r/traders

I'm not talking about the valuation and I think HUYA fits into that category. Most discussions still call it a livestreaming company, while the company seems to be putting more emphasis on gaming services and publishing. Could be totally wrong though. Any other names where you think Wall Street (or retail) is still using an outdated narrative?

I started prop firm trading with less than $500 in evaluation fees. As of today I've been paid $95,336 in total payouts. Net after all evaluation costs and resets: $86,697. That's a 1,003% return on investment. I'm about 5 weeks away from crossing $100K in total payouts at my current pace, and I want to break down exactly how I got here because none of this is complicated.

Propfirm Sync

I trade two setups. That's it (well technically 3, but that one rarely ever forms). The 15-Minute ORB and ERL → IRL. One catches the opening momentum, the other catches the weekly swing. Between them they cover basically every condition NQ/ES (futures) gives me. I don't switch strategies when one has a rough week. I don't add indicators when I'm in a drawdown. I've been running the same two frameworks for over a year and the equity curve speaks for itself.

Here's what six years of trading taught me that no course or YouTube video ever will. The market doesn't care about your analysis. It doesn't care how many confluences you stacked or how many hours you spent on your game plan. It either moves in your direction or it doesn't, and your only job is to make sure you survive the times it doesn't so you're still around for the times it does. That means small size, hard stops, and the ability to take a loss without it turning into three more. Every blown account in my career came from the same place, I was right about the direction but wrong about the timing, and instead of taking the loss I doubled down and also one of my biggest downfalls was trying to catch a falling knife.

15min ORB + FVG

The other thing nobody tells you is that profitable trading is boring. My best months are the ones where I take 1-2 trades a day, hold them for a few hours, and close the platform. My worst months are when I'm staring at charts all day looking for setups that aren't there because I want the dopamine of placing a trade. The less time I spend at my screen the better my results are and that's not a coincidence. When you're glued to the charts your brain starts manufacturing reasons to enter. You see patterns that aren't there. You talk yourself into B and C setups because you're bored. The traders making real money from this are the ones who do their prep in 10 minutes, set their orders, and go live their life.

ERL <-> IRL MODEL

If you want the full breakdown of both setups with chart examples, entry rules, stop placement, and risk management, I've posted detailed walkthroughs of the 15-min ORB and the ERL → IRL framework on here before and I'm happy to do updated versions. Drop a comment if that's useful and I'll put them together. Six years of trading distilled into two setups that I run every single day across 5 funded accounts and now I used those to fund my own live cash account. The edge is in the patience.

I’m 14 and I’m new to investing and I want to put 560$ in stocks and I wanna try spacex and lmk if you think it’s a good idea or if I should try something safer like Apple or Alphabet and is there any selling fees for spacex

Hi Reddit! I recently moved out on my own, and as a junior in college, money has been pretty tight. My biggest goal is to learn day trading so I can hopefully earn extra income to help pay for college. I have a laptop, a willingness to learn, and I’ve been binge-watching YouTube videos, but it’s hard to know what’s actually worth following. If anyone has beginner tips, resources that helped you, or would be willing to mentor me and show me how to make my first trade the right way, I’d really appreciate it. I’m not looking for a get-rich-quick scheme, I genuinely want to learn and put in the work. Thank you all! :)

I want to buy a funded account and I don't know which prop firm is best and is your prop firm is trusted and has no issue with payouts and all ...

Guys, how do I recover from this?

I went on tilt today and lost a lot of money. I only have a $500 loss limit left. Do you think it's still possible to hit the profit target with that remaining drawdown?

I'd really appreciate some practical advice. What would you do if you were in my situation?

I feel like I completely threw this account away by going on tilt. Right now, I have almost no hope for it. I'm devastated. I've been doing everything I can, but somehow I keep blowing account after account. I'm exhausted by this constant losing streak and, more than anything, by my own lack of discipline.

I really want to recover this account. What should I do from here?

https://preview.redd.it/99swp5af0dah1.png?width=1693&format=png&auto=webp&s=8a88edc004481158befec396d31972316351054b

I'm new to trading and my ig feed got filled with traders advertising their channels, bots, explaining strategies completely for free so I wanted to know what they're trying to achieve by this why would they pay for it to get advertised if the sources are free in the first place?

If you want to know what flawless, emotionless trading looks like, you need to know about John Arnold. He pulled off one of the greatest, least-talked-about contrarian trades in financial history.

🌪️ The Setup: The Anti-Gambler
John Arnold wasn't a gambler addicted to the physiological rush of trading. After starting his career at Enron, he founded his own Houston-based hedge fund, Centaurus Energy, in 2002. From the very beginning, his discipline was absolute: his fund never returned less than 50% annually during its first seven years in existence. 
By the spring of 2006, Amaranth’s star trader, Brian Hunter, was aggressively buying up winter natural gas futures. Hunter was betting heavily that 2006 would mirror the previous years in terms of hurricane destruction, which would inevitably spike natural gas prices. 

📉 The $1.5 Billion Strike
Arnold looked at the exact same market and saw reality. The industry had fully recovered from the previous year's storms, and 2006 saw natural gas reserve storage holdings sitting more than 40% higher than the previous five years. The market was prepared, and the massive supply shock Amaranth was betting on simply wasn't going to happen. 
Instead of following the hype, Arnold decided to take the exact opposite positions on behalf of Centaurus Energy. While Hunter was buying, Arnold correctly predicted that the cost of gas would fall and went aggressively short. He was effectively betting against the biggest, loudest bull in the market. 
When the market finally realized there would be no severe supply shortage, natural gas prices plummeted. In September 2006, the axe fell: Amaranth was completely obliterated, announcing a $6 billion loss and its bankruptcy simultaneously. 
But on the exact opposite side of that massive trade, Arnold celebrated. 

🏆 The Quiet King
While the financial media focused on Amaranth's epic, reckless collapse, Arnold quietly banked the profits. His bet netted billions of dollars in profits for Centaurus. In 2006 alone, Arnold's personal earnings from his energy trading dominance were estimated at $1.5 billion to nearly £1 billion. 
By 2007, this single contrarian masterclass made Arnold the youngest billionaire in the United States. 

💡 The Lesson for Prop Traders
There is a reason John Arnold became a billionaire while the trader on the other side of his screen blew up his entire firm.
- He traded reality, not hope: While Amaranth was hoping for a hurricane, Arnold looked at the actual storage data and traded the fundamentals. 
- He removed emotion: Arnold credited his massive success to his ability to completely separate his emotions from his decision-making process. He knew he could always be wrong, so he refused to become blindly wedded to his theories. 
- He knew his opponent: Whenever a counterparty put up an opposite trade against his position, Arnold obsessed over what they were thinking and what they knew so he could make highly educated, confident decisions. 

The next time you are tempted to follow the herd, average down, or force a trade based on a "gut feeling," remember the $1.5 billion contrarian. The greatest trades aren't made by those who yell the loudest; they are made by those who quietly look at the data, manage their risk, and let the gamblers destroy themselves.

Quick background — I am a XAUUSD trader, I have a 9-5 job, so i am not a screen-watcher. After 6-8 years of losing money trying to "be disciplined" with discretionary trading, I rebuilt my whole approach around something boring, rule-based, and built to run without me staring at charts all day. I don't scalp — my background is day trading, and everything here is built around having a full-time job, not around having all day to watch price action.

I'm sharing what I've learned, one topic a week, for the next 52 weeks. This is Week 1.

Week 1 : ATR — how i think ATR should be used in trading

You've probably watched online content that talks about a certain candle pattern, shows you where to place a trade, and marks the stop loss and take profit on candles like this:

https://preview.redd.it/mwohswccfm9h1.png?width=250&format=png&auto=webp&s=5e5e759366ac59f001765283883f000d7266ccaa

While trying to follow that pattern, the key thing a lot of people miss is: how do you structure this so it stays consistent every time you try to trade that pattern?

Take a look at these two charts — both XAUUSD, different years, same 1hr timeframe. Do you see any difference?

Left: June 2026. Right: July 2023. Both XAUUSD, both 1hr timeframe.

They look the same, right? But they're completely different.

July 2023 — candle body size: 550 pips

June 2026 — candle size: a whopping 7000 pips

This is what catches a lot of people off guard. A candlestick pattern from 2023 has a completely different body size to one in 2026. That spike candle you're seeing in those charts — even though they look the same — is actually a 13x difference in pips! If your trading plan isn't built to adapt — or doesn't have a dynamic way of adapting — you'll get eaten alive by this without even realising it.

From 2023 to 2026, the average candle range went from ~100 pips per candle to ~2000 pips per candle — a 20x difference!

If your trading plan can't adapt to that, you're in trouble. The worst part is you might not even notice, because the range doesn't grow overnight — it creeps up gradually. Unless you're actively paying attention, you won't realise it's happening. You'll just end up wondering why your trading plan has gotten worse, without realising you've been compromised the whole time.

So now we know the problem is, what should we do to solve this?

My approach to this, is Average True Range (ATR).

What is ATR?

According to Babypips, it's a technical indicator that measures the volatility of price — it shows you how much price has fluctuated, on average, over a given time frame. I won't go through the calculation or the textbook definition here — if you don't know what ATR is, look it up, there's plenty of material out there and it's pretty straightforward to understand.

Most traders learn this definition, glance at the ATR indicator, and move on. The mistake is not pairing it with your actual trading strategy and using it as a real input into your trading decisions.

How I actually use it
ATR is how I determine my stop loss and my lot size. This should be an automated process, and you should always be calculating this. Find yourself an ATR period that works with your strategy, determine your stoploss based on ATR value, instead of fixed pip values.

The honest truth is - stop loss of 500 pip value isn't gonna work for any strategy long term. Because 500 pips in 2023, is totally different in 2026. it might take 2 hours to move a price to 500 pips in 2023, but in 2026, it might just a matter of 3 minutes.

My strategy is built entirely around ATR:

• Stop loss set at 0.8x ATR or 1.5x ATR, depending on the strategy.
• Lot size calculated after the stop loss, so I'm only risking my defined % per trade

So what does that actually mean? A 24-period ATR tells you the average move over the last 24 candles. If I set my stop at 1.5x that, I'm basically saying "I need the market to move one and a half average candles against me before I'm wrong." With an ATR of 20 points (2000 pips), that puts my stop loss 3000 pips away.

How should you choose your ATR period?

This is something that rarely gets covered in a lot of online courses, or trading content. I am sharing this based on my personal experience - you choose your ATR period based on your trading style.

If I'm an intraday trader, I'm not interested in the average price movement over a 2-week period — when price has a huge spike or move, a 2-week ATR won't react fast enough to be meaningful for my strategy.

In the contrary, this might work well with swing trader, because they probably don't need the ATR to react as fast.They're fine with ATR sitting on a 2-week period — good enough to capture the broader move, without needing to react to every short-term shift.

Personally, I'm an intraday trader, so I want something that reacts fairly quickly, since my trades normally conclude within a day. My ATR needs to react on that same timeframe — so I've set it to a 2-day period, i.e. 48 on a 1hr timeframe. It's not too short where it overreacts like a 24-period on 1hr would, and it's not too slow like a 72-period on 1hr would be. 48 is my sweet spot for my strategy.

So how do you find what works for you?

Ask yourself these two questions:

1. How many candles does your strategy need to survive, based on your trading style?
2. Within how many candles do you need to know the price has moved against your strategy?

If you can answer these two questions, you'll have your answer on what ATR period and value you should be using.

That's everything I wanted to cover for this week's topic — ATR, why it matters, and how I personally use it. Thanks for reading.

Hello

I have been stuck on this market structure question for a long time, and I cannot confidently continue the course until I fully understand it.

After a confirmed Swing BOS on the higher timeframe, should I immediately begin building a new Internal Structure for the new swing leg, or should I continue using the previous confirmed Internal Structure until the Internal timeframe confirms its own BOS/CHOCH?

My confusion is that when I continue using the previous Internal Structure, confirmation of a pullback and confirmation of a new Swing HH/LL often come very late. In many impulsive moves, price moves extremely fast and creates very few Internal Structures. As a result, the Internal Structure becomes very large in scale and the confirmation arrives much later than expected.

Since Internal Structure BOS is also used as a confirmation tool, I am struggling to understand which Internal Structure should be respected after a Swing BOS and how the hierarchy between Swing and Internal Structure should be handled in this situation.

I would greatly appreciate a clear explanation of the correct rule and reasoning behind it.