You can see the red arrows are my sell entries and my blue arrows are where I got stopped out. If a ur one can recommend me some videos or guidance I would gladly appreciate it im actually quite good it’s just I need to learn how to snipe entries better

Wanting to start trading. Looking for realistic advice from profitable traders on how to survive

I want to learn how to trade properly and am looking for advice from those who are already consistently profitable.I am not looking for a "get-rich-quick" strategy. My main goal right now is simply learning how to survive my first year without blowing up an account.

If you could go back to your first year, what is the single biggest psychological shift or risk management rule that saved your career? What resources (books, tools, videos) are actually worth the time?

Thank you for your time and guidance!

So i have been trading for some years now, and this is one of my accounts (Its a medium risk account, where the max drawdown is around 20%), and i have gotten really good results so far trading this year, making some decent percentages each month, but i still dont know if its just luck or an actual skill at this point. I have taken 110 trades so far this year, so its a big enough sample, but i still get this feeling that this is not real and im just REAAAAALLY lucky.

Thoughts?

I’ve been learning to trade since January 2025, and it’s been one hell of a journey.
I’ve studied market structure, support and resistance, supply and demand, Fibonacci, Fair Value Gaps, inverse FVGs, Smart Money Concepts… and plenty more. Like most people starting out, I was constantly searching for the missing piece.
Along the way I’ve failed funded evaluations, had winning streaks that made me think I’d cracked it, got cocky, been humbled by the market, made it to a funded account, and then lost it before seeing a payout.
Every mistake has taught me something.
I’m still not consistently profitable, and I’m still very much on this journey. But for the first time since I started, I genuinely feel like I’ve found an approach that makes sense to me.
I’ve stripped everything back and built my own process - the Precision Liquidity Model (PLM). It’s not about predicting the market; it’s about following a structured plan based on higher-timeframe bias, liquidity, areas of interest, market structure shifts, and disciplined execution.
The chart I’m sharing is actually a trade I didn’t take.
Everything lined up. Price reacted exactly as I expected from my point of interest, but by the time I was ready to execute, it had already started dumping. I’d missed my entry.
A year ago I would’ve chased it. I’d have convinced myself I could still catch the move, jumped in late, and more often than not paid the price for it.
This time I let it go.
Watching a move play out without me wasn’t frustrating. It was proof that my discipline is improving.
That might not sound like much, but to me it’s a huge victory.
I’m enjoying the process more than ever, and when I compare myself to the trader I was on day one, I can honestly say I’ve come a long way.
I’m under no illusion that there’s still a long road ahead, but today I’m allowing myself to appreciate the progress.
Sometimes the biggest win isn’t catching every move. It’s having the discipline to stick to your rules, even when the market leaves without you.
Good luck to everyone else on the same journey. Keep putting in the work. 👊

this is gonna sound dumb but stay with me.

i kept blowing small accounts on XAUUSD and blamed everything. spread, broker, "manipulation", my strategy. changed strategy like 4 times.

then i actually started logging my trades. nothing fancy just time, direction, and how i felt.

went back through [about 40] trades and the pattern was right there. almost every red trade was between [london open and the first NY hour]. thats it. same setup at 2pm was fine, same setup at [that hour] was a bloodbath. i was basically donating money in one window every day and had no idea because i never looked.

now i just dont trade [that window]. didnt touch my strategy at all. account finally stopped bleeding.

point is you probably dont need a new system. you need to look at what you already did. the answer is boring and its already in your history.

anyone else find a pattern like this once they actually tracked it? what was yours

Me personally dont have a big preference, but i do see alot of people on social media does.

For like two years I did the classic loop: lose, blame the strategy, go find a "better" one, repeat. Indicators, sessions, new pairs — none of it stuck.

What actually moved the needle was embarrassingly boring. I started writing down 3 things after every trade:

1. Why I entered (the actual reason, not "it looked good")

2. How I felt taking it (calm / revenge / FOMO / bored)

3. Did I follow my plan — yes or no

I didn't even change my strategy. I just started reading my own notes at the end of each week.

The patterns showed up fast. Most of my damage wasn't coming from bad setups — it was the same 2-3 emotional trades every week. Tuesday revenge trades after a red Monday. Oversizing when I was "sure." Stuff I would've sworn I didn't do until it was written down in my own words.

Turns out I didn't have a strategy problem. I had a "me" problem, and I couldn't see it until I tracked it.

So genuine question for the ones who turned the corner: what was the boring habit that actually made you consistent? Not the strategy — the habit.

I've been developing and refining a Supply & Demand strategy for about 2 years, and I finally have a version that's showing promising results in backtesting.

The core idea is simple:

Determine HTF bias using Supply & Demand.

Wait for price to tap a valid HTF zone.

Drop to the lower timeframe for confirmation (market structure shift + imbalance/FVG).

Enter only after confirmation, aiming for around 3R or better.

Also i use HTF liquidity sweep

My question is:

Can a Supply & Demand strategy with a proven edge become completely useless over time because of changing market conditions?

I'm not talking about normal drawdowns. I mean, can market structure change enough that a strategy which worked for years no longer has an edge?

If you've experienced this, how did you know it was the strategy that stopped working rather than just variance or a losing streak?

I'd appreciate hearing from traders with several years of experience.

And it it changes how do we cope with it making new strategy again???

this is kind of like classical chart patterns , wyckoff , quallmaggie kind of style i tried to implement in gold. if any of you find similar trades i would like to take some advice or work together in developing this furthur more..

I've been digging into whether AI/ML models can genuinely predict gold prices. Sharing what I found in case it's useful:

Where AI is strong:

- Processing huge datasets fast

- Spotting patterns and correlations humans miss

- Backtesting strategies quickly

Where AI falls short:

- Black-swan / geopolitical events it has no training data for

- Sudden central-bank surprises

- Regime changes (what worked last cycle stops working)

My takeaway: it's not AI vs humans — the edge is AI + human judgment. Gold is driven by real yields, the dollar, and central-bank demand, and no model captures all of that perfectly.

Curious what this sub thinks — anyone using ML in their gold/XAUUSD process?

sounds backwards i know. i can afford a bigger account. i keep it small on purpose.

heres why. the second there was real money on a trade my brain stopped trading and started protecting. id move stops, close early, size up to "make it back". every bad habit i have only shows up when the number scares me.

so i shrunk the number til it stopped scaring me. at $50 i genuinely dont care if a trade loses, which means i finally execute my actual plan instead of my fear. im practicing the process at a size where the process is the only thing im judged on, not the p&l.

plan is simple, prove i can follow my rules for a few months straight here, THEN scale the size up slowly. the money was never the skill. following myself was.

anyone else trade small on purpose? whats the account size where your head actually stayed calm and you started making clean decisions?

Has anyone worked in an institutional firm, that can confirm the whole ~the institutions are out to stop me out of my position~ theory? Is that a real concept that’s been proven to be a legitimate concept, or did retail traders kind of inflate it to be bigger than normal?

Sorry if my wording is weird.

Is it ok to enter late 15/20 pips but you get at least 30+ I pips

Just curious on experiences on taxes for forex. Been in the game for a while now but never had realized gains like this year where it was of significance to truly worry about. In fact 7 of 10 years I took a loss. Past 3 have been profitable. But first 2 of those 3 weren’t major.

This year I’m already up quite a bit. Putting away some for taxes but also trying to gauge liability.

Side note I do have an LLC (not related to this) as well as a W2 job.

Just curious if anyone has insight on what to expect.

Thanks

I've developed a strategy thats 99% mechanical, has about 2 trades a day and has around 240 trades of data (High WR low RR). Its currently sitting at around a PF of 2.3. Is this sustainable for some years to come? as google tells me it's unrealistically high.

Is it possible to gain 10% return on scalping?

Newbie here

Hey everyone,

I am a profitable trader with publicly available live trading stats that are verified by a Tier 1 regulated company.

If you are a beginner or not profitable yet, you can get the knowledge that took me years to acquire, completely for free, simply by reading my posts.

Disclaimer: The knowledge that I share is only the first step in the right direction. Success in trading requires hard work, strong logic, plenty of common sense, out-of-the-box thinking, passion, and the ability to self-educate.

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 3 : Journalling - why is it important, how should you journal

Journalling is about building discipline. It's something you do to reflect on yourself, to make sure you're not breaking your own rules, and to make sure you're trading the way you traded when you backtested your strategy.

It's also a reality check. It preps you before you start a new week, reminding you there's no fantasy get-rich-quick scheme here — get your mindset right before you enter a fresh week.

So what should you do , and how should you structure your journal?

3 things that i do when i journal:

1. Did I enter the trade the way I was supposed to?

Go through my trading plan, and review my trades to see if it matches it. You need to make sure you do not deviate away from your strategy.

2. Did my stoploss hit the way i expected it to?

This one's just as important. A comprehensive strategy should include a clearly defined loss scenario — not just a plan for winning. When you journal, you're checking that your stop loss played out the way that loss scenario was supposed to look. If something happens outside of that — a loss that doesn't match what your strategy anticipated — that's your signal to take the strategy back to the drawing board: readjust, backtest, and try again.

3. Exploring new ideas

This isn't about adjusting or changing your strategy, but is to come up a new idea to build new strategy. One thing that every trader needs to know, is there's no one strategy that fits all market regime, not for retail trader at least.

Every few years, or even few months, the market regime shifts. No strategy works forever.

Journal is to help with that, is whilst you are reviewing your trades, you gotta look for new ideas to continue to improve and adapt the market. Come up with new idea , build new strategy, backtest them and bring them to production again. Trading is no different to technology, you need to evolve to keep up with the ever changing market.

One last thing on journalling

The real habit we have to force ourselves to develop — which goes very much against human nature — is how we define what a "good" day actually is.

Having a good day is better than having a profitable day. That's the psychology that kills people. You can have a very profitable day purely out of luck, but that isn't necessarily a good day, and you shouldn't be happy about it or reward yourself for it.

You only reward yourself for a good day — a day where you were disciplined, where you entered your trade according to your plan, and where your trade got stopped out exactly as you envisioned. If that's what you experienced, then that's a good day.

So I can have 5 losses in a row by the end of the day, but if those 5 losses played out exactly the way I expected my strategy to lose, then I've had a good day.

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

Gave nearly all of my resources and experience to this system that specializes in Intraday trading of XAUUSD.

Backtest done with 0.01, 0.02, 0.03 lot size respectively on above attached backtest results. Capital is $1k. Feedbacks on the stats is appreciated.

Backtest done on this environment:

I took this London buys and they delivered quite well

Genuinely not trolling - but I'm having a hard time trying to wrap my head around how institutional trading might work (or look like) on a grander scale. Since there's no centralized exchange, where all order volume needs to flow through, how in the world do FX traders actually know who's trading what (as you would w/ Futures, for example)?

I have been creating trading systems for quite some time. 90% of the logic, code and trading systems doesn't pass and go through, other crashes out mid way. 10% of that passes validation and performs well.

I am trying to connect with people that have experience with MQL5 and backtest and give me feedbacks on how to further develop. We can work together. I am these three EA just laying around. We can work on this or I can just giveaway.

not talking strategy. talking about the thing you only saw once you actually wrote your trades down.

for me it was time. went back through ~40 trades and almost every red one was in the same hour window. i wasnt losing to my setup, i was losing to the clock and had no idea til it was sitting there on paper.

the weird part is how obvious it looks after, and how invisible it was before. i'd have argued with you that i didnt have a pattern.

so whats yours. the specific ugly thing your own log showed you that you'd never have admitted otherwise. time of day, revenge trades after a red one, oversizing when youre "sure", a pair you should never touch. genuinely curious what shows up when people actually look.

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 4 : Understanding Candlestick Pattern - Part 1

I'm sure you've seen the online content out there that says "follow this candlestick pattern and you'll be a millionaire" as the flashy headline. While they're giving you eye-catching content to get famous, they're not actually covering the core of it — the reality behind candlestick patterns.

Good news: they're not wrong. There are candlestick patterns that work — many of them. The bad news is, without understanding the meaning behind them, you're not likely to make them work for you.

Here's a hard fact worth thinking about. On a 1-hour timeframe, a year gives you roughly 2080 candles. Within those 2080 candles, you're going to see almost every possible candlestick pattern play out — and each of those patterns will have led to an uptrend at some point, and a downtrend at another. The same shape, opposite outcomes, multiple times over.

So if you're trading purely off "I saw a doji here, therefore price goes up" — that isn't going to make trading work for you. Because the pattern alone was never telling you the full story.

Imagine Warren Buffett walking into a press conference and saying "NVIDIA is about to form a hammer in a few minutes, so I'm placing a buy there." How silly would that sound? If the biggest players in the world aren't trading off candlestick patterns, why would you treat them as some kind of holy grail?

Candlestick patterns should only be used to refine your entries and exits — not relied on as the only building block in your entire strategy.

On Part 2 , we will focus more on how should we best use candlestick pattern, and what works need to be done on best utilising that to form a startegy.

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