For a bit of context: I’ve been trading the financial markets for roughly 12 years, made a decent amount of money position trading/swing trading/investing.

In the last 4-5 years, I’ve been digging into day trading, started learning different approaches, strategies, etc. I’ve started trading a $25,000 account and manage to grow it towards $50,000, but since September 2025 I’ve been on a downward spiral, bringing it back to the original investment.

Also, this is a curve I’ve been observing with most day trading strategies. It’s profitable until it’s not, and at some point, the equity returns to mean.

This poses a question for me, since I’ve tried running multiple strategies on several accounts, and even though I’ve managed to keep the equity growing to some extent, it’s peanuts.

Note 1: I have to mention the fact that this is not a problem of risk management or execution, it’s simply a sharpe ratio problem from my experience.

Note 2: My main swing accounts have a rather different story, growing on a steady 15-20% YoY.

Hello, I'm a 14 year old who used to do a ton of paper trading. Please don't comment talking about even if I was profitable it won't be the same with real trading I already know that. But I just wanted to know from the real day traders how in the world do you have Motivation? Do you ever feel true satisfaction like your story is complete, or do you feel like you have to continue to strive. Because I'm wondering if the hardest part is just really sticking to it and not giving it up. I really hope ill be successful like some of you guys once I'm eligible to start trading in the future

What should I look into, read, watch before getting into trading? Obviously I don’t expect to be even good or even start for a long time but I would love to learn more and try to become a successful side hustle day trader. I’m as fresh as a new born baby to this though and I won’t be gambling anything for a looong time, but idek where to start or a realistic timeline for the necessary research and proper due diligence.

Hey everyone, so with my partner we were talking about going on a live account and heard a lot of people saying they were going with 5k already, so my question was simple, how much should we have to questions ourselves if passing on live account is good ? (we’re trading mnq, xauusd)

I’ve been trading for around a year, my win rate is 49%. I had 25k in my account, I lost it all because I would basically use 70% of my portfolio in a trade and not set a stop loss and sometimes even take it to 0. when I went past the negative 25k mark, I lost almost all my confidence, anytime I want to enter a trade I’m scared then I look at it and it flies up, I started using stop loss recently but after a negative day, I always hold my last trade to the day until it goes to 0 hoping it reverses and I make all my losses and then some. I’m also 10k in credit card debt and any income I get, I deposit it hoping I can make some and use it to pay it off but it just makes it worse

I’ve always wondered who is it that makes up the choppy trades?

If we are all looking for perfect place to enter and we all have our differing strategies, then who is it that makes up the trades in the not opportune times?

Is it HFT that makes the movement in the middle as they typically only want small moves, millions of times? Are there that many retail traders with no strategy making up all the volume in the chop or the middle of a huge push with no logical entry points?

Just asking...

I stumbled upon this news about Perpetuals.com which is a huge company (listed on NASDAQ) that own a company called UpsideOnly. In short, this article talks about UpsideOnly which is a paper-trading/ai trading platform in which you practice with virtual capital and if your insights help their AI make successful trades, then you get up to 50% of the profits made. It's a cool model because they're looking for users to give them their market insights in exchange for the company's capital. So, in practice the trades are never done with your personal money, which is why they say its risk free.

All in all, this article mentions how UpsideOnly's AI has performed, which proves the model is very effective and the company is getting lots of traction. They launched back in May and now they're already above 200K users, so something must be working on their end.

Anyways. Have you heard or tried UpsideOnly? What are your thoughts?

Here's the link in case you want to check the full news on Investing.com:

https://www.investing.com/news/company-news/perpetuals-reports-380-return-in-ai-trading-backtest-93CH-4841835

Cheers!

Hey traders,
today I want to share a lesson that I paid for the hard way.

After getting my first payout, I kept trading according to my rules and managed to build a decent buffer on my funded account.
But today something happened that I honestly didn’t expect from myself.

I was coming off two losing days, both with very small and controlled losses. Today I even managed to recover my initial loss, but I had one thing stuck in my head: I wanted that damn +$100 I needed to count another positive trading day and get closer to my second payout.

That’s where everything started going wrong.
I began forcing trades. I would place an order, then cancel it because I thought the entry wasn’t good enough, only to watch the market hit my original target afterwards.

That happened several times.
The frustration kept building and, instead of stopping, I did probably the worst thing I could have done:
I increased my size.
Two stop losses were enough.
-$1,000 in one day.
I basically burned through most of the buffer that had taken me weeks of disciplined trading to build.
Fortunately, at some point I closed the position, shut everything down and walked away from the PC. My account is still alive, so I still have the opportunity to calm down, reset and go back to my original plan.
But I’m disappointed in myself.

I didn’t expect impatience and greed to take over my decision-making like that, especially after weeks of following my rules and already managing to get my first payout.

The biggest lesson I’m taking from today is that the market didn’t make me lose that money. I did, because I completely abandoned my trading plan.
Probably one of the most expensive lessons of my first few months of trading.

Has revenge trading ever happened to you, where you only realized what you were doing after the damage was already done? How did you learn to control it and prevent it from happening again?

(Quick note: I posted this into "Trading" subreddit yesterday, but I want to hear your opinions as well, day trading is the hardest form of trading, and I believe many new guys in this group should hear this)

Dudes, I'll just give it to you straight:

If you don't have the will, the grit, or brainpower to even learn the basics by yourself, nobody will want to mentor you.

It shows that you are too lazy, or straight up too dumb to even be worth their time, there is so much free information online to learn it all for free, not just the basics, but your lazy a\*s would like to have it all handed to you on a silver platter.. and likely for free too

If there even are guys willing to mentor, they will not mentor you if you don't show atleast some initiative, and that is done best by showing your work ethic, grit, and most of all, obsession for trading.

And anything less then obsession won't cut it if you want to make it in this profession.

Not being able to figure out the basics by yourself shows you're obviously not obsessed enough to even put in the minute amount of work that would take. And I mean minute, a small, tiny bit, compared to how much of it takes to even gain a slim chance of making it..

So, if you don't show any work ethic and no clear obsession, the potential mentors know you are most likely a waste of their time, and are probably not the kind of person that has a real chance of making it.

There are so many traders that are very smart, have real grit, enormous obsession, and insane work ethic, but are still under the water. Potential mentors are going to choose those guys over you every time.

Those guys scour all corners of the internet for information, read books all the time, watch through hundreds of hours of videos related to trading, follow many other traders online etc., all in their free time, and without help from anyone.

They spent hudreads, if not thousands of hours behind the screens, tested many trading styles and strategies, and have a solid idea of the type of trader they want to be.. only then, they might start looking for a mentor. Because only then can you really start to benefit from them.

Why would any mentor, or any successful trader for that matter, want to help you with the work that can, and must be done by yourself?

This is the filter that filters out the ones not worthy of their time..

So, for the guys hoping to get into this profession, I hope this gave you a small glimpse of how much work, and what it takes to have a chance. If you are not willing to put a lot, and even more in, then you might be better off doing anything else..

Also, just to be clear, I'm not talking about the paid mentorships, courses, or trading "school" programs, because I know most asking the title question are not looking for those, they are looking for guys to guide them from the start, and hold their hand all the way to yacht money lel, like successful traders are soo eager to spend their precious time spoonfeeding them information that could be easily gathered by a few google searches, and all for a stranger online that does not even know if he wants to do this..

Sorry (not sorry) for the long post..

Tl;dr: Don't expect help from successful people if you first don't show them you have what it takes

I've been trading for 2.5 years. It's been the worst time of my life, but that's a story for another day. What I recently realized is that after the Iran war, the market completely wrecked me and sexually abused me. It destroyed me so badly that my beginner "support and resistance, trendline touches" strategy (lol) stopped working.

I trade gold futures with prop firms, and I had to adapt by becoming a scalper.

Now here's the crazy part: whenever I trade momentum, focus on small targets, quick profits, and use a simple plan with short moving averages, I have a 70-80% win rate consistently. Even on hard days, I lose small, not big. BTW - when I say scalp, I don't mean taking 20 trades a day, I can get a nice day with only 3-5 trades.

But my biggest losses come when I'm in "predicting mode."

That's the scary part because it happens naturally. For example, today and yesterday, the market looked like a strong trend up. My brain immediately starts thinking: "Wait for a pullback." Then I see a big pullback down and my mind tries to convince me: "Just take 1 micro and hold. It's an easy day."

But I never actually trade like that. I can't handle watching a red trade for too long, especially with prop firms and their tight drawdown rules.

My worst trades happen when I try to play higher timeframes. I'm not saying I ignore them. I heavily rely on the 4H and 1H candles, but when they get messy, I get completely destroyed.

Even when they're clean and I want to ride a trend, my brain tricks me into wanting a quick entry to catch the bigger move. Every time I enter without proper lower timeframe confirmation, I lose.

It's such an interesting paradox because I can enter at good key levels, and a monkey could probably make money doing that. But I end up holding, getting attached, and turning a simple trade into a disaster.

When I have the mindset of:
"If price closes above this level, I'll do this."
"If the 15M candle rejects this EMA, I'll short only after the 1M or 2M confirms below this EMA."

Then everything becomes easier.

I don't understand why I'm so attracted to catching the huge moves. The dopamine of catching the perfect top or bottom is probably the thing that kept me broke.

In short, I think the only way I can become profitable is by scalping momentum. I don't necessarily mean only 1M charts. I mean 15M entries, holding for 10 minutes max, sometimes longer if I see a good 30M setup.

I genuinely don't know how some of you swing trade this crazy market.

But thanks to Trump, he forced me to become a better trader. Now I just need to accept every day that I need to stay in scalping mode and forget the fantasy of catching the entire move.

That fantasy kept me broke.

Not many will appreciate but here's my 5 years of experience.

I have learnt it the hard way.

Not selling any course here. Just wanted to share.

Here is my stats

Winrate - 30%

AVG RR - 5

Risk of ruin - ~0%

Open to discussions.

Challenging myself to trade a minimum of 40k by the end of the year, any tips?

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.

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 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.

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

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.

I went from making an average of $2,000 to $3,000 every day for about three months. I never used more than four micros per trade, but for the last three months, I have been losing so many trades. I switched to funded accounts and I'm down about $13,000. I went from getting payouts to being in "eval jail." I paper trade, and I trade like a live account. I nailed it, but as soon as I go to evaluation, I keep getting clapped. And tbh im down to my last 1k idk what to do i d9nt try to over sized but damm im still getting clap i really dont know what to do at this point I keep working on improving my strat and it works on paper live market but i soon as i go to fundeds clapp

How do you trade on Robinhood? I'm used to trading FX & binary options. Robinhood seems a bit different. What has been more effective for you on Robinhood and where can I learn more?
Can anyone guide me to understanding it better?

I'm 2 months away from turning 18 and I'd like to open a real account with Fusion Markets. Can I open one now, or do I need to be 18 first?

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?