u/david19790

ran the same strategy on my own account and on a funded account for a while. same entries, same exits, same everything. own account was fine. funded one breached. took me embarrassingly long to work out why, because the trades were identical.

its the path, not the result.

on a trailing drawdown account your floor follows your equity peak. on intraday trailing that includes the peak of an open position. so when a trade runs +30 in your favour and comes back to stop out at -20, your buffer didnt lose 20. the peak at +30 dragged the floor up first. what actually hit your buffer was closer to the full 50 point swing.

which means the risk unit on a trailing account isnt your stop. its your stop plus whatever open profit you typically give back before exit.

thats why every position size calculator flatters you. they size from stop distance and closed pnl, so they tell you the account survives ten losses when the real number on the path you actually travel is more like four or five. its not a rounding error, its a completely different number.

and it explains something that used to make no sense to me. trades that closed green were still costing me buffer. a winner that goes +40 and closes +10 has moved my floor up 40 and given me 10. on my own account thats a nice day. on a trailing account thats a net drain on my room to be wrong later.

the fix isnt a better strategy, its sizing off the right unit. pull the MFE on your losing trades, take the median, add it to your stop. thats what a loser really costs you on an intraday trailing account. resize from that number and the account stops feeling randomly hostile.

eod trailing is softer since the floor only ratchets at the close, so the same system can be viable at one firm and structurally unsafe at another with identical rules on paper. worth knowing which type youre actually on before blaming the strategy.

i run my exports through a script that pulls the MFE giveback and recalculates the real survivable streak, took ten minutes to see something id been missing for months. anyone else sized off MFE rather than stop, or is everyone still using the calculators

looked through my log a while back and noticed something uncomfortable. most of my losing trades didnt end at my stop. they ended with me closing a position that had been sitting there dead for hours, going nowhere, until i finally gave up on it.

the stop was supposed to define my risk. in practice it barely got used. my actual exit on losers was boredom and slow bleed, which means my real risk per trade wasnt what i thought it was. it was stop distance plus hours of spread, swap and mental capital on positions that were never going to work.

so i measured it. for every trade i checked how long it took winners to start working versus how long losers sat there before dying. the split was not subtle. my winners were moving in my favour within the first couple of hours almost every time. my losers spent most of their life inside a tight range around entry, doing nothing, before eventually drifting to the stop or getting closed manually out of frustration.

the pattern was clear, if a position hadnt done anything after a defined number of hours, it almost never turned into a winner. holding it longer wasnt patience, it was donating spread and swap to hope.

so i added one rule. if the trade hasnt moved a minimum distance in my favour within its window, it closes. flat, no judgment, regardless of where the stop is. the stop still exists for fast moves against me, but the time exit handles the slow deaths, which turned out to be the bigger category.

the effect on the numbers was bigger than any entry filter i ever tested. not because it turned losers into winners, it cant, but because it cut the average loser way down and freed the capital and attention for setups that were actually alive.

the part that surprised me most, everyone i know obsesses over entry optimization. tweaking conditions, adding filters, backtesting variations endlessly. exits get a stop and a target and thats it. but the entry only decides where you start. the exit decides what everything costs.

worth checking your own log for this. split your losers by how long they lived and where they spent that time. if most of them died slowly near entry instead of getting stopped fast, you have the same leak i had, and its a one rule fix.

anyone here running time based exits, and how did you pick the window? i derived mine from the winner distribution but curious if theres a better way

for years my stop was some version of "below the swing low" or "2x atr" and i never once checked whether that number made sense for the trades i was actually taking. it felt rigorous because it had a rule attached. it wasnt.

what changed it was pulling the mae on every trade, the furthest price went against me before it did whatever it did next. then splitting that by outcome. how far did my winners go against me before working, versus my losers.

my winners were routinely dipping most of the way to my stop before turning. the distribution barely separated the two groups. which means my stop was sitting inside normal noise for the setup, and a big chunk of my "losses" were trades that were right and got shaken out first.

the fix wasnt just wider stops though, thats the lazy read. wider stop with the same size means more risk per trade, so it has to come with smaller size or it just changes how you lose. the actual answer was widening the stop past where winners normally breathe, then sizing down so the dollar risk stayed identical. same money at risk, way fewer trades stopped out on noise.

what surprised me was how much of the improvement came from doing nothing differently at entry. same setups, same timing, same everything. just a stop placed where the data said it belonged instead of where a round number said.

worth checking your own if you have the mae in your export. i run it through a script that plots the mae distribution split by winners and losers, way faster than eyeballing a spreadsheet, and it makes the overlap obvious instantly. if your winners regularly go 80 percent of the way to your stop before turning, youre not managing risk youre just donating to variance.

anyone here actually derive their stop from their own mae distribution, or is everyone still using atr multiples and swing lows because thats what the books say

spent years assuming my problem was the strategy. every drawdown i'd start hunting for a cleaner setup, a better filter, something to fix the results. turned out i was solving the wrong problem the whole time.

what finally shifted it was going back through my log and doing one boring exercise. for every trade i reconstructed what would have happened if id just left it alone. stop where i set it at entry, target where i set it, no touching. then i compared that to what i actually did.

the gap was brutal. my "untouched" version, the trades just following my own rules with zero intervention, outperformed my actual results by a wide margin. every time i moved a stop, took profit early because it looked heavy, or added size on a whim, i was on average making the outcome worse. not occasionally. on average.

that reframed everything. i didnt have a strategy problem, i had an execution problem. the edge was already in the setup, i was leaking it in the management. and no new strategy would have fixed that because id have just brought the same itchy hands to the new setup.

the specific leaks, ranked by cost, were moving stops first, then cutting winners early, then oversizing after a loss. the entries were basically fine. all the damage lived in what i did after i was already in the trade.

once i could see it as actual numbers instead of a vague feeling, the fix got obvious and it wasnt "be more disciplined." it was removing the decisions where i could. predefine the stop and target and make them non negotiable. no touching until one is hit. the trades i left alone were the profitable ones, so i just stopped touching.

curious how many people here have actually measured their intervention cost vs assumed the strategy was the issue. feels like the whole industry is selling new setups when the leak is mostly downstream of entry

spent years chasing consistency like it was a character trait. read the books, did the journaling, told myself this week id finally stick to the plan. and every few weeks something would slip, a moved stop, an early exit, a trade that wasnt on the list. then id conclude i lacked discipline and start the cycle again.

took me way too long to notice the actual pattern. my inconsistency wasnt evenly spread across my trading. it lived in very specific places, and those places all had one thing in common. they were the moments where i had a decision to make in real time.

entry timing when the setup was almost there. whether to move the stop when price got close. whether to take profit early when it looked heavy. whether this counted as a valid setup or not. every one of those is a live judgment call, and every judgment call is a coin flip between the version of me that made the plan and the version of me sitting in front of a moving chart.

the trades where i had nothing to decide, where the rules were unambiguous, i executed those fine. every time. turns out i was never inconsistent at following rules. i was inconsistent at making the same decision twice under different emotional conditions. which is just what humans are.

so the fix wasnt more discipline. it was systematically removing decisions. tightening the setup definitions until "almost there" doesnt exist, either the conditions are met or theyre not. deciding the stop and the target before entry and making them non negotiable. writing down what counts as valid so precisely that theres nothing left to interpret at 9:47am with money on the line.

every decision i removed, the consistency in that spot went to 100%. not because i got stronger. because there was nothing left to be weak about.

the trades i still had discretion over stayed exactly as messy as before. that contrast is what convinced me. same trader, same week, same market. the rules based parts were perfect and the judgment parts were a coin flip.

consistency isnt something you have, its something the structure of your process either allows or doesnt. if your system needs you to make good decisions in real time every day forever, the system is the problem, not you.

ive been running this way for a few years now, everything from setup definitions to sizing lives in rules i wrote once and stopped negotiating with. the messy discretionary version of me still exists, he just doesnt get a vote anymore.

curious how much live discretion everyone here actually runs with. and for the fully systematic people, did removing the decisions fix the consistency or just move the inconsistency somewhere else, like system hopping?

spent years thinking my problem was strategy. kept tweaking entries, testing new setups, chasing a cleaner edge. turns out the single biggest improvement to my results came from a rule that has nothing to do with how i pick trades.

i stopped letting myself trade for a set time after a loss.

thats it. thats the rule. lose a trade, locked out for a bit, no exceptions.

heres why it mattered so much. i went back through my log and tagged every bad decision, moved stops, revenge entries, oversized positions, cutting winners early. i expected them to be spread out randomly. they werent. they clustered hard in the minutes right after a loss. like a huge chunk of my total damage came from a narrow window of time when i was tilted and trying to make it back.

the loss itself was never the problem. a loss is just part of the system, sized and expected. the problem was the second trade. the one i took angry, bigger, without a real setup, because losing lit something up in my monkey brain and i needed to fix it right now.

once i saw it as a time-clustering thing instead of a discipline thing, the fix got obvious. you dont need more willpower to not revenge trade. you need to not be at the controls for the 20 minutes where revenge trading happens. one is a personality change, the other is a timer. i know which one i can actually rely on.

the results werent subtle. cutting out that post-loss window removed most of my worst trades without touching a single thing about my actual strategy. the edge was always fine. i was the leak, and specifically i was the leak in a very predictable 20 minute window.

i built a little script to tag the trades by time-since-last-loss automatically, doing it by hand across a few hundred trades was painful. thats what made the clustering impossible to ignore, seeing it as a number instead of a vague suspicion.

if youre stuck and convinced you need a better system, id check this first. tag your worst trades and look at when they happened relative to your last loss. if they cluster like mine did, you dont have a strategy problem, you have a cooldown problem, and thats a much easier fix.

anyone else find their damage concentrated in specific moments rather than spread out? curious if the post-loss window is universal or just my particular flavour of tilt

something i see constantly and lived through myself. people grind out the eval, get funded, and blow the funded account inside a month. the usual explanation is "they got unlucky" or "they sized up". i think its simpler and worse, the eval and the funded account reward opposite behaviours and nobody adjusts.

the eval is a sprint with a deadline. theres a target, sometimes a time limit, and the fee is sunk. everything about it nudges you toward pressing, and if you pass, pressing got rewarded. thats the problem. you arrive at the funded stage with a freshly reinforced habit of pressing.

the funded account is the opposite game. no deadline, no target worth rushing toward, just a drawdown you cant touch and a payout threshold that arrives on its own if you dont die. the optimal behaviour is boring, small, patient. everything the eval just trained out of you.

so the trader who passes is often the exact trader least prepared to keep it. the firms dont even need this to be true on purpose, the structure does it for free.

what actually fixed it for me was treating both stages as the same game with the same rules. same size, same setups, same risk in the eval as funded, even though it meant passing slower. the eval stopped being a sprint and became a filter i happened to walk through. by the time the funded account arrived nothing about my trading changed, so there was nothing to adjust and no pressing habit to unlearn.

the other thing that showed up when i measured it, my worst funded-stage decisions clustered right after losses. checked my log and the interventions, moved stops, revenge entries, size bumps, werent spread out, they piled up in the 30 minutes after a red trade. the eval pressure was gone but the recovery instinct stayed. a hard cooldown after any loss killed most of it, one rule, no willpower needed.

curious if others see the same pattern. did you trade the eval and the funded account the same way, and if not, which version of you was the better trader?

something i wish someone had spelled out for me before i bought my first few evals.

everyone looks at the profit target and the drawdown. almost nobody works out how much they actually need to make before a single dollar reaches their bank account.

take a typical 50k. you pass the eval, thats target one. then most firms have a minimum profit before you can request a payout. then theres often a consistency rule, no single day can be more than x% of your total profit, so you cant just hit it in one good session. stack those and the number you have to generate before your first withdrawal is a lot bigger than the eval target you were focused on.

then the drawdown. thats not a stop loss, thats a death sentence for the account. you get one shot at staying under it while generating all of the above.

the bit that took me too long to understand, none of that is hidden. its all in the rules before you pay. so the buffer isnt the scam, its the spec. the mistake is treating it as an obstacle instead of an input.

what changed things for me was sizing backwards from the drawdown instead of forwards from the target. work out the worst losing streak your system can realistically produce, size so that streak fits inside the drawdown with room left, then check whether that size can still clear the buffer in a reasonable time. if it cant, the account is the wrong size for your system, or your system is wrong for prop.

most people do the opposite. they size for the target, hit a normal losing run, and blow it. then buy another one.

the consistency rule is the one that catches people who are otherwise doing fine, by the way. if your edge is lumpy, a couple of big days and a lot of nothing, you can be green and still unable to withdraw.

curious how others approach this. do you size off the drawdown or off the target, and has the consistency rule ever bitten you when you were actually profitable

finally did something id been putting off for months. exported my trade log and recalculated what every trade would have done if id just left it alone after entry. no trailing, no moving the stop to breakeven, no closing early because it looked heavy.

the gap between what i actually made and what the untouched system would have made came out around 0.3R per trade. thats larger than my edge. i wasnt losing to the market, i was losing to myself, and id spent two years calling it risk management.

the breakeven stop was the worst offender by a mile. it feels like free protection. what it actually does is convert winners into scratches, price pulls back to entry, takes you out flat, then runs to target without you. on any system where a minority of trades carry the whole thing, removing a handful of those is enough to flatten the curve completely.

second finding, my stops were wider than they needed to be. pulled the max adverse excursion on every winning trade and 90% of them never went more than about 1.6x atr against me. i was running 2x stops. donating risk on every single trade for protection that almost never got used.

third, and this one i only found because someone suggested checking it, the interventions werent random. they clustered hard right after a loss. the touching was recovery behaviour, not analysis. thats actually good news because a cooldown timer after a loss is a much easier rule to follow than "stop interfering with your trades". one is willpower, the other is just a clock.

the takeaway that stuck with me, the system you backtest and the system you actually trade are two different systems, and the difference is everything you do after you hit enter. i genuinely thought my execution was decent until i put a number on it.

if you havent run this on your own log i'd recommend it before you go looking for a new strategy. most people who think they need a better edge just need to stop touching the one they already have.

has anyone else actually measured this, or is everyone quietly suspecting like i was

been meaning to do this for months and finally sat down with my trade log last weekend. exported everything, then went back through and recalculated what each trade would have done if i had just left it alone after entry. no moving the stop, no trailing to BE, no taking it off early because it "looked heavy".

the gap between what i actually made and what the untouched system would have made was about 0.3R per trade. over the sample thats the difference between flat and actually profitable. i wasnt losing to the market, i was losing to myself, and i had been calling it risk management this whole time.

the breakeven stop was the worst offender by a mile. it feels like free protection. what it actually does is convert your winners into scratches, price dips back to entry, takes you out flat, then runs to target without you. on a sub 50% win rate system where the winners carry the entire thing, killing even a handful of those is enough to flatten the curve. every single time i thought i was "protecting profit" i was really just removing the trades that pay for all the losers.

second thing i found was my stops were wider than they needed to be. pulled the max adverse excursion on every winner and 90% of them never went more than about 1.6x atr against me. i was running 2x. so i was donating risk on every trade for protection that almost never got used.

what i took away from it. the system you backtested and the system you actually trade are two different systems, and the difference is everything you do after you hit enter. i genuinely thought my execution was decent until i put a number on it.

if you havent done this exercise i would honestly recommend it before touching your strategy again. most people who think they need a new edge just need to stop touching the one they have.

i ended up writing a small script to do the whole thing automatically since doing it by hand was painful, feeds off the csv export and spits out the intervention cost, the stop distance check and the BE counterfactual. nothing fancy but it made the number impossible to ignore.

has anyone else actually run the numbers on their own interventions, or is everyone just quietly suspecting like i was?