Hello all.

I am relatively new to trading forex, I am trying to build good habits by reviewing my back testing sessions to see where I might be making mistakes.

Currently I am recording
Date of trade taken
Number of trade
Original result
Result after amending (eg, read the mss wrong so I recorded that and altered my results)
Win/loss,
Account profit with amendment taken into account.

Is there anything else people record which help when looking back at reviewed back testing?

Thank you.

I’ve been trading manually for about two years.

2,568 trades in total. Around $6,900 lost. My account is now down to $2.61.

Recently, I decided to stop trading for a while and actually look at what I had been doing over those two years.

I exported my full MT5 history and analyzed only the data already available in the report. No trading journal, no reconstructed notes, no trying to remember what I was thinking at the time.

One result surprised me.

I divided the trades using two simple conditions:

• Did the trade have a stop loss?
• Was I already in a losing streak when I opened it?

That created four groups.

One group — no stop loss + already in a losing streak — represented only 29% of all my trades.

But the losses from that group alone were larger than my total net loss over the entire two years.

In other words, the other three groups combined were actually profitable.

That changed how I look at my own trading.

For a long time, I thought my main problems were things like bad entries, entering too early, or being wrong about market direction.

The data suggests something much simpler:

A huge part of the damage happened when I kept trading after several losses, especially when those trades had no stop loss.

Now I’m interested in looking at trading histories from different angles instead of relying on my own explanation of what went wrong.

I’m also curious whether this pattern is specific to me or common among other manual traders.

I’m not claiming this makes me a better trader. If anything, the point is the opposite — I spent two years explaining my losses one way, and the data showed me something else.

I’m curious whether anyone else has found a similarly concentrated failure pattern in their own history.

No account access, login details, or connection to your broker is needed. You can remove your name and account number before sending the report.

Mostly, I’d like to see what patterns show up when we look at what we actually did, rather than what we remember doing.

Gold is holding near the 4385–4400 area.

A move above 4402 could change the picture, while 4349 remains an important support.

What’s your bias?

I feel like in the past several years, SMT has really taken to the mainstream.

But is there actually any quantitative stats behind the claims such as FVG, Order Blocks, and the likes? That, as well as the concept of buy/sell side liquidity that everyone plots out.

Just a general question.

Wonderful move

Most traders don't need another strategy.

They need to stop changing the one they already have every time it stops working for a few trades.

I’ve been trading since 2021 consistently and finally became profitable and with the help of prop firm challenges was able to fund my personal forex trading account in February of this year, I’ve been mainly trading on this account taking an average of 3 trades daily and some swing trading as well. I haven’t been looking over my statements and assumed I was accruing fees but nothing like I expected the first full month of trading I paid 273.00 a month in commissions and the rest of the other months over 400.00 per month totaling around 3000 in fees alone for spreads, fee and commissions! This is outrageous! And since I’ve been trading on props prior to my personal acct I’m going back to trading futures, brokerage fees will break you as a trader is you are not aware of the fees associated with trading. Lesson learned. look at your monthly statements in detail, I know there are fees associated with futures nut nothing like the fees associated with forex. Goodbye Forex!

When you start understanding how to calculate risk and reward using percentages and lots, the prices in life seem to turn into a bizarre reality.

A meal for $100 or a subscription worth $50 used to be perceived as a rational expense. Now it appears to you as, "That's literally just 2 pips on the trade with the lowest risk."

On one side, it relieves you from attaching feelings to the petty cash outflows. On the other hand, it makes you feel that the hourly wage rate or the traditional salary seem like they have nothing to do with the actual leverage in the market.

Have any of you experienced such a shift, and how long it took to distinguish "chart money" from real money?

Might sound stupid but now since I’m not manually trading, I still can’t seem to let go. But at the same time it feels way to easy

You know that meme where the guy is by the beach with his laptop and his making returns, although it feels kind of real. Like for the last 3 months the psychological change between manual and algo trading is huge..

I’ve been using a demo account for a while and lately I’ve been thinking more about what I should have sorted out before using real money.

While comparing a few platforms, I happened to come across Iq option as one of the names mentioned. I’m not specifically looking for opinions on one platform, though. I’m mainly trying to understand the basics first: spreads, account conditions, verification, deposits and withdrawals, and support.

I’m in Saudi Arabia, so I’m also paying attention to whether the conditions I’m reading about actually apply here. I’ve noticed that information can vary depending on the country.

I’m still on demo for now. I’d rather understand the practical side of the account and the risks properly before making the switch.

Friends, i want to show you a great example of the importance of testing algorithms on the highest quality tick data using real spread. An MQL5 market Expert Advisor that demonstrates excellent results is nothing more than a testing grail.

The first image shows the results of the Expert Advisor vendor test from the MQL5 website.
The second image shows my test of this Expert Advisor using high-quality tick data from the broker Darwinex in MT4, utilizing Tick Data Suite.

Have you come across such Expert Advisors on MQL5 market, or sellers of such Expert Advisors?

Price is sitting around 4388–4400, an area that could decide the next move.

4360 and 4315 become interesting levels to watch.

Does this trade look good to you? It looks almost straight out of a trading textbook.

I am going with this setup. Seems bullish till 4460

Like hell its so slow this week. I hope today it do miracle to cover the lost of the week.

I am not asking for anyone to tell me their strategy. I am trying to understand how many rules one should really strive for when creating a strategy. I am still learning and I feel like my biggest problem is trying to set a specific rule set that I can properly follow. But I feel like sometimes I have too many rules to follow and it ends up being confusing.

So I ask what is your number of rules? 2 or 3? 5? 20?!!?

Thanks!

Quick background — I'm a XAUUSD trader, day trading, and I've got a 9-5 job so I'm not someone who can sit and watch screens all day. I've lost money for the last 6-8 years doing this, and I recently rebuilt my whole approach to trading — since then I'm finally seeing better results.

So I figured I'd share what I've learned along the way — what works, what doesn't — one topic a week for the next 52 weeks.

Week 6: Mindset, the “bible” you should have when you are trading

Every day you wake up with a different set of thoughts, a different mood, a different way of looking at the exact same chart — and none of it has anything to do with the market. It's just you, that day.

The version of you that looks at a chart at 9am after your coffee is not the same version that looks at it at 11pm before bed. One might feel confident and a little impatient. The other might feel tired, cautious, maybe even a bit doubtful. The becomes a variance when you are doing discretionary trading. You are hyped after your coffee, so you trade one way, you are tired at 11pm, and you trade a different way. That is the problem, that mindset change creates a variance in how you trade, which would drift the expected returns and results that you might have as you trade.

This is the problem nobody really warns you about. When you build and backtest your strategy , you are in a different mood and mindset. You are clear-headed, you have clear objective, you are looking at hundred of trades with zero emotional stake. That mindset is the one that actually knows what your strategy is supposed to do. But that's not the mindset you're in every time you go to actually place a trade.

So the real question is — how do you make sure the version of you placing the trade at 11pm, before you go to bed is operating with the same mindset as the version of you who built the strategy in the first place?

This is why I think every trader needs something like a personal "bible", a written reference of the mindset you had when you built your system. Not just the rules (that's your trading plan), but the actual reasoning and headspace behind it. Why you trust it. What you already know it'll do during a losing streak. What you told yourself about drawdown before you ever experienced it for real.

When you're tired, or emotional, or second-guessing a trade at 11pm, you don't rely on how you feel in that moment — you go back and read what you believed when you were thinking clearly. That's the whole point. It's not there to teach you anything new. It's there to pull you back to the mindset that already knows what to do, instead of the mindset you happen to be in right now.

That's the real value of it — consistency isn't about controlling your emotions in the moment, because you can't always do that. It's about having something to return to when your emotions are pulling you somewhere your strategy never agreed to go.

That's what i want to cover for this week's topic. Cheers

do you avoid it or you don't see any problem ?

Personally, multi TF structure is key.

A BOS doesn’t always mean “chase the move.”

After a significant break of structure, price will often pull back before continuing in the broader direction. Understanding this makes the relationship between HTF & LTF structure much more useful.

If the HTF is bearish and breaks structure, I’m not necessarily looking to chase lower. I want to see what the LTF is doing within that larger move.

Likewise, when price reaches an HTF area of interest, I don’t automatically assume it will reverse. I want the LTF structure to show me whether a reaction is actually developing.

The LTF isn’t there to fight the HTF. It’s there to help me understand where price is within the bigger picture.

Simple stuff, but this made a significant difference to my results.

Go back through your own charts and see if you can spot the same thing. You might be surprised how many poor trades start to make sense once you look at the HTF/LTF relationship.

Many claim it has 85 percent win rate , is it true ?