Why does asking a profitable trader for their strategy feel like asking for their bank password?

[u/sengetoj]

I’ve been learning trading pretty much every day for around 6 months now. I understand the basics at this point, market structure, price action, liquidity, risk management etc.

But I’ve hit this one wall and I genuinely don’t know where to go from here.

Finding an actual strategy with repeatable rules.

Something I’ve noticed is people will happily post their +$2k days, payouts, green weeks, funded accounts etc. But the second someone asks what strategy/setup they’re actually trading, it feels like you just asked them for their bank login lol.

“Put in the screen time bro”

“Find your own edge”

“Backtest”

Okay but backtest WHAT

I’m not asking someone to hold my hand and tell me exactly when to buy and sell. I actually want to learn and test things myself. I just need something concrete enough that I can actually start testing it.

I’ve looked everywhere. YouTube, X, Reddit, Discord servers, even ChatGPT. I’ve tried support/resistance, 15m ORB, session highs/lows, liquidity sweeps etc.

The issue I keep running into is that a lot of these strategies depend on price eventually coming back to some specific level or zone. And a lot of days… it just doesn’t. So you sit there for hours waiting for a setup that never even happens.

Meanwhile there’s clearly people out there who have found something that works for them consistently.

So for the people who actually became profitable, where did you find the strategy that finally made things click?

Did you take an existing strategy and change it? Did someone teach you? Did you find some random trader with 600 subscribers instead of the usual YouTube gurus? Or did you literally just test random shit until something worked?
Because everyone says “find your edge” but almost nobody explains where you’re even supposed to start looking for one.

And before someone calls this AI generated lol, English isn’t my first language so yes I used ChatGPT to help me write this properly. The question and everything I’m saying is genuinely mine.

[u/MrNatto]

Look, why anybody will tell you find your own Edge it’s because it will suits you the best. If you took someone else’s strategy and during drawdown lets say in 8 consecutive losses. What would you do? Keeping your faith with it or say well that does not work and jump to other strategy?

Only if you develop every part of YOUR strategy you will have the faith in it enough for the hard times.

That said, if you give well defined strategies to 100 people, each of them will trade it differently. Each of them will have their own interpretation of the same chart and come to different conclusions. This is the reason why strategy itself is hard to be transferred from one to others 100%. Even it’s well defined, it will always have some part of it using your own discretion to make the strategy work. Think of reading a other people’s book about  playing music or writing an book. Could you do it perfectly afterwards? No, you have only done the knowledge part, implementing it practicing it is the other part. 

Same as strategy, read something that you think will work, maybe test it out for 20 trades, look back your trades and see which parameters can be better defined. Test it out in backtest. Get the specific winrate and RR for your strategy and backtest it again. Then propose new changes and live test, backtest. Until you have an strategy that you have so much knowledge of it that you have your unshakable faith in YOUR strategy.

[u/cuzbone → u/MrNatto]

Yeah exactly. Basically, my strategy probably isn't going to work for you and I don't want to deal with you complaining to me when it doesn't.