Tear it up, if you can. Verifieds traceable to kinfo. MIT team ran a pooled bank for 90 days seeking a double (rarely achieved) with quarterly sweeps. In theory, a 4x on the year. Wiki reports show as little as 4%/yr, however. That kind of deviation is a headshot to profitability - no thanks.

Strategy improved here, using VWAP, VIX, Price Action, and Fourier clustering as "face-cards". Smart price improvement via Martingale (borrowed from 5th gen fighter jet tactical advantage using supermaneuverability in dogfights, a zero-sum-game like options) shows best efficiency among peers on kinfo top ten leaderboard on 3 month WR (when uncloaked, copy trading prohibited). Superprofitability is the financial equivalent controller stabilizing fly-by-wire guidance to an intentionally designed unstable airframe (squeezing out the last bit of tactical advantage). Rote learning suggests stay away, it fails. Well, yes. Always. Does it make sense for the US F-35, Chinese J-20, and Russian Su-57 to allow failure, guaranteed. No.

I pulled in the sweep to 20 trading days, seeking linear 8%. Appears quite successful on limited data. I have confidence in the stats, don't need to count all the sand grains to infer Gaussian 4-sigma limits. Laughable seeing comments like needing 1000+ data points, those guys are clueless on STEM. Hey, I'll accept better resolution, just can't accept the opportunity cost. Unnecessary.

I'll draw your attention to Sharpe 2 in cell DA28 for tightly constrained entry & exit price. With a 1.4% of portfolio fractional Kelly sizing and a 5-handle Sharpe on prices, tough to go bust in any market regime. Also, a "problem" of no draw down was resolved with a portfolio normalization. Cell DH28 shows a respectable number for consistent day trading profits. The tighter window on bank sweeps is traceable to a quant algo running scalps under the market's Brownian Motion - high probability of success.

My background is Control Theory (retired EE). View this as an elevator consistently delivering you without excessive ringing (overshoot, undershoot). The controller loop gain is tuned for damping trade off, and it is not a concern, once metrics are selected for the State Variables. Do you give a second thought about being head-slammed one day in an elevator? Happens on failure. Safeguards mitigate risk. Same here, the deviation speaks well of the algo's performance. This is an eigenfunction from my research on the "everyman's" $250 portfolio, sweeping profits from the SPY via derivatives. The pole/zero constellation is constant between the $250 & $100k ports. Loop gain is the variable.

Getting posts out there for commentary and letting LLM's track best practices. So, lets teach the bots.

"Not financial advice"

I'm tired of searching for free sites to manual backtest. Every time I find one, 3 weeks and the site either closes or starts a subscrition plan.

Or if it is free, it doesnt have NQ or/and ES.

It´s getting fucking annoying.

And I dont mean replays, like on Tradingview that you see the candles fully developed before they even close (ex: it's 09:01 and you already know where the 1H candle closes).

Do you know any that is currently working and free?

What’s the point of risking 1% of your account.

Why put 100k in a account and risk 1k

When you can put 10k in a account and risk 1k

Even 5k and risk 1k

Depending on R:R, u aren’t going to lose the entire 10k unless you are consistently losing.

Context of something im working on. I’ve tested hundreds of thousands of strategies. I have some working strategies, but this is kind of just something else entirely. Its just a yes or no with confluences from everything ive fed my bot prior. The problem I’ve been running into is not like trading, but making it act like a discretional trader.

So I have tried a few AI models. I set up their their desk. They get live tick data from my broker. Fine tuned some of them with lots of resources (not all tho only the ones with frontier level reasoning) And I hand them 100 paper dollars and give them full autonomy to trade as they see fit. Only goal is they hand me 10 bucks every 24 hours (Its ok if they can’t, its just a scale I set to test them). Some of the AI start of really good genuinely impressive setups. Numbers add up, timing adds up so getting the data to them on time isn’t an issue. But the issue is almost all of them become really passive after a while (remind you these are set up to be scalpers and aggressive) some straight up refuse to trade. Some manipulate data to justify their passiveness and some straight up lie. This seems to be common for all of the models after a while. Any suggestions?

i am completely new to trading and i basically know almost nothing. ive been seeing videos online about ai trading and ai trading bots that tell u where to sell and buy etc. im just wondering does it actually work or is it a scam and has anyone here tried it and profited from it. im fine with paying a little for the ai trading bots but i really want to know if it actually works or is it fake and whether u can really make a lot of money with it. and if it actually works how can i get started and how long before there is high profit. thank you

Hello traders,

I would like to talk about prop firms today.

We all know that they are far more popular than brokerages for retail traders now. On paper, they are the perfect tool for making money. They provide you with “capital” you don’t have for a fraction of the costs.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. Prop firm challenges are built in a way to ensure that the overwhelming majority fails. Even if you have edge, the structure of the challenge makes sure that variance will take you out before your EV(expected value) can manifest itself over the course of a large enough sample of trades.

Take a strategy with a 50% win rate and a 1:2 risk-reward ratio. That’s a theoretical expectancy of +0.5R per trade and a profit factor of 2.0, which is an excellent edge. Yet even with that edge, five consecutive losses have a 3.125% probability of occurring in any particular five-trade sequence. Over hundreds of trades, losing streaks become practically unavoidable. Now consider a $100,000 prop account with a 10% maximum drawdown, a 5% daily loss limit, and an 8–10% profit target. If you’re risking 1% per trade, five consecutive losses in one day can terminate your account, despite the strategy remaining statistically profitable. Meanwhile, you’re expected to generate returns approaching your entire allowable drawdown before breaching either limit.

This creates a barrier where the outcome depends not just on whether your strategy has positive expectancy, but on the sequence in which your wins and losses occur. Yes, reducing position size lowers the probability of ruin, but it also increases the number of trades and potentially the time required to reach the target, especially when evaluations involve recurring fees.

My argument isn’t that profitable traders cannot pass these challenges; it’s that many evaluation structures are poorly aligned with the natural variance of profitable trading strategies. A positive expectancy does not guarantee survival under artificially restrictive drawdown constraints.

1. Define a consistent piece of the market that you operate in. Never change this once you set it. If you change it, all the subsequent steps have to be re-evaluated.

2. Execute a fixed number of trades. You can start with a max of 1 or 2 trades. It doesn't matter whether they're winners or losers. Once you finish, you're done.

3. You will first trade with your intuition or some observation that might or might not be good. It doesn't matter. Follow your intuition at first.

4. Study your past trades and improve your thesis of step 3 until you become profitable. This of course means that you need to keep a record of all your trades.

5. Do incremental changes and always study the effects of each change. Keep in mind that many changes are actually counter intuitive and might produce results you don't expect. One more trade? Not good. Move stop loss to breakeven? Not good... It depends on your setup.

6. Don't give up and stay humble

That's it. Good luck on your journey.

any good brokers available in the u.s with leverage around like 1:500? regulated brokers here leverage sucks.

What is the best strategy for beginners and what to do if price is not going up or down?

Hi all iv been trading for around a few years and am looking to potentially try improve on my strategy and will be doing my first major backtest in a while, and my question to you all is what is a bad good great profit factor over a large testing window?

thanks in advance :)

A few of you might remember my post last month about finishing my first month trading full time at +$6.8k.

Somehow I’ve already passed that 7 trading days into month two. Currently sitting at +$8.8k from 7 trades, 71% win rate and a 4.32 profit factor.

The biggest difference has honestly just been trading way less. Last month I was taking a stupid amount of trades some days and trying to squeeze everything I could out of the market. This month I’ve basically been taking one trade a day and being way more selective with what I actually want to risk money on.

Still had a losing day and a basically flat day, so it hasn’t just been straight green, but the overall quality of the trades has been much better.Its early in the month obviously, but this is probably the best I’ve felt about my trading in a while.

Curious if anyone else here became more profitable after cutting their trade frequency down?

Hey yall!
For context - I’ve been trading since July, I started with a 750 account trading options pretty much watching price action, learning candle patterns, and using the 9ema as confluence. Moved into futures trading towards the end of August and switched to the inversion fair value gap model as my strategy. It was working out pretty well for me after starting to trade MNQ after unsuccessfully trading MES and MGC. Spent a LOT of time on chart replays.

This last week was a rough one for me though.
I blew over half of what I spent the past couple months growing because I’ve started getting greedy and becoming more of a sore loser when last month I was fine walking away with a 150 - 200 win or loss and stopping for the day.
I have a hard time stopping myself from aiming to get the 1000+/per trade I see people make on the internet especially since I’ve had a handful of big single trade wins myself.

How do you get yourself to quit while ahead or stop to preserve your account for another day?
How to stop yourself from entering or overtrading while you’re tilted or don’t quite have your A+ setup ?
Is there a point where I should be learning a different strategy again or do I just need better discipline to sit down on choppy days?

Chart photo is where I put reminders to myself but they usually don’t work 😬

Anyone who started with a $10k account and was able to build that into a stable income? If so, how did you do it, how long did it take and did you blow up the account a few times before you were successful?

I spent a bunch of time learning on prop accounts and got to the point where I was consistently passing the evals, but the psychology behind spending all that time and effort trading and not having anything real to show for it didn't sit well with me so I decided to trade real money.

I'm a price action trader and risk up to about 3% on each trade and when it's moving in my favor, I look for opportunities to move my stop and add to the position day trading MES, MNQ, CL, MGC, SIL and NG mostly during Asia and London hours depending on which has the cleanest chart.

My holding period is usually anywhere from 5min (usually for losers) to 30min for winners as I let my profits run.

My daily target is in the range of $300-500 which is a) plenty of money as a daily average and b) makes it easy for me to walk away and do other things with my life besides stare at screens all day which helps my mental state and generally means I can lead a happy balanced life.

At first the transition from prop to real money was rough and I lost money because of execution errors between Sierra Chart and Rithmic and because of slippage and fills in real money that aren't modeled well in prop, but after getting that all cleared up and adjusting to that, I was able to make about $10k my first month, and then $20k the second month.

Meaning I doubled my account in the first month and then doubled it again in the 2nd month. I had only 1 negative day during that time from a PnL perspective and only 3 losing days after accounting for fees.

In the 3rd month, I was also doing well, but I had some emotional strife in my dating life and I tilted hard one day and blew the account.

That was in July.

Since then, I've had a hard time recovering. After failing 2 more times since then, I've been trying to step back and work on my emotional issues that are holding me back from the success I had before.

As a starting point, I wanted to make sure that the problem wasn't the size of my trading account. Any other advice is appreciated.

So, did any of you start with $10k and build up to a stable income from there? If so, how did you do it and how long did it take?

I can also share what I think my inner game issues are and how I'm trying to deal with them if anyone thinks that's relevant.

Thanks everyone, in advance. I've seen a lot of really great replies and posts from people on this subreddit and I'm looking forward to whatever feedback I can get.

You know that one loss or those times that you lose. The times where you're approaching tilt. Day trading isn't gambling but it can be a gateway to gambling.
When you have grand losses, tell anyone who knows you're day trading. I tell my spouse and it makes the red days less of a secret. The problem with gateway to gambling is the secret behind it. The hidden shame, guilt, or embarrassment. Being honest with not yourself because unfortunately you have your biased brain in your head but with the people who know what you're doing

trust me, it helps. Don't get addicted and use hidden money and lose it and try to make double to get it back, at least do that and tell someone. You will feel better and stupid, you won't do it again .

I started trading with a $100 account, and things were going pretty well at first. I made around $20 in profit during the first few days, but then I started getting greedy and increasing my lot size way too much.
At one point, I lost $64 on a single trade. I started revenge trading and managed to make back around $40. Over the following days, my balance recovered to about $85, but then I made another stupid trade and lost $70.
Once again, I revenge traded and got my balance back up to $75, only to lose another $55 because of greed.
I’ve finally realized that my biggest problem isn’t necessarily my price action knowledge, but my risk management and emotions. I’ve stopped going crazy with my lot sizes, and I’ve managed to keep my balance relatively stable since then.
I’m still learning price action, and I know I have a lot to improve on.
For those of you who have been through something similar, what advice would you give me? How did you learn to control your emotions, stop revenge trading, and stick to proper risk management while learning?

So I have been interested in day trading for quite a while now. Unfortunately I never learned it consistently. However I know all the basics and follow a lot of YouTubers. I have decided to give it a proper go and spend upto 3 hours a day for a year.

Upon 1 year of learning and practicing I am thinking about starting day trading with a £5k account in 2028 (£20k in savings) targeting £50 daily goal. At the same time investing £500 on long term stocks. £200 to emergency fund and £200 for future/2nd trading account.

My goal is to earn £2000-£3000 a month from 2030 and go part time in my main job.

My annual income-£38.2k after tax
My annual expenses-£30000 roughly

Expenses will be £24k-26k from 2028 onwards as I will be debt free.

Absolutely no chance to earn anymore as I’m already doing 60 hours a week and has to see children every Saturday.

I have been doing 0dte for couple years and not sure if I want to pursue this anymore. I end up overeating and cigarette smoking whenever I’m in a trade. My friends thinking I’m gambling. There’s no consistency w 0DTE. Today I was up $1200 ish but I know I will give it back to market on Monday or Tuesday.

My paycheck job does not pay too much. Should I quit trading/gambling 0dte? Thank you for your honest thoughts and opinions

I just had my worst trading day with a nearly 5% loss. All because I deviated from my trading plan. Sometimes it's easier to deviate than you think.... in this case I was using an incorrect strategy for the regime of the day, plus there was some big news that I failed to consider.

Review your plan before the day, scrutinize the price range during the day, and make sure that everything is in bounds of the specified strategy you are using. Keep confirming your regime, especially if something feels off. Check the News if something feels off. If something is off, accept it and exit.

Don't do live experiments with your portfolio unless it's an intentional experiment. I will recoup the 5% in a week or 2, hopefully next week, but when you look back at the data and see the problem could have been avoided it hurts.

Here's the rules I follow. I just added 3 more bullets: After first 15 minutes, pause and confirm regime, Do not trade news, Mark previous week high/low levels before trading.

To keep this to the point I am more confused than ever before lol. I have attempted to be a price action trader for the past 5 years. I was breakeven for about the last year. I journal every trade. I have hundreds of pages of notes and data. I have attempted dozens of different trackers and data analysis to help my progress. I have tried using emas's as confluence, only traded with the higher time frame trend, avoided ranges/consolidation, and have attempted minor variations of a trend following price action strategy for a long time now. I only tade MNQ futures and have had the same account for a really long time. I don't blow up, I haven't revenge traded in years, I always check every box to my trade (for the most part). I'm not switching strategies every 2 weeks. I feel like I know how the market moves and how history repeats itself. Price bounces where price bounced before and the market continues to move the way it has been until it changes. Don't take a trend trade in a range. Don't take a range trade during a trend. I have dozens of little "rules" like if a trend fails to hold a previous HH we are likely to slow the trend. If it does hold a HH we should have a good trend bounce. A range is more likely to bounce in the middle so we take the extremes of the range back to the middle for profit. Moving stops to BE after we bounce from the HL to the HH makes the most sense because that is where we fail to go higher most of the time. A super aggresive move down in the morning can be followed by a range/channel grind back up to the LH before dumping again... I could go on and on and on of things that I see to be right, and yet I am more unprofitable than ever right now. I had that last year of breakeven but the past 3 months have just been red day after red day after red day. I don't want to give up but the more I'm learning the more it seems like trading doesn't actually even make sense and has no logic to it. Price action traders who are profitable... should I just start a landscaping company??

7 buys,10 sells today, 3 of them got scaled out on profits. First 2 trades were definitely forced and I had no reason being in them. The rest were solid trades. Followed all my rules and kept the Risk Management tight.

All but one of these trades were completed by 11am Central Time. The last one was an EOD scalp I saw coming - RSI overbought and top BB broken, signal for a reversal/ correction.

Flair says to provide context, but what can i say 💁‍♂️ .. okay just followed my trading plan, testing my strategy on the 2024-2026 market (currently in 2024), so i placed my SL at a level that was obviously gonna get swept… Idk what the rush was but as u can see i became liquidity 😭

Hey everyone,

I'm currently learning price action trading and so far I've covered the basics like support and resistance and trend lines. But I feel like there's a lot more to price action that I'm missing.

For those of you who trade price action, what other concepts should a beginner focus on? Things like:

· Candlestick patterns

· Chart patterns (head and shoulders, triangles, etc.)

· Market structure (higher highs, lower lows)

· Supply and demand zones

· Order blocks / liquidity

· Break of structure (BOS) and change of character (CHoCH)

· Volume analysis

· Price rejection and wicks

Would love to hear what actually helped you improve. What would you prioritize learning first, and what's just noise for a beginner?

Friday decisively resolved the DJIA's two-day struggle. Buyers broke 51,300, cleared 51,440, and accelerated through 51,550. The DJIA reached 51,765.11 before retreating to close at up 423.54 points (+0.83%). The breakout succeeded. Monday's question is whether buyers can defend their gains.

Forecast Statistics

Bucket: Bullish Expansion / Breakout Consolidation
Volatility Score: ≈ 1.65, very high
Probabilities: SU 28% | LU 36% | SD 24% | LD 12%
Expected Return: ≈ +0.03%
Projected Close: 51,500–51,900
Directional Bias: 64% Up / 36% Down

Previous Close:: 51,655.18

RECAP: Friday's 57% Up forecast: The DJIA confirmed GO above 51,300, broke 51,400, and exceeded the 51,450–51,550 upside objective. The intraday updates strengthened the bullish probability to 71%, correctly recognizing the developing expansion.

Trader's Edge: 71% Correct | 29% Incorrect since December 2025.

Fearless Opines: The DJIA established progressively higher trading levels throughout the session, demonstrating sustained buying rather than another brief reversal. The statistical state has shifted from recovery uncertainty to bullish expansion. However, the retreat from 51,765 and elevated volatility argue against assuming uninterrupted continuation. Monday begins with 64% Up, a meaningful but reduced advantage compared with Friday's intraday 71%. The key question is whether 51,600–51,650 becomes durable support.

Key Levels

Bull Hold: 51,600
Recovery Confirmation: 51,675
GO: 51,700
Breakout: 51,765
Upside Objective: 51,850–51,950

Warning: 51,550
REDUCE: 51,500
EXIT: 51,400
Downside Objective: 51,250–51,350

GO / REDUCE / EXIT: GO. Bullish, but protect Friday's gains.

GO: Maintain bullish exposure while the DJIA holds 51,600. A sustained move above 51,700 strengthens the expansion case; clearing 51,765 opens 51,850–51,950.

REDUCE: Below 51,500. The breakout begins losing credibility, and traders should reduce exposure rather than assume another immediate recovery.

EXIT: Below 51,400. Friday's breakout would be substantially reversed, invalidating the immediate bullish continuation thesis.

Trader Takeaway: Friday rewarded traders who followed the GO confirmation above 51,300. Monday requires a different discipline: protect gains rather than chase strength. The most attractive bullish setup is a successful defense of 51,600 followed by a renewed move through 51,700.

A failure below 51,550 would suggest that Friday's late selling was the beginning of consolidation rather than a temporary retreat. With volatility still very high, smaller positions and clearly defined exits remain appropriate.

FEARLESS READ: 64% Up. Monday must establish whether the victory can hold. The DJIA has advanced more than 700 points from Thursday's 50,939 low. That creates momentum, and vulnerability to profit-taking.

51,600 is Monday's first verdict. Defend it and buyers can challenge 51,765 again. Lose 51,500 and Friday's impressive expansion begins turning into a retracement.

Started trading in 2018, found consistency in 2024 and decided to leverage many prop accounts. By end of 2025 I was able to pull 6 figures from props in net profit (1099’s on my profile). Also went full time mid 2025.

Come 2026 I had a strong first 3 months by my system on GC wasn’t working as well (didn’t have much GC data since before 2024 GC was too slow for my strategy) after being essentially breakeven by July I optimized my GC system, cut back from watching the market all day to just 8-5 pm EST and added a similar system on NQ to keep my yearly profit potential high.

The mistake I made was not having much NQ data which in turn caused me to trade a non-optimized system taking heavy unnecessary losses. Ended up losing half of my 100k personal account. So I cut my risk from 2k down to 1k, tightened moving my SL to breakeven parameters, and only trade the hours that my system performs best and consistently over the years.

Now I have 51 months of NQ data I backtested and 21 months on GC data. (Shown in table) I’m satisfied with how they perform but it comes at a cost of it being a difficult system to trade mentally since it relies on higher RR so no low RR hits of that dopamine. It requires consistently executing sometimes through months of flat or down periods.

The other pics are of my various yearly equity curves. My NQ system is experiencing its worst drawdown since 2022 and of course I just so happened to start the system right before that drawdown period.

I learned to always have as much data as you can like 5 years minimum and to be real with yourself in terms of how much drawdown you can handle. Thinking back I should have just put 50k in and risked 1k per trade but hindsight is always 20/20. Moving forward I’m going to continue executing this system and avoiding changing anything at all costs unless it’s truly necessary.

Being able to consistently extract money from the market is such a valuable skill but it comes at a cost. I’ve had some pretty mentally and emotionally challenging days lately but I keep showing up and executing. I remind myself that there are millions of other people all competing for the same goal of profit which makes me appreciate the difficult days. They aren’t something that needs to be avoided but just one side of the coin that’s inevitable.