Whats your strategy.? I'm a month in New to trading I keep getting pulled into different strategies by social media. Specifically people offering to teach their strategies with a monthly expenses sounds fishy to me... but before I try that please will someone tell me of a strategy that made you pass evals and makes you profitable I'll stick to that for a month and see how it goes I just don't want to trust social media gurus yet..
Was up around $1.5k for the month, then made $12.7k today from two trades.
By far my biggest day ever and honestly it’s completely thrown me off. I know this isn’t normal and I can’t expect days like this often, but now going back to making $500 is going to feel like nothing.
How do you go back to trading normally after a day like this?
Hey everyone,
I’m a trained chef, but lately, I’ve developed a huge interest in finance and the markets. I’ve been seriously considering going back to school to study finance, but I'm trying to figure out if that's actually necessary or just a waste of time and money for someone wanting to trade.
Right now, I have a stable career, but the long-term hours and physical toll have me thinking about the future. I definitely don't want to be doing this exact same routine for the next 10 to 15 years.
My dilemma is this: Should I invest time and money into formal finance studies, or is it a smarter move to keep my current stable job and learn trading online through courses, books, and practice in my free time?
If anyone here transitioned from a completely different background (like the culinary industry) into trading, how did you do it? Did formal education actually help you, or is self-taught online the way to go?
Appreciate any advice!
What was your job? And is trading making more money than your normal wage?
The goal is simple : share knowledge ( how liquidity is created, taken, and used)
deeply understanding price action and market intention, practice trough structured
backtesting and eventually trade live together.
Also -Small account flipping.
\-Propfirm accounts.
I’M NOT LOOKING FOR AMATEUR TRADERS OR BEGINNERS, you should have some experience in this market and already understand the basics.
This for people who are still learning, but serious about mastering their craft trough study, discussing ,backtesting and real execution.
NO GURU CULTURE.
No signal selling.
No « buy here sl here tp there »
Just knowledge - testing - execution- refinement.
If this sounds like you, DM me.
I am talking about the candle from 67.5k to 70.4k in 1 minute. Curious about what caused that carnage? I couldn't find any major news
can anyone answer why sometimes when I’m logged out I be in a trade I didn’t place . Like I place a sell last night and put my buy limit so It’ll hit where my buy limit at but i woke up and I was in a buy like wtf I thought it’d stop right where I put my buy limit not reverse it to but. Pls help because has happened to me 3 times now . Like I hit 500 on gold lastnight on a sell by putting my buy limit but when I woke up I was up 3k on a buy I didn’t place . This been happening to me a lot lately
It is Monday. The markets are officially open, your charts are moving again, and after a long weekend of zero action, your dopamine levels are screaming at you to click a button.
Before you force a mediocre setup just to "get in the game" this week, I want you to remember the story of Jesse Livermore.
In the early 20th century, Jesse Livermore was an absolute legend. He didn't have algorithms, MT5, or prop firm capital. He traded off a chalkboard and a ticker tape. Yet, during the catastrophic Wall Street crash of 1929, he aggressively shorted the market and personally walked away with roughly $100 million (equivalent to over $1.5 billion today).
People constantly begged him for his secret mathematical formula. But his answer had absolutely nothing to do with technical analysis or secret indicators. He famously wrote:
>"It was never my thinking that made the big money for me. It was always my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight!"
Livermore realized early in his career that the market only presents truly high-probability, asymmetrical opportunities a few times a month. The rest of the time, the market is just generating noise designed to chop up impatient retail traders and transfer their wealth to the patient professionals.
Whenever Livermore got bored and tried to force trades in choppy markets just to feel the rush of the action, he lost his fortune. He only achieved legendary status when he learned to physically sit on his hands and wait for the market to perfectly align with his edge.
As someone who watches the backend data on funded accounts, I can tell you that Monday is statistically the most dangerous day of the week. Traders feel a psychological need to start the week "green," so they take a C-tier setup on a Monday morning, instantly go into drawdown, and spend Tuesday through Friday revenge-trading just to get back to breakeven.
Here is how you survive this week:
Have a fantastic week, protect your capital, and practice the art of sitting tight.
Hi everyone! I’m new to trading, and I’m particularly interested in trading cryptocurrencies.
I wanted to ask experienced traders: is it actually realistic to make any meaningful profit starting with around $200?
There’s so much hype around trading on Instagram and other social media right now, with tons of courses and people making it look like easy money. But I understand that the reality is very different, and that most beginners lose money rather than make it. So I’d really appreciate some honest advice from people who have been doing this for a while:
Is $200 enough to start learning and trading, or is it too little?
What would you focus on if you were starting from zero today?
What are the biggest mistakes beginners usually make?
Are paid courses actually worth it, or can you learn everything you need for free?
How long did it take you to become consistently profitable, if you got there at all?
I’m not looking for a “get rich quick” strategy. I’d rather understand whether this is something realistic to learn over time and how to approach it without gambling away my money.
Any honest advice or resources would be really appreciated!
quick setup: the July FOMC minutes drop at 2pm ET. that meeting held rates at 3.50-3.75% but with an unusually visible 9-3 split, Hammack, Kashkari and Logan all wanted a 25bp hike. so the obvious thing to mine the minutes for is how far that hawkish view spread into the voting majority. if more officials were leaning hike than the three formal dissents suggest, that reads hawkish.
but here's the catch, and it's the actual trade: the minutes are backward-looking, and a lot has happened since July 29. July payrolls came in negative, inflation gauges softened, and retail sales unexpectedly dropped. all of that cut against the hawks, the market's now pricing 67-70% for a September hold. so the minutes capture a debate that the data has arguably already overtaken.
the usual pattern with stale minutes is a quick repricing on the initial read, then a fade once everyone remembers the info is three weeks old. and there's a bigger event right behind it Jackson Hole, where Warsh speaks. with Warsh having killed forward guidance, every meeting's basically live, which cuts both ways: it makes the minutes matter more (no guidance elsewhere) but also makes them more likely to be leapfrogged by the next data point.
what i'd watch immediately: the 2-year yield. it's the cleanest tell for whether traders read it hawkish or dovish.
genuinely curious how the room's playing it:
Came into trading 2 years ago after turn 1k in 15k with a crypto bot on phemex app and loosing it all by wanting to make more.
Learnt basics of trading started funded, with 9 20 ema i made 6k in payout and blowed after.
Since then learned ict for year passed evals but no payout
Switched to orderflow 3 months ago, passed accounts no payout
I am tired of failing and buying evals
My evals and personal account totals near 30k in 2 years.
When i take decision to leave trading it scares me that wtf else should i do i have not skill working security rn
Please give me advice
I feel like the era of the typical YouTube trading guru is slowly dying.
We're now seeing more “quants” and data-driven traders emerge online, and some of them are exposing the old-school trading gurus by analyzing their claims, showing their lack of statistical evidence, or arguing that they're not actually profitable and are essentially just LARPing (posting Lambo photos, screenshots, rented lifestyles, etc).
And honestly, some of these critiques are pretty convincing.
But here's the thing: Can we actually trust the quants either?
Some of these guys are also selling courses, indicators, software, communities, or other products, except now the marketing is framed around statistics, mathematics, backtesting, probability, and scientific trading.
That sounds much more legitimate than the typical “SMC/ICT guru” selling a lifestyle.
But at the end of the day, it's still someone selling you something.
A strategy being presented with equations, charts, Monte Carlo simulations, and statistical terminology doesn't automatically mean it's profitable or robust.
So I'm curious what everyone thinks:
I’m from Europe and when I started investing in S&P500 I made the mistake of choosing the one listed in LSE and it’s in dollars, which made me pay that withholding fee every time I bought more shares. That’s why I’m calling it a mistake.
Well eventually I started to buy the one listed in Milan stock exchanged and that is going well I guess. I lost the compound effect but I’ve had enough of seeing those extra fees.
Now my doubt is, what do I do with the S&P500 shares in dollars? It’s basically stopped.
Do I sell everything at once, keep gradually selling smaller chunks or simply keep it as it is? I could use the money to buy other shares
after I finish trading I often keep telling myself that I’m not doing enough to get to where I want to be in trading, even if I win on the day this thought keeps coming back to me.
I’ll start: I trade intraday/short-term for a living. Fast execution, tight stops, no romance. But my long-term portfolio? Supposed to be boring: index funds, SIPs, minimal tinkering.
Reality: I’ve caught myself “just adjusting” long-term positions because I felt confident about a setup. That confidence came from trading skills, not fundamental edge. It’s a trap.
Questions:
Looking for honest stories, not theory.
After 3 years of trading, I finally feel like I’ve cracked the code.
Over the years, I’ve been part of countless communities, spent a lot of money on mentors, and switched strategies more times than I can remember. Eventually, I realized that simplicity really is key.
About 3 years ago, I decided to start trading options. Looking back, I chose probably the most difficult path I could have taken. I started trading with my own money and blew account after account after account.
After 4–5 months, I switched to futures and prop firms. And, you guessed it, I blew evaluation after evaluation, even after passing some of them. I never managed to get a single payout.
At one point, I was in around 5 different trading communities, trying to learn as much as possible. But instead of helping me, it gave me a serious case of analysis paralysis. None of the communities were completely honest about what they were doing, so I kept jumping from one strategy to another while trying to combine their ideas with my own poorly developed edge.
After about a year of consistently losing money, I decided to go back to options. I had stumbled across a strategy that, in my opinion, seemed to work better on individual stocks.
And it kind of did.
For the first time, I was starting to see some consistency. However, because of the correlation and influence the “Big 7” have on each other, I was getting faked out quite often.
Then, one weekend while backtesting, I decided to test my strategy across different markets and pairs. That’s when I came across gold.
I had never really considered trading gold before, but after backtesting my strategy on it, I noticed something immediately: my edge worked WAY better on gold than it did on any stock I had tested.
From that day on, I started focusing on gold.
And the rest is history.
Last month, I didn’t have a single red day. Obviously, I still have losing days from time to time, but on average I’ve been making around $80K–$120K per month.
The crazy part is that, looking back, it’s actually much simpler than I ever thought it would be.
The hardest part was never finding the perfect strategy.
It was controlling my brain.
Having patience. Staying disciplined. Not constantly changing things when something doesn’t work for a few trades. Not chasing losses. Not overcomplicating something that was already working.
Those were things I struggled with A LOT during my first year of trading.
I’ve now been green every single month for the past 8 months, and I intend to keep it that way.
Hi I'm new to trading perhaps a month ish in and I'm not putting in real money instead am learning from paper trading but I want to know more I have looked into YouTube vids and stuff but idk they don't seem to be real I feel like it would be like when people find gold they don't tell other type thing so I'm hoping to find some advice and information here and help from anyone who wants to help me please do comment
I BOUGHT at the red line......hit DDL but price did nothing but increase?
Am I missing something?
I used to blow up accounts not because of strategy, but because of emotions.
So I wrote a small personal “Mindset Manual” for myself — simple rules I read before every session to stop trading like a gambler.
Here they are: 1. If I’m not calm, I don’t trade. 2. No “I’ll win it back” trades — ever. 3. One good setup > ten impulsive ones. 4. If I feel FOMO, I step away. 5. Small loss = business. Big loss = my mistake. 6. I don’t trade to feel something. 7. My job is discipline, not prediction. 8. A missed trade is better than a forced one. 9. If I break one rule, I stop for the day. 10. The chart doesn’t care about me — so I don’t take anything personally.
These mindset shifts changed everything for me. Once I controlled my emotions, my results stopped being random.
If anyone wants this as a clean text version, I can share it in the comments.