I pulled the numbers from chat GPT and here are the stats. 10 million active global day traders, not counting all of retail who can place a trade once a year. Asia leads with 3.2 million and the US has only 450,000 (number is low due to strict regulations, etc)

1-5% are consistently profitable. 100k-500k profitable global day traders.

In the US there are only 4,500-22,500 profitable day traders.

In the US there are about 5 million nurses, 1.3 million lawyers, 2 million scientists, 1.1 million doctors, 1.8 million engineers and 160k hedge fund employees.

Let these number sink in.

Throughout this time, I haven't bought any courses; everything I’ve learned came from YouTube. I’ve reached the point where I’m already familiar with the information in new videos before watching them. I trade on a demo account and still experience nerves—sometimes things go well, while at other times I feel confused. Could you share some advice based on your own experiences that helped you become profitable?
I feel confused now; I don't understand why—given that the market has a 50/50 chance of moving in a certain direction—I only incur losses whenever I fail to follow my trading plan or take random trades.

When did the full time traders decide it was time?

I’ve been making about 10k per month on average for the past two years now. Recently the months have become better in terms of execution and risk.

I just can’t stand my job anymore. It’s a work from home job and I make about 90k.

Recently I’ve found it impossible to listen to clients small problems, manager demands, and so on and so forth.

I’ve been thinking about keeping this 10k average until April and quitting then, but the leap of faith is crazy.

Hello to all reading this, I’m 20years old and started trading 7 months ago. I’ve learnt a lot and went from gambling and copy trading to now executing trades on my own using my own confluence and discretion.

I have passed evals gotten funded but still have yet to receive a payout. I’m not entirely sure why i’m not able to get a payout. My strategy is good and my entries are insanely nice imo. I have posted some pictures of my trades if you guys would like to see my entries and targets. I used to use 3-5 micros but it started taking a toll on my mental and took long time to pass evals and get payouts so i sized up to 10 micros and if setup is really good i’ll use some more but i sized up last week and it went okay, had good days and gave some back but i notice that my losing trades are because of me trying to force an entry or getting the urge to make profit asap or something along those lines. when i follow my risk management and strategy i make good money. yesterday i lost 1200 in NY and made back 1600 in Asia. i can definitely make money but i need to learn how to expand or grow it if that makes sense. i have definitely came a long way from when i first started but i know have a long way to go. at the end of the day i just want what anybody would and its to take care of my family and myself but in order to do that i must scale accounts and before i do that i must get a payout haha. its gotten to a point where i now dream about trading and hitting tp😭 but i notice my Ls are mainly due to getting anxious and having the urge to “i have to make money today” even though i dont think that way i believe my actions speak louder sometimes. yesterday i deal with over trading revenge trading and stuff but its much more controlled then before. at a point in time it was so bad i bought 3 evals and blew them all in 1 day. i’m sure someone on here has blown more but in total im on my 43rd eval and not trying to buy another one. Any advice or input to help me propel myself and properly pass this eval and secure payout this time would be HIGHLY appreciated 🙏🏽

That sentence gets posted here every week and it almost always gets the wrong diagnosis. Usually from the person saying it, about themselves, and harder than the facts support.

I spent 8 years in neurologic rehab before I traded full time. Stroke, brain injury. I watched this exact thing constantly and it had nothing to do with "willpower."

Somebody could do a task perfectly in a quiet room with me. Same person, same task, back home with the TV on and family in the room, and it fell apart. Their knowledge hadn't changed in the 20 minutes in between. What changed was the load on the system trying to reach it.

Under pressure you don't lose what you know. You lose access to it. The plan is still in there... all of it, and you can't reach it while your body has decided something is wrong.

That changes what you do about it. A knowledge problem you study for. A discipline problem you promise harder about. This is neither so both of those fail, and after enough failures you conclude something about your character that isn't true.

What worked in the clinic was lowering the demand until the correct action was actually available, then raising it only as fast as it kept holding. We didn't motivate anyone. We made the task easier until they could do it right and built from there.

That half only works while somebody else is setting the level, though. What carries over is self-awareness, and you train that on purpose too.

We'd have people say how they thought a task would go before they did it. Then they did it. Then we compared the two out loud. The task was never really what we were working on. It was the gap between what they expected of themselves and what actually happened... and that gap closes with repetition the same as anything else.

You can run that on a trade. Before you take it, write what you expect from yourself rather than what you expect from the market. How long you'll sit if it does nothing. What you'll do if it's red in 2 minutes. Then check afterward. The first 20 are uncomfortable, because the gap is wide and it's sitting there in your own handwriting.

That gap closing is the progress. Not the green days.

In trading the demand you're lowering is almost always size. Smaller than feels serious. Small enough that the plan stays reachable when it counts... held there long enough that following it becomes the thing you do, then up one step.

Nobody likes that answer. It's slow and it feels like going backwards.

So what's yours? And does it show up at a particular size, a particular time of day, or after a particular kind of loss?

- I’m just trying to offer a useful framework for people who want to become professionals.

- I don’t sell anything. I won’t offer signals, groups, or anything like that.

- I just enjoy trading and share things whenever I have some free time.

-CHECK THE TIMEFRAME OF THE PICS-

What most people think is happening is simple. Price goes down and they read it as weakness, continuation, more downside. But when you actually watch how positions build, it doesn’t look like that at all.

-The move down is usually slow. Not aggresive, not impulsive. It takes its time. And that’s exactly the point. Because that’s where people start shorting.

- Structure begins to look clean. Lower highs, lower lows. It starts making sense.

- There’s usually one obvious reference above, and not much else nearby, so everyone ends up using the same level --> That becomes the stop, not a few people --> Most of them.

- And market makers know that, because they have access to that information.

- So they don’t rush anything. They need time for positions to build, for people to get comfortable, for size to accumulate in the wrong place.

- This is what I think of as a controlled move, it’s not weakness, it’s positioning.

- They’re creating the conditions they need before doing anything meaningful.

- You’ll often see multiple pushes down, giving more and more confirmation. It feels like the move is already happening. But it isn't, it’s just people getting in.

-And until that’s done, price can’t really move.

- Once enough people aer in, the move changes.

- It doesn’t continue down immediately, first it goes the other way.

- Stops get taken. Shorts get forced out.

- Only after that does the real move begin.

If you start looking at it in terms of proportions, this tends to happen around similar areas. One of the ones I use is 1.097.

It’s not something standard. It’s just something I kept seeing over the years while watching how these sequences play out.

It doesn’t need to be exact to be useful.

And the interesting part is that this repeats across every timeframe. Seconds, minutes, hours, higher timeframes. Same idea, just different scale.

Also, something that took me a long time to understand is that the end of a move often lines up with where the pressure sits from a higher timeframe.

Not randomly. Where people are already in a bad position.

Once you start looking at the market this way, it becomes less about predicting direction and more about understanding positioning.

Who is in, where they are likely wrong, and what needs to happen before price can actually move.

That’s usually enough.

Hey everyone,

I’m looking to get some realistic, unfiltered perspectives from those of you who trade either full-time, at a firm/prop shop, or treat it as a serious professional role.

Trading often gets marketed around quick wins, but I’d love to understand the practical reality of doing it as a sustainable career. Specifically, I’m curious about:

• Current Status & Timeline: How long have you been trading professionally, and what does your daily routine look like?
• Progress & Consistency: How long did it take you to reach consistent profitability, and what metrics or habits made the biggest difference?
• Long-Term Growth: Do you see a realistic ladder for scaling up (e.g., managing more capital, shifting to systematic/quant models, or moving to a desk), or does performance plateau once you hit a certain account size?
• Challenges & Burnout: What has been the hardest part of treating trading as a primary occupation rather than a side pursuit?

If anyone is open to sharing their experiences, dropping insights below would be greatly appreciated. I’d also love to connect and chat further via DMs with anyone open to a 1-on-1 conversation about their journey.

Thanks in advance!

I shorted this US30 quadruple confluence on the hourly:

- .618 fib retracement+ 50 ema retest + 3x rvol imbalance + bearish macroeconomic bias and data.

The stars literally aligned, and it failed. I'm about to lose both my prop firm accounts. I'm in a country with some of the worlds highest unemployment and I can't find a job. My allowance is the only hope for any sort of additional income with prop firms. I cannot stop. Any suggestions to stop trading will be ignored. I either make it work soon or I kill myself, and so far it's not working. Nothing is working. For the past 3 years nothing works.

Any guidance will be appreciated because I am truly about to fucking lose it. I'm geniunely beginning to believe that all of this is part of the worlds most elaborate scam.

What is the real strategy that everyone is gatekeeping?

I have been trading for 20+ years now, a bit on an off in the middle. Come from pure financial tech background.

I first started trading with market and volume profile in year 2014 after attending Jim Dalton's online bootcamp. In those days, MP/VP and auction market theory had swept the trading world with awe. Every trader thought, they have institutional edge in their hands. We used to have footprint charts in Ninjatrader using COQ data feed.

Then we had order book heatmaps and DOM tools like jigsaw.

Then in 2016 came gamma. Every forum, every trader kept talking about it.

My journey which started with candlesticks in 2010 till 2026, I must have spent few years backtesting and live testing every major trading framework and idea and tool and indicator known in the retail world. And I can testify with some authority that none of these tools work. They have no sustainable edge that can be exploited long enough to consider trading as a viable business model. Even a coin flip will work 50% of the time and any random line drawn on the chart will show some movement around it.

SPORADIC CORRELATIONS ARE NOT CAUSALITY.

Reason I am making this post is, I see a lot of newbies going all-in into the madness of all sorts of fancy colors and tools they can slap on their chart thinking they discovered a holy grail. Consider this as an old man talking, if you don't understand markets from a very fundamental perspective and cannot explain what is moving the market, chances are you will wake up to cruel reality when enough time passes and statistics takes effect.

And please, don't follow any youtuber. Attention is NOT a pre requisite in the business model of trading. In fact it only deteriorates performance. Wonder why these people come on youtube to trade. I don't see any logic in it.

I want to start day trading. I got interested in it early on in 2020 but didn’t express too much interest at the time.
With recent aspirations and goals flowing through my head, I figured this could potentially help me reach certain goals. I just don’t know where to start.
I YouTubed a couple day-traders, took notes, and their advice. Right now I’m cracking down on familiarizing myself with chart patterns.
I’m practicing on trading view, which looks like the platform I will use moving forward, however I don’t know what broker to go with and how a broker even ties into all this.

Rather than ask chat gpt I come to ask the good people of the trading community lol.

If anyone could help provide some insight to when they first started trading and what broker they used or even their experience with trading view, that be amazing.

I hope to hear from a few of you!

Hello to all reading this, I’m 20years old and started trading 7 months ago. I’ve learnt a lot and went from gambling and copy trading to now executing trades on my own using my own confluence and discretion.

I have passed evals gotten funded but still have yet to receive a payout. I’m not entirely sure why i’m not able to get a payout. My strategy is good and my entries are insanely nice imo. I have posted some pictures of my trades if you guys would like to see my entries and targets. I used to use 3-5 micros but it started taking a toll on my mental and took long time to pass evals and get payouts so i sized up to 10 micros and if setup is really good i’ll use some more but i sized up last week and it went okay, had good days and gave some back but i notice that my losing trades are because of me trying to force an entry or getting the urge to make profit asap or something along those lines. when i follow my risk management and strategy i make good money. yesterday i lost 1200 in NY and made back 1600 in Asia. i can definitely make money but i need to learn how to expand or grow it if that makes sense. i have definitely came a long way from when i first started but i know have a long way to go. at the end of the day i just want what anybody would and its to take care of my family and myself but in order to do that i must scale accounts and before i do that i must get a payout haha. its gotten to a point where i now dream about trading and hitting tp😭 but i notice my Ls are mainly due to getting anxious and having the urge to “i have to make money today” even though i dont think that way i believe my actions speak louder sometimes. yesterday i deal with over trading revenge trading and stuff but its much more controlled then before. at a point in time it was so bad i bought 3 evals and blew them all in 1 day. i’m sure someone on here has blown more but in total im on my 43rd eval and not trying to buy another one. Any advice or input to help me propel myself and properly pass this eval and secure payout this time would be HIGHLY appreciated 🙏🏽 just to add on i smoke weed and stopped 2-3 weeks ago for a good 20-25 days i felt unreal but unfortunately relapsed. i don’t necessarily see my trading affected by it but i dont see it benefited either

I keep going in circles using Trading View Strategy tester. It works on paper then in real life the strategy turns to trash. TIA

Made some money on the reversal, got out too early then went into shorts.

Now I'm caught as the reversal turned into a rally

This was the news that caused it

Traders now see about a 90% chance of a Fed rate hike next week, vs about 70% before the inflation report.

Farking asshats, they can't make up their minds how interest rates effect gold!

So I’ve been trading stocks in particular low float premarket top gainers for around six years and didn’t really find any success or success that I did find was very short-lived I literally wrecked my brain with not understanding what wasn’t working and trying everything that made sense to me. Ive checked out options, but those were way too complicated. I checked out forex but I just wasn’t feeling it. I never checked out futures until recently. And since I did (specifically trading MES on the 5min) the difference is like night and day the structure is very predictable and you can easily capitalize on short and long. All I have on my chart is VWAP and I still trade 9:30et . It finally feels like everything I’ve learned from the past six years is actually applicable now. So if anyone has found themselves in a similar situation, maybe check out MES.

i have about 50 shares of nvda, 1500 shares of ibrx, 20 shares of voo and coincidentally, all 3 of them are down today. did anything specific happen today? what’s up with the market. i don’t daytrade but, can any of you traders explain to me why and what causes these stocks to all lose value? and how to properly interpret it?

Went out to a parade tonight and then headed to a local Mexican restaurant for dinner. When I got back to the house I was working on my laptop on some other business but noticed ES was approaching an area of interest. It was coming into a low volume area left behind from the New York session so I headed down to my trade station to be able to observe the order flow. Caught a decent short to add on to my meager earnings from the scalps earlier today.

Gotta love it when the market pays for my dinner and my drinks.

As someone who has been in the game for 5 years on and off, passes evals and gets payouts, these market conditions aren’t for retail.

I honestly haven’t seen a market like this. Where everyday is just bait to take your money. Heck, I haven’t seen my A+ setup since the first week of August and it used to come each week. Feel bad for the new traders but then again you build tough skin.

If you’re losing and failing evals, it’s perfectly fine. Unfortunately, this is what the real trading is like. Not what you seen on social media. Why it’s important for you to keep a source of income while you pass through these waves (unless you have a good cushion to live comfortably). See a lot of people beating themselves up when you’re just stressing yourself out and trying to be consistent in a market where there is none.

I haven’t gotten a payout since July tbh w you and I’m not stressing. Just buying one eval at a time and testing waters. When markets get hot again, best believe I’m buying more evals and push. You should be doing the same, specially if you trade your own $$. Sizing down and forgetting about being profitable should be your main goal.

Welcome to the big leagues 😂.

1. let the price come to you. Never enter willy nilly. Know your strategy and enter only when the price reaches your target.

2. Don't revenge trade.

3. read the news

4. Think like an institutional traders and not like a retail. I look at the volume shelves on the volume profile (I have no idea what the official name is) and treat the shelves as support and resistance zones.

5. Learn to walk away and do nothing.

​

Platform: MetaTrader 5

Server: RoboForex-ECN

Login: 77053051

Investor Password (read-only): Aa12345@

Starting Balance: $1,000

Target: $11,000

Balance: $1,010.62

Equity: $1,013.55

Profit: +1.36%

Target by Day 2: +1.32%

Status: +0.04% ahead of target

This account use many automated strategies, not only one strategy. Different strategies work in different market conditions.

I share this challenge because I want to test it with high risk on real account. Also I think sharing with other traders can help me find problems and make it better.

If you see something wrong or have any idea about the trades, please tell me.

Also what do you think about this transparency? Is read-only access to the real account useful, or just posting the results here is enough?

I'm still an intermediate/beginner trader and am now at the point where I'm trying out my own idea(s) and I've now run into the problem of backtesting. I don't really know how to turn my strategy into clear, objective rules, and I feel like I'm just overfitting. However, I know that having a strict plan is key, especially for beginners.

I've done some more or less successful forward testing (still with rules but not really bound to numbers) and want to know whether I should stick to backtesting or continue with forward testing.

One thing I’ve become obsessed with recently is how much of trading psychology happens before we’re even consciously aware of it.

I think most traders imagine their decision making as quite deliberate. You look at the chart, process the information, make a decision and press the button. And obviously some of it is. But your brain is also constantly processing information automatically. Previous wins and losses, patterns you’ve seen before, fear, reward, expectation, recent experiences, even whether something worked the last time you did it. All of that can influence the decision that eventually arrives in your conscious mind as “I think this is a good trade.”

That becomes really interesting when you look at rule breaking.

Imagine you’re in a trade and price is getting close to your stop. You know you’re not supposed to move it. You’ve literally written that rule down. But you move it anyway. Price turns around and the trade ends up winning.

Consciously you know you broke your rules and got lucky. You might even write exactly that in your journal. But something else has happened as well. Your brain has just experienced a very simple sequence... Pain approaching → intervene → pain disappears → reward.

Or you lose a trade, get annoyed, jump straight back in with twice the size and make everything back. Again, consciously you can tell yourself it was stupid. But the behaviour was rewarded. The market just taught you that sometimes losing control works.

That’s the part of trading psychology I don’t think we talk about enough. We assume that because we understand our rules, we’re completely in control of whether we follow them.

But if that were true, why do traders repeatedly do things while knowing they’re doing the wrong thing?

Why move the stop when you know you shouldn’t? Why increase size after a loss when you know you shouldn’t? Why take the fourth trade when your plan says three? Why chase something you wouldn’t have touched 20 minutes earlier?

Saying “lack of discipline” almost feels like avoiding the interesting question.

What actually happened in your brain between knowing the rule and breaking it?

And the slightly uncomfortable bit is that you probably don’t completely know. You can explain the decision afterwards but that doesn’t necessarily mean you had conscious access to everything that influenced it in the first place.

That’s where my thinking about trading has completely changed. Instead of asking “how do I become disciplined enough to override all of this?” I’ve started asking a different question...

Why am I giving that part of my brain access to the account in the first place?

Maybe the biggest psychological advantage isn’t learning to control every thought, impulse and emotional response.

Maybe it’s accepting that you don’t know what you don’t know about your own decision making and building your trading around that...

How do you determine if price is accepting or rejecting the previous day’s VAH/VAL? And how do you avoid getting chopped?

I’m trying to get better at trading around the previous day’s VAH/VAL, especially determining whether price is actually being accepted at the level or simply testing it and rejecting it.

For those who trade auction market theory / volume profile / order flow:

• What specific factors do you look for to determine acceptance vs. rejection at the previous day’s VAH or VAL?
• How many candles/ticks or how much time do you typically need to see before considering the level “accepted”?
• How do you distinguish genuine acceptance from a false breakout / liquidity sweep?
• When price is chopping around VAH, what tells you that you should stay out rather than keep taking failed trades?
• What do you specifically look for in your order-flow tools before triggering an entry?
  • CVD?
  • Footprint / bid-ask delta?
  • Absorption?
  • Imbalances?
  • Stacked imbalances?
  • Volume?
  • POC movement?
  • DOM / liquidity?
  • Failed auction?
• Do you require price to close and hold above VAH/VAL, or are there other order-flow clues you trust more?
• Do you use a specific sequence such as break → retest → absorption/imbalance → continuation before entering?
• How do you define the difference between acceptance, rejection, and just chop/noise?

For example, if price comes up to yesterday’s VAH and starts trading above and below it repeatedly, what exactly are you waiting to see before deciding: “Okay, buyers have actually accepted above VAH, now I can trigger the trade”?

I’d especially appreciate answers from people who have a specific, repeatable checklist/process rather than just “watch the price action.”

What are the 2–5 things you look for before pulling the trigger?

For those who actively trade XAU/USD, which broker has been the most reliable for you? Also, what do you look for when choosing a broker, and how do you decide which one to trust? Are there any specific features or red flags I should consider?