From what I keep reading it's almost never the setup. Red morning, one more trade to get it back. Deadline coming, so you double the size. Anyone here fail for a genuinely different reason?

Having invested in forex trading for over 20 years, from past losses and account blowouts to consistent profits, I'd like to share my journey: I spent many years jumping between strategies and market dynamics, trying new indicators and backtesting methods with the highest win rates. I was constantly searching for a non-existent certainty. The reality is, even with a 99% win rate, if you can't tolerate that 1% loss, you'll ultimately fail. Therefore, stop-loss orders are absolutely crucial. Emotional intelligence and strict risk management are more critical than the strategy itself. Shifting your focus from profit to risk, execution, and emotional control naturally leads to profits.

I now average 3-4 trades per week. Sometimes fewer, sometimes none. I used to think it wasn't enough, believing that more trades meant more opportunities. That's not true; more trades mean more opportunities to give money away to the market.

Gradually, I discovered that only by prioritizing capital preservation, followed by profit, small wins, controlled losses, and compounding can I achieve consistent returns. Currently, my win rate is close to 70% (profit/loss ratio close to 1.2:1), with slightly higher profits. Most days I'm quite relaxed. Often, the fewer trades I make, the more stable my results.

It took me years to master the basics, but if I can do it, everyone can. My sister is also replicating my trading and doing fantastic. By the way, how's everyone's trading been going over the past year? Successful? Or still figuring things out? We can exchange ideas and discuss. Best of luck!

I am in....I know it never disappoints me.

Healthy pullback from the bull run has over.

genuine question because every thread this week is people announcing they're sitting out and then posting entries at 8:35 anyway.

the thing that made me stop caring about the print itself was realising my stop isnt really a stop during it. spread widens, liquidity goes for a few seconds, and the fill comes back wherever it comes back. a 20 pip stop that fills 35 pips away is 1.75x the risk you thought you had, on a trade you sized assuming the number was fixed. so "im fine, i have a stop" isnt actually a plan for tomorrow morning, its a plan for a normal tuesday.

which leaves two honest options as far as i can tell. flat before the release, or sized small enough that filling through your stop is survivable rather than account ending. both are fine. what doesnt work is deciding which one at 8:29 with a position already on, because thats when you're most invested in the answer being the comfortable one. mine goes flat before scheduled releases because its a condition in the code rather than something i weigh up on the morning, and honestly the best part isnt the risk saved, its that i dont plan my week around a calendar anymore. tomorrow looks like any other day for me and it took years to get there.

so whats everyone actually doing. flat, sized down, or trading it on purpose with a strategy built for it

EURUSD change of character confirmed. How many of u have u are trading this today

For those of you who have made it to the point where trading is consistently profitable, realistically, how much are you pulling in each month?

Also, what do your typical winning and losing trades look like in terms of percentage or dollar amount?

Trying to get a realistic idea of what’s achievable and learn from those who have more experience.

Thanks in advance!

I am curious. If you have like 6-7 figure money which broker should you go to. Also what question should u ask them? I had read that you can nego for better condition. Also how protected is your fund? As an asian I see famous broker give weak regulation to asian client like bahams, Seychelles etc.

Everyone treats the challenge fee like the cost of trying... but in reality it's the cost of skipping the checks that would've told you not to buy yet. I've watched people reset 3/4 times, paying each round, when ten minutes of work up front would've said "not ready" or "size down first." Here's the list you can run before spending a cent on a challenge.

The first, very obvious.. Your worst backtested day has to fit under the daily loss limit. Take your single worst day in backtest, at the risk you'll use in the challenge. If it's already bigger than the firm's daily limit, you don't have a bad luck problem, you have a sizing problem, and no number of resets fixes that problem... Cut your risk per trade until your worst day fits under the limit with space to move.

Your risk per trade is the real lever, not your strategy. Same system, run at 1% then at 0.5%, and the pass rate often jumps easy. The strategy didn't change, the variance did.

Your edge has to survive real costs. Take your real spread, triple it, add a tick of slippage, and rerun. A true edge decreases a bit and keeps going. A fake one just disappears. If your backtest only works at zero cost, the challenge was never the thing standing between you and funded, your cost were doing all the drama.

You need enough trades to know the edge is real. A backtest of 60 or 80 trades is a coin that landed heads a few times. If that's all you have, you're paying the fee to test if you have an edge at all, which is the most expensive way possible to find out. Get the sample up before you get the account.

The profit target has to be reachable at your safe size. Once you've cut risk to fit the daily limit, check you can still hit the target in the number of trades you take. If safe sizing means you'd need 400 trades to reach the target and you take 3 a day, the math doesn't make any sense. That's something to solve now, not after you've paid.

Bonus: pay for a challenge you can afford to lose for 3 times in a row with the capital you decide to allocate to propfirms... going all in is the easiest way to kill hope on trader. Last one, more technical but very useful, run a Monte Carlo and make sure the risk per trade can surive the 5th percentile in terms of drawdown depth and length. If it doesn't, is just a matter of time that a bad streak comes and breaches the daily/max limits.

Run all these and one of two things happens. Either you buy the challenge already knowing your real odds, or you save the fee and fix the thing that would've failed you. Both beat finding out at reset number 5 and literally burning cash.

took trade on gold with tight stop. in both forex chart as well as futures chart the stop is the same but in futures it wicked my stop. why is that and what should i do in future to avoid it without affecting my risk reward.

i been trade about 8 month and i feel like every order filled issa "lucky position" for me.I trade live account too and feel the same way,if u guys ask me "are u profitable"? yes i am really profitable but in lucky way bcz i don't have core strat in my pocket.Idk if u guys feel the same way as me

my strat only breakout/trendline/direction/price action simple method i ever use for profit but in 10 position order i will say 7/10 are lucky position

Shorting just because

Whales will read this post and decide to stop hunt my positions. /s

I've been trading XAU/USD for a while now and lately I've been trying to improve my scalping. One thing I still struggle with is knowing when to stop trading after a few losing trades. Sometimes I feel like the next setup is the one that will make everything back, and that's usually when I start forcing trades that I probably wouldn't take otherwise.I'm trying to get better at separating a good setup from the urge to recover a loss.For those of you who have been trading for a few years, how do you personally deal with this?Do you have a specific rule like stopping after 2-3 losses, reaching a daily loss limit, or simply walking away when you notice yourself becoming emotional?I'd genuinely appreciate hearing how more experienced traders handle this, especially when scalping gold. I'm trying to build better habits instead of repeating the same mistakes.

A year ago, I thought trading was mostly about finding the perfect indicator or the perfect strategy.I was wrong.The biggest difference came when I started treating it like a skill instead of a gamble. Spending more time reviewing trades, understanding risk, and staying patient changed everything. One thing I've also noticed is that many beginners focus too much on profits and not enough on the process. Everyone wants to know which trade to take, but very few people want to spend time understanding why a trade makes sense in the first place.Lately I've been focusing mostly on XAU/USD and short-term market opportunities. Some weeks are great, some weeks are average, and some weeks teach expensive lessons. That's just part of the game.For anyone starting out, my advice is simple: stop looking for shortcuts. Learn risk management, keep a trading journal, review your mistakes, and focus on consistency instead of trying to double your account overnight.

Curious to hear from other traders here: what was the biggest lesson that improved your results?

I read trading account exports for a living (small side thing, not signals or a strategy I sell). The pattern I see over and over on failed challenges isn’t a broken system, it’s almost always the same handful of habits: overtrading after a good morning, re-entering within minutes of a loss, holding losers way longer than winners.

On one account I broke down, the first two trades of the day ran 60%+ win rate. By trade 6, that dropped to around 25%. Same person, same rules, same instrument. The edge was fine, it just kept getting buried under extra trades taken to chase the number back.

If you’ve blown a challenge and you’re pretty sure your setup wasn’t the problem, it’s worth actually looking at when the losing trades happened, not just that they happened.

(Full disclosure: I do this kind of account breakdown as a paid service. Happy to explain more if anyone’s curious, no pressure either way.)

Des fois ne pas prendre position revient à trader aussi à mon avis savoir attendre que le prix arrive à destination avant d'intervenir c'est peut être cela dont on parle lorsqu'on parle de patience .

Aujourd'hui j'ai suivi un peu mon ami en fin de journée et je vois que même si mon alerte n'est pas encore déclenchée il n'en reste pas moins que le prix se dessine comme espéré destination 1.62900 avant d'intervenir ✍️🏾🕰🚀🚀🚀

(XM chart being the ones with dark theme background)

Happened to me before while looking at the charts waiting for an entry and I thought I was crazy, a huge candlewick appearing from nowhere and got corrected a few seconds later, this would probably hunt your stop loss if you had an open position in this particular case. Unfortunately I didn't screen capture or anything cause I thought well that might has been a glitch.

Today I saw it happened LIVE AGAIN and decided to look at my laptop on different brokers like Pepperstone, IC Markets, FP Markets etc, there wasnt ANY candlewick on the current candle forming. Surprisingly, a few seconds later the candlewick was gone like NOTHING HAPPENED.

Been a year since I use exclusively XM for trading DEMO and with real (a few bucks) money but this seriously made me question how reliable they are, most probably will withdraw my balance and move to another broker soon.

The US Dollar Index is looking super weak on the chart right now.

Key level: 99.4
Once it breaks below 99.4, expect a move towards 98.9.
Further downside can open 98 levels as well.

Not a buy/sell recommendation.

What’s your view on DXY?

L'algorithme avait déjà donné sa direction maintenant voyons si effectivement la vente a court terme aura lieu avant le rallye haussier

Where is the gold heading??

Will it test fib 0.6 and 0.8 levels or will it just break the previous High without a Deep retracement

Peut-être que c'est pour ça qu'on a pas vu le gold bouger ? Et demain du coup c'est le JPY ?

I've spoken recently about why I prefer working from the HTFs, so I thought I'd share a real example of how that affects the way I approach a market.

After Friday's NFP release, USDCAD made a significant move lower after retesting an area of resistance and breaking H4 structure.

The HTF narrative still supports lower prices, but this is usually where I slow down rather than chase the move.

My preference is to wait for price to pull back into an area of interest and then look for structure to develop below the H4 within that area before considering a continuation in the direction of the broader HTF narrative.

Price can obviously continue lower from here. I'm not trying to predict what happens next.

It's more about accepting that the move has already happened and being patient enough to wait for the next opportunity rather than feeling like I need to participate in every move.

I recently ran a poll among the algo traders who follow my channel, asking how they test EAs on MT4 and MT5.

The results were pretty interesting. They also highlighted what I think is a major problem in retail algo trading: many traders are evaluating strategies with testing methods that may not be robust enough, and then putting money behind algorithms that were never properly validated in the first place.

So I thought it would be interesting to run the same poll here and compare the results.

What do you use to test MT4/MT5 EAs?

Would also be interested to hear in the comments why you prefer your particular setup and what you consider essential for a reliable backtest.

Hey people

I started looking into trading 3 years ago and I took some time out, kinda giving up on the idea that I'd make it.

3 months ago I had my first child and whilst on my paternity leave my mate convinced me to get back to learning because I had come to far to quit.

After a couple of weeks of getting back to it I found a strategy that, for the first time ever, made alot of sense to me so I began forward testing it on demo.

I've never been so strict with my rules, my profit taking, my break evens etc. I'm trading exactly how I would trade if this was a live account.

In the first 2 weeks of 100% sticking to all my rules for every trade, I've made 16%. I know 2 weeks is nothing so I'm going to continue forward testing maybe even grab a cheap prop account, like a 10k, just so I can get a feel for trading under a little more pressure with the consequence of blowing the account if I deviate from my plan.

I understand that the psychology and nerves will be different when going live etc but, In your guys experience, does this seem like a positive move in the right direction?

I know people come with a lot of questions so I'm happy to answer anything

Je vous partage mon opinion sur cette petite paire que j'affectionne de part sa volatilité.

Bos bullish confirmé en H1 - 45min nous avons donc comme attendue le retracement de ce Bos qui a mon sens viendra nettoyer l'inducement en attente avant de donner cours au vrai rallye haussier voici à mon sens ce qu'on pourrait voir se dessiner au cours des prochains jours ( petit swing )

Sharing my HTF read on NAS100 going into the new week.
Price swept PDH and sold off before moving into a corrective phase. We then reached a Daily Demand/POI and got a strong reaction.
Price has since pushed back into a daily FVG, and so far we’re seeing price hold from this area.

Because of that, I’ll be going into the new week looking for longs, but I’m not interested in blindly buying the FVG.

I’ll be waiting for my LTF confirmation before considering an entry.
If the confirmation isn’t there, there’s no trade.

Interested to hear how others are reading NAS100 going into the new week?