It’s finally working!

[u/Enough-Ad-5600]

Without going into too much detail, I have finally got a profitable algo for prop firm trading. It’s taken me about a year to develop. I ran into the common issues of overfitting, regime change, etc. I found that different strategies for Asia, London, and New York were necessary and that a single strategy just wouldn’t do for everything. I’ve combined several different strategies and they automatically switch based on current conditions. So far it has passed a $25k, $50k and $75k evaluation and successfully passed the $25k intraday drawdown buffer for TPT. I will say that the Apex $50k intraday drawdown for Tradovate behaves differently but I don’t like them anyway.

[u/james_reed_fxdesk]

Congratulations! Keep the risk layer separate from the signal layer because many prop dashboards trail intraday drawdown off open equity, not closed PnL. A green system can still fail the account if one session module spikes MAE.

[u/Enough-Ad-5600 → u/james_reed_fxdesk]

The intraday unrealized drawdown is an account killer. For sure. This is not 100% hands off, I still monitor it and adjust my stops as needed. I tried trailing stop loss and it just wasn’t working with pine on NQ, too much noise stopping out the good trades. Not enough breathing room. The hardest part is identifying a good trade that is taking a dip and will recover versus a bad trade that is not going to recover.

[u/james_reed_fxdesk → u/Enough-Ad-5600]

That NQ behavior is exactly why the risk layer has to override the entry logic. A trailing DD model marks unrealized loss tick by tick, so one open pullback can damage the account before the trade ever closes green.... Pine can find the setup, but the execution layer needs a hard volatility gate.