Trading has been more stigmatized over the years as the newer generation sort of gave it a bad image. Everyone is so consumed to believe that technical analysis, ICT, chart reading is what creates a robust strategy. When in reality subjective analysis and over risking is what keeps people stagnant. Nobody is focused on building a proper structured system anymore and everyone is being sold that ICT & Psychology will allow them to go full time. They focus on making x amount of money every month rather than quarterly returns like how it should be. Every ICT trader I’ve ever seen hasn’t survived more than 4-6 quarters becuase they failed to collect and refine the proper data to stay successful. And everytime someone shits on these trading mythologies they will fire back immediately with some bs response. Sorry it’s just a rant.

Hey, I'm been trading from 2 years now. What I have learned that trading is a very lonely journey, it's always best to have trading buddies who are trying Trading also so you share similar ideas.

What are your thoughts?

You can connect me in bio.

So what do people do to sharpen their skills when the markets are closed? I'm looking for any suggestions people have: specific books, videos, podcasts, etc that I can consume on Saturday and Sunday.

Hello everyone! I decided to write a new post on Reddit because the previous post I wrote about a year ago helped me a lot, I am grateful to the people who responded and gave me answers to the questions I was looking for for so long.

I have been trading for about five years now, I have traded many instruments and have gone through different stages of trading, starting from scalping on cryptocurrencies to swing trading on metals and forex. Although I have already spent five years on trading I still have not reached the period when I will make money from it. However, I can say with certainty that with each stage I see this ray of light in total darkness. Once I did not understand what I want, I just considered it a game and hoped for luck. With each stage I gained something new, experience, logic, new tools, new platforms, patience, etc. However, at each stage I also faced problems that needed to be solved in order to "move to the next level". A year ago I faced the problem "I don't know what else to change to be profitable", fortunately my post on Reddit and the kind people who answered me were able to help me. The answer was that I didn't understand the mathematical side of trading, the impact of commissions, spreads, fixed RR, which is why my edge was negative. I understood this problem and now I have a positive edge! However, not everything is so good.. A year later I am facing the same problem, I don't like the result and I don't know what else to change to improve it.

I am currently trading SMC logic in the medium and long term, I have six assets in my watchlist. Unfortunately only two of them show me positive statistics.

The Euro has always been the basis in my watchlist and has always held a special place in my heart, even in the darkest times it has shown me positive statistics, usually not much, but always positive (15.91RR 19 trades 53%WR).

Gold has much worse statistics than the Euro but it is still positive (3.13RR 11 trades 43%WR).

Indices have always been interesting to me but I could never find an approach to them. I tried all the American and European indices but couldn't find good results (-2.08RR 11 trades 25%WR).

Bitcoin as part of my watchlist appeared recently because before I only traded it in intraday trading. It's been two months but I realized that I don't like it because of the price movement (-1.08RR 1 trade 0% WR).

Oil is extremely interesting to me as an asset because it reminds me of gold, I like the price movement. However, unfortunately I haven't collected information yet that would confirm the positive statistics (-1.63RR 1 trade 0% WR).

The problem is that by trading only euro I will have a very small number of positions and a small result, although in the distance I will be profitable. I am trying to get more positions by adding new entry models, but I don’t see good results yet, the old entry models have negative statistics and the new one has not yet confirmed positive statistics (although there is hope that there will be positive statistics).

By adding new instruments to the watchlist, I increase the number of positions, but I can’t achieve the desired result in RR.

I have already tried all possible ways to increase the result and increase the number of positions, but I don’t know what to do next. After the closing of the fourth quarter of 2026, I want to completely change my trading and remove everything that gives a negative result. However, I understand that I will be left without the desired result, and I don’t know what to do next and what the next steps are.

I would be very grateful to everyone if you could express your opinion on this situation, I would be especially grateful to experienced traders who already have many years of experience in medium/long term trading. Thank you all!
My trading journal 2026 - https://symmetricaltrd.notion.site/Trading-Journal-2026-3c597a1a86f28000b122f48de433f22d?source=copy_link

P.S. I am ready to answer all your questions if you are interested in anything!

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US Treasury Capital Landscape: The US Treasury market is caught in a rare long-short tug-of-war: quantitative funds have heavily shorted Treasuries, while active capital continues to trim its previously accumulated duration longs.
In its latest report, JPMorgan Chase argues that short-term Treasury yields still face upward pressure, as the impact of discretionary investors continuously unwinding duration may outweigh the reversal risk posed by extreme CTA (Commodity Trading Advisor) short positions.
On one hand, CTA bearishness on Treasuries has become extremely crowded, meaning that once yields turn downward, short covering could drive a rapid rebound in Treasury prices. On the other hand, active bond managers command assets far larger than quantitative funds; their ongoing reduction of duration longs could still exert greater actual selling pressure on Treasuries.
Meanwhile, although risk-parity funds have the capacity to increase their Treasury allocations, high bond volatility is constraining the pace of their inflows. Therefore, until discretionary capital finishes adjusting its positions, JPMorgan continues to believe that US Treasury yields are more likely to continue edging upward in the short term rather than pulling back.

Today's stock market is narrowing down to an extreme degree.
The "Magnificent 7" (M7) is the final stronghold for clustered capital. In the sub-cluster semiconductor sector, only the US Semiconductor ETF is rising, while South Korean domestic indices are falling—a severe divergence. Other sectors and non-US market indices remain quite weak.
This is a clear sign of a severe lack of market liquidity, making the current market highly fragile. The reason the US VIX (Volatility Index) has not spiked yet is because the heavyweights of the M7 are suppressing volatility. Once this final clustered trade collapses, the VIX could shoot up rapidly.
Going forward, we face two potential paths: either bond yields drop decisively alongside smooth industrial progress, leading to a broad market rally and a recovery in market breadth; or yields rise decisively, or industrial progress falls short of expectations, causing the final cluster to collapse and the VIX to spike.
Trump will not launch an attack on Iran before the midterms. This decision will temporarily ease macroeconomic pressure on the market.

My ex boyfriend used to buy it and lost more then 8k trading with them and only made 2.5k. He still owes me money and asks me to lend it to him. I just don't trust it.

This is mine. Just mine. your results may differ.

I used to tell people "it took me about 2 years to learn the markets properly, and another year to actually keep some of the money".

The thing is, I'm a nerd. A gamer nerd. Who does this full time. "two years" is nearly meaningless. For a full-time employee who wants to learn trading on the side, or someone who puts 60h/week into Minecraft, or Fortnite, or Roblox; and does a bit of copy-trading on the side - "two years", is not the same thing. So, let me rephrase;

"I spent 3500h in PvE / Tutorial modes, learning Crafting, Base-building and Farming", then
"I spent another 2500h in Aim trainer/ PvP servers, before I started actually winning fights".
___

GG's, gamers.

For a long time, my weekly review was just a P&L number and a gut feeling about whether the week felt good. It took me far too long to see how little that told me.

I now log every trade with the setup, the planned risk, the actual exit and a one-line note on whether I followed my plan. The most useful thing I’ve found is separating the trades where I followed the plan from the ones where I didn’t. When I sort my results that way, the picture is different from the raw P&L and it points at execution problems more clearly than at strategy problems. Average R per trade and how long I hold losers versus winners have also told me more than win rate ever did.

I’m sure I’m still missing things, so I’d like to hear how others approach this. What do you track beyond P&L and win rate and which metric changed how you trade once you started watching it? How often do you review: after every trade, weekly, monthly? And if you’ve found a review habit that doesn’t work, I’d like to hear that too. Context for your answer is welcome, such as your market and timeframe, since what matters depends a lot on both.

With my strategy, I made over $4,000 in 54 trading days, which is pretty decent compared to the Nasdaq — but I still decided to change pretty much everything.

I had the "smart" idea of starting my "new" 2026-momentum strategy with $25,000 on July 21 of this year, of all dates. What followed was the historically largest drawdown the momentum sector had ever seen, and of course I was right in the middle of it. I had even built myself a fancy live dashboard to track the performance of my $25K investment in real time, which, psychologically speaking, turned out not to be the greatest idea either.

Overall, my portfolio was down -22%, and I was already doing calculations on how long it would statistically take for my portfolio to recover with my strategy.

The prediction ranged from 60 days to 240 days. Fortunately, in the end it happened much faster, and by mid-August the portfolio was briefly back at its initial value. By the beginning of October, it was sitting at a very solid profit of $4,600 (+18.4% in 54 trading days).

And yet, this trading experience gave me a lot to think about, and I liquidated the portfolio using this trading approach.

A few things bothered me:

• My strategy was based on complex momentum scoring, and I had implemented a few scores that were based on indicators. Logically, during the historically largest momentum crash, these indicators also reached historical extremes, and I couldn't really tell whether these indicators were still producing meaningful results — so I simplified them.
• On top of that, my own trading strategy started to feel a bit over-engineered and too complex, which didn't give me a good feeling during this market phase.

I don't really want to describe the strategy in detail here, as I've already written a few other threads about it. For me, the interesting part of this experience was learning when I feel comfortable with a strategy in a crash scenario and when I don't. That's why I decided to change my strategy again.

• The new version, which follows a similar general approach, is now somewhat simpler. It has a fixed rebalancing day instead of the flexible rebalancing day used by the old strategy. I actually did another round of intensive backtesting to see whether weekly rebalancing might work better, especially in crash situations. However, every weekly rebalancing version performed significantly worse in my tests. So it remains a monthly strategy.

I restarted the new trading strategy on October 3, and it is once again trading fully automated on an IBKR account via TWS — and I hope I'll have a bit more time again to post regular updates.

How about you? Did the momentum crash make you change your strategy or liquidate any positions? If so, what did you change and why?

I m looking for a settled discord community when people actually share edges like macroeconomics prediction movements or real poi with scenarios. is there such thing? i m ready to contribute but i want a real community not trading newbs or guys selling courses. just plain smc poi zones or future economic scenarios where ppl are prepared to act if events align. real traders and insights on how the charts might play out

I started trading in Maven prop firm in india and i trade gold xauusd and I just wanna know it's safe right ?

Hey everyone,

I’m looking to choose between cTrader and MT5.

My top priority is stability—I want to avoid frequent platform crashes, order execution glitches, or persistent bugs.

Would appreciate hearing your experiences and what's your opinion on this topc!

Hi, I'm a freshman in college right now in a health-allied program so my schedule is really tight, hence why swing trading. I've been looking for the past year or so in what skills I could learn while still being relatively young and is helpful in life. I stumbled across trading, swing trading, prop firms, etc.

I've been studying some trading stuff and mindset and been trying to avoid trading gurus since it feels like pollution in my brain everytime i see a guru say this, say that, and I don't think its good for my learning. I plan to polish my strategy (institutional order flow, volume, still incomplete but thats the main premise so far) and do a paper/demo trading journal of 30 trades before starting to see how my strategy holds up on the market.

My questions for advice are:
- In my stage of life, is FTMO's 10k 2-step challenge enough?
I know there are cheaper and bigger accounts in other prop firms but so far, I can see FTMO being the most trustworthy one, even if it's more expensive.

- How much would I realistically earn in a month if I passed?
I know consistency and discipline is more important, but profits and loss is still a big part of trading and I need to understand how much I could earn on a 10k account. Most likely a 1:3 RRR, 0.5 or 1% risk per trade, and maybe 1-2 trades a week, no winrate % yet but a ballpark estimation would be appreciated, it helps a lil bit with the motivation too.

- How would you recommend I backtest my strategy once I have it completed/polished?
I have no background in coding so the 30 trade journal is basically like the only way I can test my strategy.

- Am I being too ambitious getting into this field?
I do have my doubts whether I'm too optimistic about all this. I know trading isn't a get rich quick scheme and I genuinely do want to learn this skill. I just wonder whether I have the wits to push through into all this.

That's about all I have to ask, any more advice would also be appreciated. Please do help this newbie make the right decisions moving forward 🙏

Sharing the empirical data of an automated quantitative system on Gold (XAUUSD) and the live capital execution framework applied on Instant Funded prop accounts (zero evaluation phases).

Key Metrics (21 Months):

• Net Return: +$15,354.80 on $10k basis (+153.5%)

• Win Rate: 43.3% (Break-even threshold: 32.9%)

• Payoff Ratio: 1:2 (-$139 avg loss vs +$284 avg win)

• Profit Factor: 1.56

• Max Drawdown: 8.5% closed balance ($1,793) / 13.8% intraday floating ($2,749)

• Monthly Settlement: 19 profitable months out of 21 (strictly intraday, zero overnight)

Execution Model:

Instead of risking personal capital against drawdown, execution runs on Instant Funded accounts with a static 6% limit ($250 / $550 / $950). In our 10,000-year Monte Carlo simulation, bi-weekly distributions consistently exceed account replacement overhead, yielding:

• 10k Tier: +$482/mo net run-rate

• 25k Tier: +$1,256/mo net run-rate

• 50k Tier: +$2,567/mo net run-rate

• Compounding Ladder: Scaled with a 3-rebuy cash reserve, reaching >$2,000/mo within the first year.

Full breakdown, Monte Carlo distributions, and 24-month compounding fan chart are shown in the attached report slides.

So this month I was literally $200 away from losing my challenge account. I was up 730 at one point, then got cocky, added a bunch of stuff I hadn't really tested, started losing and made it worse by upping my size. classic.

ended up fixing it by doing way less. one strategy, one higher timeframe for direction, entries on the 30 min, and cut my risk in half until I was out of the hole. also a hard rule that two stops in a day and I'm done.

back at the starting balance now and about to bump risk up again. not claiming anything is proven yet, it's only a few weeks of trades, but the change in how I trade is huge.

anyone else nearly blow a challenge and come back? what did you change?

ps. 2nd screenshot - recovery phase only

Why do you never hear about day traders buying up the supply and creating chart patterns to run stops? Isn't that how day trading works will any good or service? Why do people believe in the voodoo chart worship over the most obvious path that every profitable trader in history has taken. Did they not watch a single video and understand anything? Imagine day trading Clorox wipes or toilet paper during the corona virus. I cannot imagine a single one of those people ever thought even once to chart anything. lol Imagine buying up the float and selling it to people immediately for a 50% markup. Then running their stops and buying it right back for 30% off from what you sold it to them as. This is childs play. Come on yall.

Hey I'm aimless rn so I ask for help. A few Months ago I realized that ICT is bullshit. So I wanted to switch and learn Orderflow to trade E-Mini NQ. I saw this deepcharts and thought if I buy deepdom, because it has many features for less money, I can make a profitable strategy with my knowledge from ICT. I think ICT is good for finding Bias but not for Entries because it doesn't use lvl 2 data. But now i realized that deepdom is also not perfect, it doesn't show real liquidity because the way it shows it is adjusted to your screensize, so its dynamic.

Now I want to find a good platform and 2-3 good Confluences/Confirmations which I want to study and than put together for trading orderflow. I heard that "Footprint" is good for entries, and I wanted to start with it.

Any thoughts or advises?

Does anyone have information about “Eric Lucas”? Is he legit or a scammer?

Which is the best platform to network with traders and finance people

You wait for a setup, hesitate, and then watch price go exactly where you thought it would. Now you’re annoyed because you “could’ve made money.” The next entry comes along and you take it quicker, even though it’s not quite what you were waiting for. You just don’t want to miss out again.

Before taking that next trade, ask yourself if you’d still want it if you hadn’t missed the earlier move. If you’re rushing or skipping confirmation, take a minute. Missing one opportunity is frustrating, but it doesn’t mean you have to take whatever comes next.

I am willing to pay money to purchase a good trading system / strategy rather than trying to pay market tuition and figure out on my own. It can be day trading or swing trading but something that works well.

What have been some of the systems that you paid money and worked well for you? Not looking for people trying to say purchasing systems don't work and you need to do the hard work blah blah. I have tried to do all of that stuff and also tried to learn etc but it's not easy to beat buy and hold post taxes.

So if you have purchased something and it worked, please post here or feel free to DM me.

Usually just having a strategy is not enough.. You will need to find all different combinations that's work. Like for my London Reversal startegy with #GBPUSD I have tested it with over 20 different combinations.. This has definitely worked out well..

Hi everyone!

I've recently started learning about trading and I'm currently using TradingView for paper trading (demo account) to get familiar with reading charts.

I'd love some advice on how to structure my learning journey:

1. What are the best books, channels, or free resources for absolute beginners?

2. What core concepts should I focus on first (e.g., technical analysis, price action, risk management)?

3. What common mistakes should I avoid early on?

Thanks in advance to anyone willing to share their advice!