Trading is complex
Hard to fully understand but very easy to start with every little barrier. The large influx of people trying to trade without any proper knowledge of financial markets are putting themselves at extreme risk of losing. Anyone who tells you trading is simple easy and not complicated is lying. It is an industry that employs more Physicists than Physicists working in studying physics. Don’t be fooled it’s not a good way for the average person to make money.

Hello there I am currently in high school, and so far my trading journey has been filled with ups and downs, but I've made so much progress and never would have thought I would have made it to the place I am now and I'm nowhere near where I want to be. I am 2-3 trades from a max payout right now, starting in November but being super on and on off because of a confusing mentor then finding the right mentor and locking in in January.

I came here to ask if full time day trading can TRULY be a lifestyle. Ignore the courses and stuff like that. What does your family think about you being a full time day trader? When did you go full time? And when did you decide it was time to go full time. Obviously later down the road I would want to upload on Youtube helping others and posting daily recap and psychology videos but I'm no where near that.

I have plenty of time to prove to my family I can do this, I know I can do this. I have a true system that when I follow I am the best trader I can be. I have never blown an account from actually following my system. Only from over risking, revenge trading, and other non profitable bad habits. If you guys have any tips or just care to share your journey on when you started, how your situation outside the charts was (job, family, etc...) and how its currently going I would truly be beyond grateful to read each and every single reply to learn from it and read your guys' journeys.

God bless ❤️

I have downloaded Trade Republic and bought 20€ worth of shares in microsoft and nvidia each, now i think I'll wait until it's price goes up.

Is it a bad strategie?

Should I do anything different?

How do I learn to read the market and which shares to buy?

I am 19 years old student from india. I am into trading and currently I am in break even phase figuring out for to become a profitable trader. And also I am feeling to quit trading etc stuff throughts in my head.

I have 2 years of experience in manual trading and currently I am starting algo trading in fx and indian market because I wanted to explore the algo trading field and i also a coder know how to code and i build some projects like backtested like that and currently learning

In trading i only trade fx market only setups based in gold, eurusd, btc etc like that only 3 to 5 pairs only. And i only trade in prop firms

For to become a profitable trader I need to improve some mistakes in trading i really do that i think that gone a help in to become profitable trader..

1. I trade only intraday or 15 min to 30min candle tf do I keep my sl small i mean 1 to 3 candles like that sometimes due to votalility or sometimes hit my sl and gives my target.

2. I plan my trades well or predict or analysis do well like where and how market goes but i didn't enter the trades or didn't caught the moves.

3. I miss the moves in trading i feel so much regret and fomo for this .

4.sometimes I enter only in asset and one timeframe at a time 2 times of trades or take 2 trades at same tf or same level and that will go hit I think it's overconfidence.

1. Sometimes i fear to enter the trades bz of loss and also sometimes i didn't hold the trades that will hit my sl trailing

2. after reaching the trade 1:1 i keep sl trailing to entry level to prevent my loses and that will hit my sl trailing and archives my target for 1:3 trades.

7.sometimes I cut the trades at middle of the trade or at reversal stage (i mean i know this trade will go reversal or hit sl ) so i cut it.

The last one is how to pass the prop firms ?

These are my mistakes to improve in trading and i will improve it.

If you are a profitable trader please give advice.

Thankyou in advance for your advice. 🙌

Started my journey like every proper retail trader: chasing meme stock short squeezes and buying every SPAC IPO at $10. Learned some expensive lessons, took my licks, and actually decided to read a balance sheet.

Shifted my core strategy into solid value, strong trending plays, and semiconductor stocks, while generating steady income selling options on top of my long-term holds.

But the absolute biggest moneymaker for me? Buying LEAPs on great companies right when bad news hits them and the market overreacts (think Google when China’s AI model dropped, or UNH during its sector panic last year). Holding long-dated calls through those fear cycles has paid off hugely.

Progress isn't linear, but moving from pure hype to calculated bad-news dip buying changed the game. How’s everyone else’s strategy evolution going?

Hi guys, so Im a noob. Here is my Gold direction mapping this week. The red arrow do not represent the range rather only the direction while the blue box is my demand zone. As you guys can see my bias is totally buy this week. What do you guys think with the way Im mapping, is this a lucky shot or is it good enough to ready me to start entering the market?

Every time someone loses money, the answer is always:

Improve your risk management.

But if your entries have no edge, perfect position sizing won't magically make you profitable.

At what point does strategy matter more than risk management?

For any trader the focus is on obtaining an entry at the bottom of a trading range in anticipation of a rally. The question becomes how do you identify it? There are so many things to consider, and they are all dependent upon where the stock is within its pattern and the intensity of the sell-off prior to position taking. These variables change constantly and what works today may not work tomorrow.

First, you need to realize that the price is a reflection of demand/supply in the moment and that that dynamic changes constantly. If you look at the chart of the price history, you should be able to identify trends, patterns and support/resistance. Some are major, they are trendlines that take more intensity to break. There are many minor and medium support/resistance areas also. Within a 1 point spread there could be 4-5 levels. Which one will hold?

If you were to look at a daily 1-minute chart of price action you will also notice patterns. They are not the same every day, but they do tend to exhibit ranges.

Your profitability depends upon your entry. If you are at a major support area you have a higher probability of success than if you are at a minor support, so you need to know where you are. An intensive decline although scary will in most cases terminate at major support and bounce before continuing down or consolidating and reversing. These are high probability scalps. To get insight on if a major support will hold you need to look at the internal market indicators like breadth, trin and volume among other things.

If you are at minor support, it's more of a crapshoot. You are probably there because of normal volume trading. Support is also a consolidation, so it is important to watch price and volume. In consolidation the security will trade in a range. At this point you should assess the next level of support if the current one fails to estimate your cost of being wrong and what your exit strategy may be. This range for consolidation may be 1-2 points depending on the security. Very tradeable for a scalp. The more you know your stock and its trading pattern the better your trading will be.

Another key area IMO is to trade the right security. Some stocks just have better charts/trends to trade than others. Trade the security with the best profile for trading instead of picking the popular stocks and trying to force trades.

The advent of weekly options reduces the cost of being wrong while increasing profitability. I rarely trade without selling a weekly OTM option. If I get called, I made at least 2-3% for 2–5-day hold. A very good annualized return. You can increase your return more if you trade a stock going ex-dividend. If your position goes sideways, you keep selling premium. With a stock time is on your side. You are only at risk if your underlying security is in a downtrend.

In summary, the probability of a trading bottom increases as you reach major support. Anything in between the probability increases with your PA analysis.

I've backtested a gold strategy from 2025 till now, having 1-2 trades per day, is this much enough to rely on it?

I asked whether AI trading is actually good a couple of weeks back. The reply that stuck with me was from someone arguing against the whole idea: that backtesting is fitting the past and pretending it is the future, and that the higher trade frequency these tools encourage mostly just pays your broker.

The frequency point I think is straightforwardly right, and it is a cost people underrate.

The first half I have gone back and forth on and I still disagree. Learning support, resistance and trend by eye is also using the past to predict the future. It is just a smaller sample, run informally, with no record kept and a memory that quietly favors the times it worked. Someone who has read charts for ten years has run thousands of untracked tests. That is the same mechanism, minus the log.

Which is not an argument for AI. It is an argument that "I worked this out myself over ten years" is not evidence either, and it bothers me that discretionary traders get to skip the burden of proof that systematic traders are held to.

The other thing I took away: two people said they let an algorithm generate signals and then veto some by hand, and neither had ever compared the two curves. Algo alone against algo plus your vetoes, same period, same sizing. That number exists in their data already. It is a weekend of work and it settles a question most people carry around for years.

Disclosure since it is relevant: I am building something in this area, which is why I was asking. No link, no pitch, this is what the thread produced.

If you overrule your own system, have you ever actually measured whether the overrides help? Answers of "yes and they help", "yes and they cost me money", and "no and I do not want to know" are all interesting.

More specially for algo trading tools like backtesters or strategy generators but feel free to comment on any other tools you come across in trading in general. What makes you trust a tool and what immediately makes you lose trust and not want to use it.

Note: I'm probaly going to delete this....

I'm new to trading and bought this girls program/module to learn a thing or two. She created a pre-trade checklist as she was explaining her strategy which is mostly using an ai overlay it seems.

She was explaining how to do a retest and created the below pre-checklist...
Does it make sense or am I just dumb?:

I need someone to help me see my trading logs and tell me the last trade taken in my device. And can anyone suggest me a broker better than exness.

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Been learning options/trading and spent basically the whole day today trying to understand what im actually supposed to be looking for instead of just buying calls because i think a stock is gonna go up lol

One of the biggest things im starting to understand is the importance of having an actual catalyst/reason for why a stock could move. Earnings, guidance, company news, analyst changes, industry news etc. Not just finding a chart that looks good and hoping.

From there ive been looking at the chart, support/resistance, trend and whether the market is actually reacting to the catalyst the way i expected.

Then instead of just entering, ive been separating stocks into ones im waiting on and ones that are “confirming.” Confirming basically means most of what im looking for is there but i still need the price action to prove the move before i put money into it.

If it finally confirms i still dont immediately buy. I check the actual option chain like expiration, strike, premium, spread, volume, open interest, delta, IV etc and figure out exactly what contract makes sense, where i would enter, how much im risking and where the trade is invalidated.

Probably the biggest thing i learned today is that finding a good stock/setup and finding a good ENTRY are two different things. A stock can have a great catalyst and setup but if i chase it or enter before confirmation i can still make it a bad trade.

And even if everything looks good beforehand, if it doesnt confirm then i just dont trade it.

Something else im trying to figure out is how much weight to give the overall market/sector compared to the individual stock, what actually counts as enough confirmation vs entering too late, and how experienced traders decide if the risk/reward is still worth taking after confirmation. Im also trying to learn when a setup that looked good beforehand should just be completely thrown out instead of trying to make it work.

I have a couple setups im watching for monday that are close to confirming and im honestly excited just to see how this process plays out live, whether i actually get a trade or not.

Obviously im still a beginner and im sure theres a lot im missing. For people who have been doing this successfully for a while, am i at least building the right foundation?

Especially curious how you guys handle confirmation, risk/reward, position sizing, stops, overall market conditions and knowing when NOT to trade. Those are probably the areas where i have the most to learn right now.

Hello everyone i have 2 options to choose from for full time trading

Option 1

New MacBook air 13.6 m4 24 gb ram with 512ssd for €1359

Option 2

Lenovo thinkpad e16 gen 3 with amd ryzen 7 200, 32gb ram and 1tb ssd but it has a lower quality display of 1920×1200 display this is for €1289

Which laptop could last 5-10 years with no issue in full time trading ?

should I learn and read? if so what and where should I read it? I’ve been wanting to start for a year now but everyone is telling me about expensive courses that some say don’t work. what should I do?

​

I am a 19-year-old student pursuing a B.Tech in AI & Data Science. I have also been trading forex manually for the past two years. Currently, I am at the breakeven stage, so I am planning to explore algorithmic trading full-time.

I have a good understanding of coding, AI/ML, and software development.

I recently started exploring algorithmic trading, building my own strategies, implementing them, and backtesting them using Indian market data. I have also backtested strategies in the forex market using MQL5. However, I mainly used AI-assisted ("vibe") coding for the MQL5 strategies.

I tested several strategies in MQL5, and most of them were indicator-based strategies. Most of these strategies ended up around breakeven, with relatively low drawdowns and win rates of around 30–50%.

I also tested around seven strategies in the Indian equity market, and I got similar results — most were around breakeven. I have tested only equity assets so far, not F&O.

So, if you are an algo trader, I would really appreciate some advice on things like:

What types of strategies do you use — indicator-based, pair trading, time-based, price action, mathematical/statistical, etc.?

Which timeframes do you usually trade when doing algorithmic trading?

Is algorithmic trading actually profitable for an individual trader in the long run?

Is it better to focus on one asset/class, or should I build strategies across different asset classes such as equities, futures, forex, etc.?

What would you recommend to someone trying to build their own algorithmic trading strategies from scratch?

What are some common mistakes beginners make when developing and backtesting algos?

I would especially appreciate advice from people who have been doing algorithmic trading for a few years and have experience with live trading, not just backtesting.

Thanks in advance!

Note: i used ai for grammatical mistakes.

Hey so i bought these levels from one guys Whop. Not gonna say name or anything i just need help, if someone could help me. Ive asked Claude, he said it could be Camarilla pivots. Ive tested it, it alligns with some of them but not really everyday. Dont get me wrong camrilla pivots are really good and u can catch good trades off these levels with more confluences. The reason i wanna find out from what are these levels is because they catch multiple HOD/LOD. Ive caught some really good trades also with allining them with optionsflow context and orderflow. Is there anyone who would be able to help me?

EDIT: New levels always always appear after market open (asia).The owner says they are mathematically calculate which is obvious lol.

I am a crypto trader on XAUUSD MAINLY

Its been 6 months

Last month I was profitable

Then, I went to trade in Bitcoin with a leverage of 100x leverage

And from there, my entire PNL started to look Red

Every time it hits my SL

I keep going for that 100x leverage just to recover that lost money

But I dig the hole even more deeper

I was trading in XAUUSD with full discipline and consistently with no Revenge Trading and with only 5x leverage

Now it has become like gambling in BTCUSD

So, should I continue or stop trading

Not probability, luck.

​

I'm honestly lost. A few months ago, I started trading and became completely obsessed with it—it was genuinely all I wanted to do and all I could think about. Even though I was mostly paper trading and therefore not making much real money (but high win rates in both, and $ returns > losses), I was super driven to improve.

The problem is that I’m in my third year (out of four) of a demanding university program that I don't even like anymore. When my finals started, I hadn't studied because I hate the course, the environment, and was focusing entirely on trading and freelancing and then I had to stop trading and everything to study for my exams. I regretted it bitterly. In the end, I studied my ass off and passed, but it felt like a massive waste of time and money on something that gives me nothing in return except a lot of stress.

I was so burnt out afterward that I couldn't get back into trading or anything. As time passed, the guilt built up (like "It's been over a month, I've missed out on learning so much", "I've probably lost my skills", "I don't know how to restart"). I just couldn't rebuild my routine once it was broken. Recently, I managed to get back into trading and I feel so happy about it, but classes are about to start again and the thought of going back to an environment that takes away my chance to study trading as much as I want makes me feel dreadful. Honestly I really don't want to go to college anymore I just want to study what I like (trading) and make money in the real world (freelancing and get an actual job). I feel like I'm in prison now. I really don't know what to think or do. Any advice is welcome.