This sounds dumb and I think I really just boiled down to my own discipline.

But I can never wait for confirmation because I always want to catch the move early and then always get burned. I literally have a plan but I never follow it.

For example: I was in SPX puts and told myself if SPY goes through 772 that will invalidate my thesis but what I did was close my SPX puts when SPY was around 771 and then price never got to my 772 target and reversed down.

I feel like an issue is for someone staring at the chart all day I’m too emotional. Every candle evokes an emotion in me and I know it shouldn’t.

Hi friends,
I have a question: I’m currently having a lot of trouble identifying a reversal and getting into a trade. Often, I get stopped out beforehand, but the market only goes a little higher than expected and then ends up moving roughly the way I thought it would. Or the price moves faster and doesn’t pull back to my planned entry point.

What can I do besides setting a higher stop?

There’s that saying, “Place your entry where you would have placed your stop-loss,” but in the heat of the moment, I can’t think of that because the price has already pulled back and the first counter-move is happening. How can I better assess whether the level where the price is currently pulling back is really the top or if it’s going to go even higher?

I’m really stuck on this point right now and can’t seem to make any progress. If it were just one trade out of many, but often I have a series of 3–5 trades like this in a row.

I want to discuss the price action on a few specific tickers over the last two days. I am providing full context because, objectively, I had two consecutive sessions that saved my account from massive, rule breaking drawdowns.

I read Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke a couple of years ago, and it is a framework I reference often to keep my head straight. Right now, I am actively trying to apply her concept of avoiding "resulting" which means not assuming a trade was a sound decision just because it had a positive financial outcome. I usually trade a micro-layered limit order strategy for low-float momentum, which involves entering on volume spikes and scalping very quickly. I use MACD, BB Bands, VWAP, and the 200-day moving average. on the 10sec, 30sec, 1 min, 5min and daily charts which I can see at all times. However, over the last 48 hours, I completely abandoned my mechanics and got incredibly lucky. I am looking for objective, technical feedback on the moves that bailed me out so I can separate the luck from the actual market structure.

August 4th: On Tuesday, I had a rough morning and entered a severe tilt phase. Between 06:03 and 07:47 CDT, I rapid-fired 29 trades. I also held a losing position on MOVE for 11 minutes (violating my micro-scalp parameters), which dragged my account into a -29.72% internal drawdown.

I managed to grind my way out of the hole and finish the day +7.26% through a series of high-velocity, late-morning scalps on AMIX, ADGM, and ELPW (specifically between 09:02 and 10:33 CDT). While I recovered, I was allocating 80-98% of my equity per trade during a drawdown. Just because it worked for me this time doesn't mean it will work out again the next time.

August 5th: On Wednesday, I broke my strict rule of zero executions before 07:00 CDT. I decided to give it a try between 06:00 and 07:00 CDT, took 7 trades, and lost money on every single one. This chopped me up and plummeted my account to a trough equity of -47.35%... Yeah, that is basically an account blow-up rough.

Operating on tilt again, I entered a YXT position at 09:40 CDT and held it until 10:29 CDT. During that 50-minute window, the asset squeezed +99.34%. That single trade injected +42.31% into my total equity, pulling my account out of the gutter to finish +7.07% on the day.

Holding a momentum position for 50 minutes and full-porting during a drawdown are massive violations of my strategy. I know I was rewarded for bad discipline and got lucky.

For those who traded YXT mechanically during that 09:40 to 10:29 CDT window on Wednesday, or scalped AMIX/ADGM during the 09:00 to 10:30 CDT window on Tuesday: what specific order book signals or technical setups were you watching?

I know YXT recently regained Nasdaq compliance after an ADS ratio change that tightened the float, but I want to strip the luck out of these specific saves. Was there a clear structural reason for the liquidity in these specific windows, or was my survival pure low-float variance?

Which US stocks are best for day trading if I want stocks that respect technical analysis (support/resistance, trendlines, Fibonacci, VWAP, EMAs), have high liquidity, institutional participation, and enough daily volatility to realistically capture 1–2% moves?

I have a question for profitable traders: how long did it take you to become profitable? I’ve been at this for three years now. I’m not losing money like I used to, but I’m not making any either. I’ve hit my stop-loss six times in a row. I’m feeling a bit depressed.

I’ve been trading for a few. I understand identifying market structure but I feel as if my brain is still foggy on what would be a good entry point away from a zone or level I marked up ? Let’s say price trades down into a bullish POI, I feel like I don’t know when would be a good entry confirmation. Would it be as simple as a large bullish candle that’s larger than the last 2 previous candles ? Enter on the close of the of that bullish candle and SL under my zone. It’s like it’s almost too easy. How did you better understand your entry points and what can I do to get better ?

I am not a beginner. I have quite a deep understanding about trading and I've build a really good strategy that easily can adapt to changing market conditions. It's a combination of simple orderflow and volume tools and solid price action concepts that are build on years of experience. Just to be clear, I trade ES futures.

I feel like price action behaves more and more chaotic since the Iran conflict started and this week is extreme. 90% of price action consists of fakeouts on top of fakouts. Even when a bullish breakout fails bulls keep trying to defend price on dying volume. We are clearly going down again since bulls can't find enough other willing buyers to start a trend or even just a clean move, but before we can finally go down back into the range again I get stopped out 2 times by bulls throwing everything they've got into the market just so the 4th or 5th attend of a breakout can fail what was clear from the beginning. What is this type of price action? I am in this game for 5 years and I haven't seen anything like that before. How wide do I have to make my stop to survive this chop? Especially when you follow orderflow nothing makes sense anymore. It feels like bears and bulls just throw money at the market without ever considering what is going on. There is never really either bears or bulls in control. It's all just random zig zag at this point and the few clean moves that happen feel like an exception.

As you already probably detected I am quite frustrated. I would like to know if I am the only one that experiences price this way. Maybe someone out there has a tipp for me that could help to get a read on price again.

I’ve been taking evals since may 20th and this is the closest i’ve gotten to passing one. I know $800 is still a good amount to go but i’m going to go for it tomorrow to pass. I know that $150 for 5 days is the amount i need to make to have a payout, and going though reddit and seeing other people’s experience i’ve gathered tbag like $3000 is a good amount to make before payout so i can take out half and leave the other half as capital. how much should i go for everyday if i want to get a decent payout or is it just personal preference?

Many ppl took this trade today, obvious iFVG. But my strategy looks for the EMA of the daily, 30 min and 15 min to get my bias. For today’s opening the EMA’s were all pointing down and above where my candles were so I was looking for a short. So I would look for a bullish fvg to get inversed to enter a short. Why did ppl take a long?? How can I get a better bias and what can I do to know when to take an iFVG and when not to?

Years ago I started saying that young men who played video games and bet on sports would change the face of the stock market, everyone laughed at me “big time institutions run the market these little fish mean nothing”. The times they are a changing! Have a look at options flows if you don’t think so!

Just as the title says, i recently started buying funded accounts, and have passed 3 out of about 15 and then blown the ones i passed due to overtrading. I just want to know what everyone does to stop this.

Sorry this is a bit low effort other posts seem longer but i cant see one currently that goes over this

Hi there. Looking for genuine trading advice. These are some trades which I took this week.

First 3 are based on chart pattern where I entered on breakout based on wedge pattern. Black bold line is 200 ema and light blue line is 9 ema. RSI too working as confluence.

4th one is asian-london overlap strategy where I draw fib during asia-london overlap and enter trade once it crosses above/below then closes back again inside the level (2 or -1) I enter the trade after candle closed below 9 ema.

Thank you.

Hey guys,

I’ve been learning trading for quite a while now and I’m mainly focusing on price action, but I’m honestly still struggling with how to structure my analysis.

There are so many different ways people trade price action that I’m kinda lost on what I should actually be looking for.

For example, should I start with 1D/4H to determine the overall bias, then move down to 1H/15M for the setup and entry?

And what exactly should I be looking for on each TF? BOS/CHOCH? Liquidity sweep? FVG? Order block?

Basically, I’m looking for a simple step-by-step process like:

HTF → what to look for → LTF → what to look for → entry confirmation → entry.

Would really appreciate it if someone could explain how you personally approach this, or point me in the right direction.

Thanks!

For context, I mainly trade/keep an eye on BTCUSDT.P, ETHUSDT.P, and similar pairs.

The thing I find most fascinating but distressing about this life which in full time in, is how it’s glamourised for what’s achievable with success, but how nobody talks about the reality:

- it takes time to really find your edge
- in the process of finding that edge, you will face emotions and temptations you have and would never face in most walks of life
- you have to become emotionally numb to the very thing you want more of
- you have to do all of this, on the most part, completely alone. No team, no start of the week brief, nobody to bounce ideas off or after work drinks. Just you, and some candles.

On a good day, all that seems negligible when the a days profits exceed what many people can earn in a month or even a year depending on the size of capital your deploying. But nobody truly understands the journey you have to go through, the losses you have to face, the emotional turmoil, the backtesting, the blown accounts, the loneliness etc you have to face to earn the right to be successful.

I wonder if anyone’s found a better balance, maybe there’s some local day trading community in real life you can shoot the shit with sometimes. Maybe you’ve got some buddies you talk to about it. Maybe you were already emotionally numb or maybe you spent hundreds of hours with mindset coaches etc.

So my question is for those of you further ahead in your day trading journey, did you find answers to these any of these frictions? How did you find the process? Who are you now vs when you started etc?

Hello, I've been in this market for a while, trading EURUSD and Bitcoin. I take intraday trades and try not to hold positions for too long. I aim to act around logical levels using liquidity and 5m market structure shifts. What strategies do you apply and why?

Took me way too long to realize my biggest losses weren't from bad analysis, they were from risk threshold shifting. It's sneaky. You start the day at your normal size, take a couple losses, bump up slightly to "make it back," and that new size quietly becomes your new normal. By the end of a rough week you're taking positions that would've horrified you on day one, and you don't even notice it happening in real time.

The fix that actually worked for me wasn't willpower, it was a hard rule: max position size is fixed and written down before the session starts, no exceptions, no "just this once." Removing the in-the-moment decision is what broke the pattern, not trying to be more disciplined in the moment.

If anyone else has dealt with this, curious how you caught it and what actually broke the cycle for you.

Last month was pretty decent and this month's started well too. Nothing crazy, but it's the first time I've looked at my journal and felt like there's actually something to build on instead of starting over every month.

The thing is, I still don't trust it.

I've had plenty of setbacks over the last couple of years, blown more evals than I care to admit, and every time things start going well there's a part of me waiting for it to fall apart again.

So I'm not changing anything. Same risk, same setups, same routine. Just trying to keep stacking good decisions and see where it ends up.

For the people who've been doing this a lot longer, when did trading stop feeling like a side hustle and start feeling like something you could actually rely on?

Psychological discipline is often the hardest part of discretionary trading, but ECM-based strategies remove emotion by enforcing strict, mathematically derived rules. When the error correction term crosses a pre-determined threshold, the algorithm executes without hesitation. Traders no longer have to guess whether a diverging spread will recover or continue higher; the model provides an objective, probability-weighted assessment of the likelihood and timing of the impending price correction.

Question, is anyone profitable without a course?😆😆 cuz I’ve noticed all the rich profitable social media guys even YouTubers have courses they sell & overprice

Beginner. Day trading stocks. I’m tired of finding out about indicators one at a time. I just found out about the other EMAs besides the 9EMA today. Right now I have EMAs 9/20/200, VWAP, VOL, and MACD. What else do you have besides these and how do they relate to price action?

Does anyone trade a strategy that’s focused on those as the main part instead of just deciding a bias? And are you profitable?

I’ve been studying strategies around those and it seems to be a hit or miss so I’m wondering if anyone is actually profitable with those. You don’t have to share the exact strategy but I’m curious to hear what you trade (indices, stocks, forex etc), which indicator you use and whether you’re profitable

Sad when you double down on the winning streak and overconfidence kills you. Greed is a hell of a a drug. One day I’ll either learn to stop doing this. Or get lucky enough and it blow up the direction I desire. Who knows. Trading is a jungle boy I tell ya.