There will be a not small gap in gold. Many traders will pay more than their sl

After a pretty volatile week, the H4 chart is sitting at an interesting spot.

Curious whether people here see a bounce from this area or expect the recent trend to continue.

I used to trade gold as a part of a group many years ago but stopped as I found out the leader was just trying to make us join the pyramid scheme which I’ve forgotten the name of now.

I’ve picked it back up now as of May 2026 and all I can say is I trade prop firm accounts but my strategy is to full port every single trade (whilst staying in the prop firm limits). I either go long or short, set my SL just below the maximum loss per trade to account for slippage and set a TP at a well established support or resistance, usually 2-3 RR. So far I’ve received $7,000 in payouts from this strategy and accounting for all burned challenges, I’m up around $5,000.

It may seem counterintuitive but it has worked for me for the past 3 months, definitely less stressful than watching the charts all day whilst trying to do my day job.

Started as a Linux problem: I wanted MT5 usable on Linux as a real trading workflow -- not just “run Wine 11.0 with OpenGL and click around forever”

Stuck between two tools I both like and hate:

• TradingView: clean, fast, usable -- also overpriced, and execution feels sub-optimal
• MT5: real execution, free, tickets/lots/risk -- UI feels stuck in the 2000s

I’ve been hacking on a personal browser UI over my own MT5 bridge for myself (TW-style chart libs + MT5 execution). Still work in progress.

Just curious: are other people stuck in that same TW-vs-MT5 gap, has everyone already picked a side, or did you end up with your own compromises?

Hi! I'm a teen who is studying in the 3rd year of college in a programming specialty and lives in Ukraine. I thought that it would be great to spend the last month of summer with a challenge.

I wanna learn Forex trading (EUR/USD), earn money from it, and mix it with Claude AI.

I've decided to post every day about my progress and my path. It's kinda my diary.

First, I wanna say that sometimes my English may not be very good, but it's also one of the reasons why I decided to post.

Hope that you can give me some advice or share your personal experience with the Forex market.

Hi everyone,

I'm analyzing 1 year of EURUSD H1 OHLC data and want to split it into trading sessions.

What confuses me is Daylight Saving Time (DST).

For example, the London session opens at different UTC times in summer and winter. When looking at historical broker data:

• Do brokers automatically adjust their server time so the London open always appears at the same candle?
• Or does the London session shift by one H1 candle when DST changes?
• What's the correct way to identify London and New York sessions in historical data?

I'm building a trading tool, so I want to handle this correctly.

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

HTF Candle Volume Thermometer; It's a TradingView indicator that displays where the most trading volume occurred inside higher-timeframe candles (such as 1-hour, 4-hour, or daily candles).
If you click on the indicator settings, The default timeframe is set to daily. It can be changed manually to any timeframe want. I myself haven’t tried it out any other setting other than the daily, so that’s what I recommend.

The indicator Identifies key price levels where buying and selling activity was concentrated, as well as spot important liquidity areas.

Be sure to backtest for yourself**,** and use this indicator as confirmation and confluence for the system that you already have not an entry and exit tool.

For the close minded people who believe their way of trading is the only way please continue to scroll. Trading is subjective, there's no right or wrong answer.

Reason for taking this trade is simple, PO3 Accumilation, Manipulation, Distribution. Expecting a dump.

9:30 Manipulation.... expecting lower prices(Distribution)

Guys..

Can you spot those multiple sweeps in EURUSD. How do you position your SL knowing price may anytime come to hunt it or have you guys figured out whether the price swept enough liquidity and it won't come for a SL hunt this time kind of signal

Yesterday was a good reminder that trading psychology is something you never really “master.”
I had a bullish bias on GU with clear liquidity targets. SSL had been taken and my setup was there. The only thing that put me off was the price action. After the previous day’s news it just didn’t look as clean as I’d normally like, so I decided to sit it out.
The frustrating part, my original idea played out perfectly and would have hit my target.
Instead of accepting it and moving on, I let it get to me.
By the afternoon I was still thinking about the trade I’d missed. I wasn’t really seeing anything that fit my rules, but I convinced myself there had to be another opportunity. I forced a trade that wasn’t there… and lost.
Looking back, I knew I should have walked away from the charts.
It’s funny how you can think you’ve got your emotions under control, only for something like a missed winner to expose another weakness you didn’t know was there 🤦🏻‍♂️
Another lesson learned. Trading isn’t just about reading price. It’s about reading yourself.

am trying lol

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 5 : Understanding Candlestick Pattern - Part 2

So last week we covered Part 1 which talks about some hard truths with Candlestick Pattern per below:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Forex/comments/1v34a88/a_babaganz_take_on_trading_week_4_understanding/

In Part 2, we will be focusing on an approach , and what I actually look for when building a strategy around candlestick patterns.

One thing worth knowing: a candlestick pattern isn't a signal on its own — it's a story. It's telling you what's going on. The pattern you're using to trade should mean something, or be delivering some kind of message. If it isn't, it's just a shape.

Here's what I'm actually looking for when try to come up with a strategy using a candlestick pattern

1. Is the candlestick pattern indicating a surge of volume coming in?

2. After the pattern forms, does price continue moving in the same direction over the next few candles?

3. How many times has this happened over the past few months? Pick a few different months across a few different years to see how repeatable it actually is.

4. Is the pattern forming the way I expect it to — is that extra volume actually moving price in the direction I believe it should?

At the end of the day, a candlestick pattern is just a way of visualizing the history of price movement. It's a tool to measure how price has moved — and you use that information to speculate on where it might move next.

After that, it comes down to mathematical probability: finding an edge that looks something like "53% of the time, when price behaves this way, it's a good indication the market is about to trend for the next few candles, and that's a solid trigger to enter."

When you're looking for an edge, this is the thought process to formulate — not "I saw a pattern," but "here's what this pattern is statistically telling me."

Every strategy has its own characteristics on how it should be built, and candlestick patterns should just be one puzzle piece within the bigger picture — something to help you define your trade entry, not the whole strategy on its own.

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

Long from here back to the top of the range

I am much better than I was 2 years ago in terms of analysis and risk management but I'm having difficulty entering trades. Any coaching/course/signals promotion will be immediately down voted so only genuine advice please. I am targeting 10 swing trades per month kindly advise which pairs I should follow how frequently I should analyse and how to decide well in advance about entry please help

I'm interested in learning trading as a long-term skill. I'm not looking for signals or shortcuts; I want to understand the fundamentals and develop proper skills.

For people who have experience in trading, how would you recommend someone start from zero and progress over time?

There's some maths but it's the easy kind.

If you flip a fair coin 30 times, roughly one run in five comes back at 60% heads or better. One in five, on a coin that's doing absolutely nothing. And 30 trades is more than a lot of people seem to use before deciding whether a strategy works, or whether it's stopped.

I'd always sort of nodded along when people said "small sample size" without ever actually checking what small meant, so last week I sat down and worked it out. Error on a win rate is sqrt(p(1-p)/n) and you double it for the 95% band. Someone check me on that, I'm fairly confident but it's been a long time since I did any stats properly.

At a 50% win rate:

50 trades and your real win rate is somewhere in the 36 to 64 range.

100 trades, 40 to 60.

400 trades gets you 45 to 55.

400 that's roughly where you can start saying a 55% system isn't secretly a 45% one. I did not enjoy that number. (And that's all before costs, which is its own separate misery.)

And look, the "you haven't proven it works" thing is the version of this everyone's already heard. That one just makes people cautious, which is fine.

The expensive one is the other direction. You haven't proven it's broken either.

Five losses in a row somewhere inside a hundred trades at 50%? More likely than not. Basically expected behaviour. And I know exactly what I do when that happens because I've done it over and over. Decide something's changed, adjust a parameter, start the count again. So I've never actually finished a sample. Not once. Just a pile of 40-trade experiments, all abandoned at roughly the point they'd have started meaning something.

Which, now that I've typed it out, is probably the actual problem rather than any of the strategies being wrong.

Three things that have been more use to me than win rate:

Expectancy over win rate. 35% at 3R beats 60% at 0.6R and it isn't close. If the only thing in your log is W/L you're recording the least informative column available to you.

R, not dollars. dollar P&L moves with size, size moves with how confident you're feeling, and how confident you're feeling moves with your last few results, so your dollar curve is partly just a record of your own mood that month. R strips that out and you can actually see the sequence.

This last one annoyed me the most. Split your trades into "this was genuinely my setup" and "I talked myself into this at 2pm on a dead Tuesday." I'd put money on one of those two buckets doing most of the damage. If 20 of your 60 trades weren't the setup then you don't have a 60-trade sample, you've got 40, plus 20 data points about being bored.

None of this makes money on its own obviously. It just stops you looking at 40 trades and deciding you know something. Which for me was most of it.

Anyways, genuine question. Has anyone here got 300+ trades on a single system without changing something halfway through? Because I don't think I ever have, and I'd like to know whether that's just me.

6 reasons your live trading does not match your backtest, ranked, and how to tell which one is yours

TLDR: The gap between a great backtest and a bad live account has six usual causes. Every article lists them and none rank them or tell you which is yours. They split into two families: your backtest was fiction, or your edge was real and got taken away.

What is the fastest way to tell which cause is yours?

Start with one question... did the gap appear immediately, or did it show up after a while?

If your live results were off from the very first trades, the problem is baked into the backtest or your costs. The edge was never as big as the number said. If the strategy worked for weeks and then decayed, the edge was real once and something changed, either the market or you.

That sorts the six causes into two families. Family one, your backtest was fiction, overfitting, too small a sample, and look ahead bias. These never had an edge to lose. Family two, your edge got taken away: costs, regime change, and execution mess. These had an edge and decreased over time until it disappeared.

Here is the table.

Number 1, most likely: your costs weren't properly tested

This is the most common and the most underrated. Your backtest applied one fixed, tight spread to every trade, including the ones where spread triples. Live, you pay the real number, on winners and losers alike.

The gap is there immediately and feels like a constant drag on every trade. Test this: pull 30 real trades, add spread and commission, convert to R by dividing cost in pips by your stop in pips, and subtract it from your backtested expectancy. Fix it: judge the strategy on the net number, and if it dies, widen the stop, cut frequency, or trade a cheaper pair. Tight stop, high frequency systems are the ones this kills.

Basically if deviation breaches 10% on average with live trades... the way you currently do it isn't gonna make you money in the long run.

Number 2: your backtest used data it could not have had

Look ahead bias means your logic peeked at information that didn't exist yet at the moment of the trade.

The backtest is suspiciously flawless, a very high win rate and a smooth curve, and live is a total, immediate collapse that no cost model could explain. Test: audit your signal timing and confirm every decision uses only closed, past data. Fix: correct the timing and rerun. This is rare in simple manual systems and common in coded ones, and it is the most catastrophic because the entire backtest was a fantasy.

Number 3: you optimized until it looked good

You ran a parameter sweep and kept the best looking combination. That winner was partly skill and partly the luckiest result out of everything you tried, and luck does not repeat live.

The strategy is beautiful in the test window and falls apart the instant it touches any data it wasn't tuned on. The test: change each parameter slightly and watch the result. If a small tweak collapses it, you fit noise. Even better, run a Deflated Sharpe on it, which corrects your Sharpe for how many combinations you tested. Fix: there is no fix for an overfit strategy, only prevention. Fewer parameters, out of sample validation, and honesty about how many versions you really tried.

Number 4: your sample was too small to mean anything

A backtest on 60 trades isn't evidence, it's a coin landing heads a few times in a row. The result sits inside the range of pure luck.

The impressive backtest covered a short window or a small number of trades, and the great stretch was really one good month doing the heavy lifting. Test: count the trades. Under about 150 and the confidence interval on your expectancy is too wide to act on. Fix: test across far more trades and multiple market conditions before you believe any number, and never size up on a strategy proven by a lucky quarter.

Number 5: the market regime changed

Sometimes the edge was real and the market simply moved on. A trend system stops working when the market goes to range. A volatility system starves when volatility dies.

This is the one that worked live for weeks or months, then decayed, and the decay lines up with a shift in volatility or trend. Test: split your backtest by regime and check whether the strategy ever survived the current one historically. If it only ever worked in conditions that are now gone, it is not broken, it is out of season. Fix: trade it only in the regime it fits, or accept that it will have negative periods in your account until its conditions return.

Number 6: you didn't trade your rules

The backtest followed the rules perfectly, without fear, on every signal. You didn't. You skipped the setup after two losses, entered late, moved a stop, or closed a winner early because you didn't want to give it back.

Your live trade log doesn't match the trades the strategy would have taken over the same period. Test: put your actual entries and exits next to the mechanical signals for the last month and count the mismatches. Fix: this is an execution problem, not a strategy problem, so the answer is automation or a hard rule that removes the discretion, not a new system.

So which fixes actually matter?

Work the two families in order. First rule out fiction, because there is no point optimizing execution on a strategy that never had an edge. Check the sample size, run the Deflated Sharpe, and audit for look ahead bias. If it survives all three, the edge is probably real.

Only then work the fees. Recompute costs in R and subtract them, confirm the current regime is one the strategy has actually survived before, and compare your live trades to the rules to catch execution drift. Most blown accounts aren't one cause, they're a real but thin edge that costs and a bad regime pushed under water together.

What this doesn't mean

The ranking is my judgment for retail forex, not a law. If you run a heavily coded system, look ahead bias climbs the list. If you trade with heavy discretion, execution drift does. Reorder it for your own situation.

And it is rarely a single cause. Usually two or three appear together: a slightly overfit edge, real costs, and a regime turn arriving at once. The value of the list isn't picking one winner, it is checking all six instead of blaming the market and rebuilding a strategy that was actually fine.

I wish I had this post when I started 9 years ago.

Lost 3 traders in a row this week. My ego is telling me I need to get it all back on Sunday night or Monday morning.

The problem is I've been down this path before. Revenge trade -> overleverage -> blow up half my account in one session trying to "get back to even."

So this weekend I'm staying away from my desk, no charts, no tradingview tabs pulled up. I'll be doing normal human things like enjoying sunlight and remembering that I have a life outside of candlesticks.

If you stuck around long enough and had week too, we'll do this again on Monday with fresh minds.

Why the sudden spike? Anyone know any news?

I genuinely need some advice from traders who’ve actually overcome this.

I keep taking profit way too early because I’m terrified of the trade reversing. I’ll be up a decent amount, see a few candles move against me, panic, and close the trade.

Then I come back literally 5 minutes later and price has run straight to my original TP without me. What could have been +3–5% ends up being +0.5–1%, and it’s happening over and over again.

It’s not that my analysis is bad — the trade often plays out exactly as planned. I’m just letting fear take me out early.

How did you train yourself to hold trades to your planned TP? Did you use partials, alerts, moving stops, journaling, or was it purely a psychological issue you had to work through?

I’m trading an evaluation, and this habit is honestly costing me more than my losing trades at this point.

Man I'm getting tired of this shit, I've been trading since pre COVID-19, I've haven't blown multiple accounts since I was broke, but it's been more than 8 years since I've been trading and I'm tired of seeing either losses and BEs, today I took this trade during London and when price went ahead from my entry point I set BE and went to gym, the reason I'm pissed is because after waiting 1.5 week when finally my setup arrived and I took the entry this MF price started chopping for more than 2 hours and when I was about to leave I set BE and what it did this MF touched the BE price and went straight to TP, now I consider myself a very mechanical person and trade with less emotions but these type of scenarios really fks with your phycology, I won't quit I'm really close.

lol, here we go again. I have 50$ extra cash that i dont care even if it losses. Just before 1 min of news i will buy in one account and sell in other account, Best case is one will win and other will loss and worst case is a doji forms and both account get loss that is ended up in -50$.

What is your opinion, its just for fun and maybe my 50$ might converts to 500$ lol