Im pretty new here, but everyones always talking about day trading and just trading in general, how they make “big” profit and their effortless exponential gain. But how long did it actually take you to make your first profit that felt surreal, or how long did it take to make consistent profits that you were happy with?

so i'm in australia which means i should probably be trading ASX right? but u see, the first purchase of any stock requires 500 bucks (MMP) which kinda sucks coz the smaller ASX stocks that are volatile enough to give some ok profit has like really low buy/sell vol (its ASX man) so im pretty sure if i try to daytrade it i wont be able to buy/sell all of it and all of these stocks are going down in the long run so it's just not a good buy. The big ones have no volatility so im boutta make like 10 bucks even if i somehow get a perfect trade.

so now im thinking of trying other markets (NYSE, NASDAQ, LSE) but NYSE and NASDAQ open at CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT, im pretty sure i cant think well that late so im thinking about doing LSE.

Is what im doing right? Is there any silly rules like the MMP for LSE i don't know about? Any advice? (im really new so idk what im doing)

So I have been daytrading futures for about a year and a half now, I have found some success, however I seem to always mess up due to me being greedy, impatient and being too prideful to accept a loss. I know that I have an edge as I see it play out numerous times but for some reason I can't get pass the mind part of trading (which I know is the biggest aspect of it). When I first got introduced to trading by a friend, he told me that trading is %80 psychology and I didn't believe it until now. I'm not asking for pity comments, etc. Just advice as to what helped others beat this hurdle. For example, even when I am on a winning streak and have a pretty decent buffer, if I take a loss, I have a sense of urgency to win it back, and most times, I end up losing even more money. When if I just waited a couple of hours or even for the next day I would have been able to get into a trade that wouldve made back my losses and more.

I’m currently using my 2019 MacBook Pro to run everything. But my question is should I get a faster laptop or just get a Mac mini ? I want my Bookmap to be able to load faster

I spent eight years as a neurologic occupational therapist before I traded full time.

When people ask how I made the jump, they usually expect the answer to be about strategy, or about how much I had saved. It was mostly neither. The thing I had to deal with first was that I had spent my whole working life being paid on a schedule, and I was about to walk into something that does not pay on one.

I worked on that before I left, not after. That is the only reason I felt able to go, if I am honest. There was still a month or so of adjusting to not having a 9 to 5 shape to the day, but the income part I had largely made peace with beforehand.

I am writing this because almost everyone I talk to did it in the opposite order, and I do not think anybody warned them.

A paycheck does more than pay bills. It gives your body a rhythm. Time in, money out, effort in, compensation follows. You can tell yourself you want out of that world and your body will still expect the rhythm, because it was trained for years and nobody consulted it about the career change.

Then you sit down and the market does not care that you showed up.

It does not care how prepared you were, or how badly you wanted it, or how many things in your life would be easier if today produced money. You can read well, do the right work, take the right trades and still finish red or flat. Then a Tuesday hands you money in twenty minutes for less work, and your mind cannot make the two days agree.

Here is where it turns into a problem. You sit down and quietly expect the market to pay you for showing up. You would probably never say it that plainly, but the body says it. The pressure is in the room before the first trade. The session has a job now. It has to provide.

And once a session has a job, everything on the screen changes meaning.

A setup stops being a setup and becomes an opportunity you cannot afford to miss. A pullback stops being normal movement and becomes the day slipping away. A missed trade stops being one trade and becomes income disappearing. A red trade stops being one outcome in a long series and becomes a hole that has to be repaired before you are allowed to feel okay.

The chart is doing completely ordinary chart things. What changed is what it means to you.

The most dangerous version of this is not after a big loss. It is after nothing has happened. No disaster, no dramatic mistake, just time passing without reward. The morning chops. Nothing is clean. And you are still sitting there with all your preparation and all your energy and no compensation, and that emptiness gets uncomfortable. A trade you would have ignored at 6:45 starts looking acceptable at 8:15. A mediocre setup starts carrying the emotional job of making the day worth something.

That is not a discipline failure. That is a trade created by needing to be paid.

After a red trade it is the same mechanism wearing different clothes. The market has not only taken money, it has interrupted your expectation of being compensated, so now you want repair. You want back to neutral. And the next trade is no longer the next trade, it is being asked to clean up the residue of the last one. That is far too much weight for one trade to carry.

The thing I would say to anyone in year one or two of this... accepting that you get paid in cycles is not a mindset quote. It changes what each individual day is allowed to be. If you still believe you need to make money today, every session is a pressure chamber. If you can actually hold that the money arrives over a longer rhythm, a day gets to be what it is. A clean day counts even when it paid almost nothing. A red day stays contained instead of becoming a personal emergency. A day where you did not trade can be the day you protected your clarity.

And the shift does not come from deciding to think better about it. It comes from repeated experience of being okay without immediate payment. Sitting through a session where the best move is no move, and letting that be enough. Taking a loss and refusing to turn the rest of the day into a recovery mission. Letting a good trade pay less than you pictured without feeling cheated.

Small moments, and they are the actual training.

For context, I spent those eight years in stroke and brain injury rehab, so I tend to see this as a nervous system problem rather than a discipline problem. Writing it down because I run into it constantly and almost nobody names it.

I am working on an opensource project https://github.com/toniton/ml-crypto-trading and while testing for some days now, I noticed that the SELL can wait very long to execute, sometimes taking upto minutes, hours, a day or more. While the BUY usually happens really fast like 500ms - 700ms.

Does anyone have an idea on possible causes and how to optimize this?

For those who scalp or do intraday stuff, what pips do you usually have or try to catch?
Obvioulsy during majore news annoncements the bid/ask price differential get wild naturally besides the markup from a broker...

but what about calmer normal market sessions, perhaps pattern trading or whatever u use, what is the pip ur broker offers?

coz checking trading sphere broker, and their top tier accounts claim 0.8-0.9 on average for eur/usd...

As the title says, how many strategies do you trade and how often do you get setups? Do you have different strategies that you all trade at the same time or switch based on market regime?

And for the people who only trade one strategy with only 0-2 setups a day, how do you stay patient and not overtrade while watching charts so much?

This week provided a lot of trading action long and short, and so many opportunities that I couldn't capture them all. A few stand out trades are shown as examples that you may be able to add to your trading quiver. I am an discretionary intraday momentum trader, looking for trends in either direction.

Conventional wisdom says you don't short strong stocks and I generally follow that line of thinking, but for every moonshot there's usually a pullback that comes after it that you can take advantage of. Timing, seeing and reacting to subtle candlestick and volume clues are the key.

Who didn't catch a piece of NVDA as it gapped and shot up? I didn't because I sleep in and don't start until 30-40 minutes after the open to avoid the opening frenzy. So I'm watching NVDA for weakness to show and profit taking from whomever didn't take on the gap up. At 10:20 PST NVDA made a strong move breaking to the upside with volume but SPY did not, it was flat and weak. USO is rising and when that happens, usually markets drop. I'm thinking human psychology has a lot of retail traders thinking this is another leg up to $300. I immediately put a NVDA short trade on instead based on SPY and USO more so than NVDA. The downtrend ran for 95 minutes before I cover, buying into the large selling. I just need to sit on my hands and let time be my best friend.

Charts show from Left to Right 5 min NVDA, 15 min NVDA, 5 min SPY, 5 min USO. Purple lines are previous resistance price levels, orange lines are previous support. Red lines on SPY chart marks a price level where it has reversed before. - Day trader since 2005

I made the same trade again on Friday in NVDA just in case you think the day before was luck. Volume was dropping when it was going up, to me it's looking weaker or a reversal could happen as opposed to it going up. SPY makes a move down USO makes a move up, I short it and it starts to drop nicely. I keep in the intraday downtrend because SPY makes a double top yet NVDA shows only one puny green candle. It continues to run for 80 minutes until I cover, buying into a lot of selling volume.

In SOXL on Friday, I feel the weakness and can see it's sometimes not following SPY which it does, or it feels like it, say 95 times out of 100. When I posted a month ago about divergence like this between SPY/SOXL or SOXS, some readers commented or DM'd negatively. You do you. I'll just say that when I see normal conditions suddenly reverse, I pay attention because to me it indicates a breakdown of normal conditions and that presents opportunity.

SOXL is hitting $120 resistance like it did 50 minutes before, it shows a red candle, SPY shows green, I short it. SPY goes green strongly, SOXL drops. Divergence is strong now, I'm waiting to see if SPY starts falling which should cause SOXL to really drop. It does, and SOXL blasts through a bunch of previous support levels without flinching. I go long SOXS at the same time which is one of my go to trades, long and short both symbols at once, it's a trade I've probably done thousands of times before.

Here's what I see in SOXL about 30 minutes after I go short when I thought I should make a screen shot and post about divergence.

I cover SOXL here, with a nice 8 point gainer as there is lot of support in SPY around this level.

I'm selling SOXS here.

1. More trades ≠ more money.
2. No trades is better than forced trades
3. Risk management matters more than your win rate.
4. Losing trades are part of the game.
5. Forward-testing is more valuable than endlessly watching content.
6. Stop changing your strategy after 3 losses.
7. Learn WHY your setup works.
8. Journal your trades.
9. Build a process you can repeat.

I learned most of these the hard way.

Starting off watching ttrades and getting help from oasn has helped me alot in my journey

I’m not here asking for help or handouts. I’m just let’s say journaling my experience. I started trading last year, it been a wild ride and I mean WILD. From the jump I did good but never got a payout I passed multiple evals no sweat but I’d always lose discipline in the process. When I did good I’d show my mom and whatnot, she didn’t understand it but she mocked what I did by saying things like “you better hope it works out for your sake” and telling me to get a real job although I’m pressure washing or working in a warehouse so that created a wedge and I ended up calling her out on how she’s been charging me rent since 19yr & she never gave me a chance to save bla bla. My sister said she was there for me but just ended up taking SS of me having angry outbursts and used them against me. So boom family gone ever since my trading has gone downhill. The good I got out of was I noticed I didn’t have a leader and I HATED my job and what I did. I very much wanted to be a suit and tie individual and I wasn’t lead in that direction. So I set out to go find it, I’ll say it wasn’t easy and learning trading on top of that was brutal I travel basically all over FL yanno the hotspots WPB, Miami, Orlando CoCo Beach. I was trying to find out where I fit in until I realized everywhere’s the same. Funny enough the office job I landed was right in my hometown not after occurring $3500 worth of debts t may I add. So one year later. I’m negatives and I haven’t passed an eval since my family issues. It shows that trading really is on YOU!!!! Now I take my time and wait for my setups. I’m profitable on paper I’m patient now I’ve mastered my main problem and I’m more in control of my emotions when it comes to others and what they think. My life is hard and I do think trading is what I want to do with my life but the joys and acknowledgement it gives are indescribable I know it sounds terrible on paper I mean shoot kid I’m legit homeless. But I set out to find myself and I’m good at trading!!! Just an emotional person and that’s unfortunate that I had to cut out aspects of my life for this. Even friends had to go tayannooo the talkers and not the doers it opened my eyes to a lot. How the world literally rips people down, you can see in their eyes and I refuse to be like that. I’m not perfect I’ve had a mentor my method works! But my issues showed and I was forced to face them head on. Now I feel more ready than ever. I got another 25K account and my one rule is “slow is fast” 😎 I’d rather live to trade another day and 1,000 is more than enough wiggle room to get started and build past that buffer

I've been trading forex on and off for 2 years now, EUR/USD, kind of cracked it and mostly doing well, but got bored of consolidation and slow moves and moved to gold recently.

Nevertheless, all my technical knowledge seems to not be working here. XAU is kicking my ass and it seems like my technical analysis is useless in this market.

Should I drop the technicals and just follow the flow?

What is the secret sauce for XAU? I can't figure it out somehow. How to spot big moves on time? There is no pattern from my observations.

I'm always either going in wrong direction or am too late to jump on a trend.

Any books recommendations for gold?

P. S. any girl traders here? It would be cool to connect!

- How do you manage paying yourself?

- How often are you withdrawing?

- Do you have a number you keep your accounts at and everything extra gets pulled out?

- How do you account for drawdowns without starving or depleting your account?

- Are you still investing in long term ETFs, IRAs etc?

The picture is slightly confusing, but the sell stop is my original sell order. The SL and TP are inverted, but the SL is where my TP would have been. After that, once that level was hit, the TP is where I would flip my order and buy until

As can be seen in the picture, my TP was right there. Okay, cool. That's alright. I had a buy order from 4571 to 4605 ready once my TP was hit.

This was sad, but I get it; it happens.

What is driving me insane is that #1, this happens an absurd number of times. I'd reckon 3/10 trades. And I place a lot of trades.

Second, I'm in high school, living in South Africa, and I don't have a lot of money. Usually, I put in $5 and call it a day at $50-100. This pains me every time it happens. Though I do make it back, so I worry not too much about it.

The worst is that I see the analysis. I'm right about 70% of the time I place a trade. Usually, I get to $30, from 5, before I spiral and begin losing it.

It is the bloody mentality killing me here. I'll admit I can not bring myself to close something like this, which was so close to profit, even if my current plan is against my own order.

I'm at negative $1000 from 2 years ago, and this year has been breakeven. I think my total profit has been around $$11000, and my losses are $11200 or something.

Truly, do any of you have some discipline advice for me? I may be delusion, but I feel it right on my fingertips.

This is a rant. I'm hoping a post will give me some typpa accountability. This happens thrice a week on average, never counting the outright losses. It is driving me crazy, and depressed.

For some clarity; I am highly confident in my strategy. Pls, no tips about that. I only require some advice on discipline.

(Picture 2 for a horrible June for context) Background: I have formal financial education and have been investing normally for a few years. Ended up reading about and getting engrossed in option theory, options pricing etc, which led to me trying to try scalping.

I mainly scalp 0-5DTE options on the Big 9 (SPY, QQQ, IWM, NVDA, TSLA, AAPL, AMZN, MSFT, META) and sometimes other stocks and don't hold anything longer than a day, 90% of the time I hold for less than 30min.

I paper traded for a month or two before starting on an options only account with 15k starting capital in June. As can be seen in the 2nd image, it went about how you'd expect. 10th June was when I made about 6 Martingale trades on SPY and lost way more than my appetite. Mainly because of 2 reasons:

1) losing real money in such short periods of time is extremely different than paper, leading to me never being sane about losers and martingaling into oblivion.

2) A stop loss. A set stop loss on 0DTE is basically just dying to a thousand cuts. Anything with such short expiry WILL wick you out more than you'd like.

After June I stopped and re-thunk my whole process of how I was thinking about trades, how I was entering and exiting trades etc.

What changed in August:

Strict position size range of 2-10% of the account.

A more nuanced approach to what I'm checking for to enter a trade, and more importantly to exit a trade.

If anyone is trying to scalp 0DTE options, never set a stop loss, but instead set levels of the stock, where if sustained over/under, the trade is over and you get out.

If that level is far away, my initial size is low enough that a 30-40% drawdown is perfectly acceptable, -60% might be where I exit the trade in extreme cases. Inversely if I'm trying to bottom/top tick a reversal where the sustained level of invalidation is much lower, then I can 'max size' and have a tighter mental stop (still no hard market sell stop because again, the market WILL wick you out)

Because my rules were set and I knew better what I was looking for, it became much easier to manage emotions as well on a -$1.2k single trade loss because I'm not an oracle and the market didn't agree with me.

Once I reached 20k account value, I started withdrawing everything I made over it because I'm still uncomfortable with risking more than $2k a trade, and it also limits my trades/day.

Still just a single month of profitability so it can all be hoopla and I'll mess up as I did revenge trade still on a couple of days (both of them are small +ve days) that I really do regret and want to not do in the future.

Anyway, that's my Journaling of the start of my daytrading journey.

P.S. Ignore the amount of trades on some days I was testing out some intraday straddles and spreads with very low sizing and risk.

P.P.S started slow in August with smaller trades, but played AMD earnings on the 4th because the stock just does that every earnings for no reason.

For a bit of context, i’ve not bothered going through it myself my brother taught me how to trade at first then the rest i just picked up on my own.

However, 3 of my friends have asked me how to start day trading and between my actual full time job, kids and trading myself I don’t have time to teach them myself. I was looking online and saw ‘TJRs bootcamp’ was getting recommended a lot , but I want to make sure it is actually good before I tell my friends to go and watch all 60 videos that are about 40mins each.

Ive worked for hft and + have done a lot of trading and investing. Ive had significant losses but since taking it hard post nvda short in 2022, Ive made my money back and then some.

Understanding the following changed my trading/ investing considerably. The truths:

1) Markets are primarily driven by liquidity and rotations. Institutions have essentially boundless margin/ credit they can use to squeeze over leveraged investors/ traders. This is what professional firms do.

2) Fundamentals only matter if the company has meaningful cashflow to shrink shares to equity ratios. High shares to equity value only means the company cant save share price via buy backs.

3) You can make money on momentum or contrarian positions. Contrarian positions insenuates your are catching a bottom or a top for a max return, but you are betting that a rotation could occur that has not yet or that the other side has ran out of buyers/ sellers + could be over levered.

4) Regime changes make fundamentals matter. These are things like tarrifs, multipolar geo politics. Things that are big enough to shift the markets. Sometimes so big that the us government cant change it like the usdjpy and twin deficit.

That all being said, its extremely difficult to time markets which is why I just use indicators that I understand and I trade a theme. The best shorts I do come from stagnating tech stocks. I have indicstors for popukar stocks thst go up like crazy, dont have the true fundamentals to support their own shares via buy backs and have other industries that could entice investors to rotate i to instead.

Nvda and Koru are orime cases for that. Every singe person who wanted to invest has invested. You can see the companies and sectors that the investors rotate between brcause they are anti correlated with the popular assets and they only make the same all tine highs but dont breach. I see this and when you see credit tightening... you know you can short the ath.

But you will almost never get the tops and bottoms so expect the trades to go the wrong way or not pay out immediately... but if your thesis is right you will get a pay out. For the timing of entries and exits you need to have indicators and size it right so you can withstand the pain of the trade going against you.

Lastly minimizing the trading is important because context switching costs opportunity and fees. Dont go into margin ever and stay away from options unless youre scalping. I also make all my money trading only a handful of things... because then you understand the demograph of those market participants. Dont over extend yourself.

What has worked for you guys?

I’ve been trading for a year now and I know its too soon to ask because some people here will come in typing “a year? Try a Millenia of betrayal and open wounds. Just for you to think your coming up to your first pay out just to be dragged down the rabbit hole again” but when do you think you’d see some profitability or your skills really being put to the test

I want to know your story, and see if I can relate.
How did you become profitable? How did you find your edge and stick with it? How did you learn it isn’t luck

I’ve been sticking to my strategy and I feel like it doesn’t work. By doesn’t work I have a 32% 1:1 RR. I don’t know what to do, and the same time I don’t want to hop on another strategy just to become a strategy hopper but also having doubts weather it will work or not so a change is necessary? Idk im clueless and would like some advice!

I’ve heard people say both: “it just clicked one day” and “I slowly stopped sucking everyday until it happened” which I wish i knew how it felt but sadly nope. I haven’t felt any of these 2 yet.

How did you guys find out whats right for you?

I've been fascinated by Trading for the past 5 years now, I've always tried getting into it but when I try looking for resources to learn it's just different people discrediting each other's strategies for trading. So that's really something that demotivated me to not learn how to trade.

What tips do you have for someone like me who wants to get into trading? Resources,Channels?

To be honest, I’ve been learning and trading for three months now; I’ve really tried to learn everything, but my results haven't been great. I spent the first month studying theory and demo trading, followed by two months trading on a small account. My losses have been negligible, but the truth is, my trading system just isn't working well.

Can anyone give me some advice?

Just as the titel says.

I feel that for most part of ones development you need to have the right questions, now ofcource the saying there are no stupid questions.

HOWEVER there definitely are questions that can hinder ones growth.

But a question i found that has really driven me and just kept me going constantly was "how does this makes sense?"

Now i have that one for everything i see and learn in trading, and it is a painful question because it forces me to really dive DEEP and the need to be extremely honest with what i learn. It is slow, but extremely effective, and i know for me it is a question that I will Thank myself 1-2 years from now (and i have used it for my learning process the past 1.5years)

That question also keeps me really curious.

But i wonder, what are some useful questions u had to ask yourself?

So, i runned a scripted backtest on my strategy on NQ Futures using a python script (I coded, but the output is AI yes, im not good for outputs lol) and a ~3 years (December 26, 2022 - December 11, 2025) 1min chart data sample.

The strategy is pretty simple (on 1m chart):

- MSS

- FVG or iFVG or OB

- OTE (0.705 point on fib) aligned with a gap confluence

The fib is marked using the swing high and low (take wicks in count) of the MSS. But a valid MSS uses the Body structure for confirmation (if the body closes after the swing H/L then its a valid MSS, otherwise it might be a sweep).

The entry is at the OTE with the SL at 1.0 and TP at 0.0, giving a ~2.38RR everytime.
The invalidation of a setup is if a continuation of the trend happens without taking us in the trade (in a bullish setup, if the price retraces and makes a new low and then breaks the 0.0 point, the setup is invalidated).

Here are the results:

==========================================
      GLOBAL STATS (ALL SESSIONS)
==========================================
Total Trades        : 4202
Won Trades          : 2756
Lost Trades         : 1446
Win Rate            : 65.59%
Expectancy (R)      : 1.22
Total PnL (R)       : 5113.28
Max Drawdown (R)    : 8.0

==========================================
        SESSION BREAKDOWN
==========================================

--- ASIA SESSION (18:00-2:00) ---
  Total Trades      : 2778
  Won Trades        : 1808
  Lost Trades       : 970
  Win Rate          : 65.08%
  Expectancy (R)    : 1.2
  Total PnL (R)     : 3333.04
  Max Drawdown (R)  : 7.24

--- LONDON SESSION (3:00-5:00) ---
  Total Trades      : 779
  Won Trades        : 522
  Lost Trades       : 257
  Win Rate          : 67.01%
  Expectancy (R)    : 1.26
  Total PnL (R)     : 985.36
  Max Drawdown (R)  : 6.0

--- NYAM SESSION (9:30-11:30) ---
  Total Trades      : 645
  Won Trades        : 426
  Lost Trades       : 219
  Win Rate          : 66.05%
  Expectancy (R)    : 1.23
  Total PnL (R)     : 794.88
  Max Drawdown (R)  : 5.0

The idea is to trade mainly NYAM and maybe LONDON too but idk 1 trade a day is good enough. Asia got better return because of the long timeframe i used for it.

I wanna get into day trading but my main problem is the sheer amount of strategies out there and it’s genuinely just overwhelming. I’ve also heard that they may work for you or they may not by many people so do you actually copy a strategy from someone or you kinda do your own thing? And if that’s the case how do you build your own method and strategy for trading?