much smaller than just a few short years ago).
The “however” is that there are players above institutions, such as central banks, sovereign countries, continents, that can cause the institutional money flows to be incorrect, in the past this was not very often but as liquidity dries up around the world, sovereign countries battle for resources against each other, the institutions are more and more being whipsawed themselves.
This is the new dynamic, how to capture institutional money flow (which is already a standard deviation and more above retail to retail) with sovereign hovering overheard (adding another deviation in to play), it’s why hedge funds are closing because they lost their advantage, I use a platform that tracks institutional, sovereign, continental based moves in core assets (Forex/Futures/Indexes/Stocks), but that extra deviation is hard work, truly hard work.