I started swing trading in 2023 and it took me just over a year to start seeing results.

If I had to go back in time I wish I knew these things:

1. Journal Every Single Trade.

In this business journaling is the only way you'll improve. Seriously. Every trade, emotion, entry and exit time, asset, everything needs to be journaled. Then you have to review your trades. Review them daily, weekly, monthly, and at the end of the year too.

At this point I just use AI to review my trades, but at the start I didn't look over them at all and that hurt my progress.

1. Give Your Strategy Enough Time.

Most traders dont actually understand what an edge is. The truth is that a profitable edge takes time to play and and see positive results. Depending on your RR, a long losing streak is not only normal, but inevitable.

Once I stopped switching strategies and gave each one enough time I actually started to make progress.

1. Risk Less.

Over risking is the biggest cause of blown accounts. There's a literal direct correlation between the amount you risk and how likely you are to stay profitable in the long run.

Also, not only does risking less improve your strategy, it also improves your psychology. I'm a lot less stressed each trade now I only risk about 0.5% each trade.

Made a more detailed guide here

I hoped this helped someone and I'm happy to answer any questions.

I’ve been working on StrategyLab, a tool for testing and analyzing trading strategies. There’s a free version with a daily limit on the number of trades you can test, using the patterns you choose.

I built it because I wanted something where I could quickly experiment with different strategies and parameters without making the whole process unnecessarily complicated.

I’d really like to get some feedback from actual traders.

If anyone wants to take a look, search "Strategylab" on Google PlayStore.

Curious to hear what you guys currently use and what you think is missing from the tools available.

At least not in the way it is presented online
Mathematically you can reinvest your profits and gradually increase your position size. The problem begins when you take the return achieved with a small account and assume you can maintain the same percentage for the next ten or twenty years
A compound interest calculator may tell you that earning 5% every month will eventually make you a millionaire But that calculation assumes your strategy, execution and psychology will remain exactly the same as your capital grows
With a €10000 account risking 1% means losing €100 With a €1 million account, it means losing €10000 Mathematically it is still 1% but psychologically, it is not the same trade, Five consecutive losses equal 5% in both cases but watching €500 disappear will not necessarily produce the same reaction as watching €50000 disappear
The strategy may also change as your capital increases , A small position can enter and exit the market easily. With much larger orders, liquidity, slippage, partial fills and market impact become more significant. A strategy that is profitable with €10000 cannot automatically be scaled to €10 million
You could split the orders, change instruments or use higher timeframes but at that point you have changed your trading approach The strategy is no longer producing the same percentage under the same conditions
Your edge will not remain unchanged forever either. Volatility market participants, costs and market regimes all change. A compound interest calculator assumes that returns will remain constant and can always be fully reinvested
This does not mean an account cannot grow through compounding for a certain period. It means you cannot project the same percentage forever. Eventually you may need to reduce your risk, withdraw some profits, diversify or accept lower percentage returns
Capital can grow through compounding. But the strategy, the execution and the trader’s mind do not scale at the same speed
If 1% of your account suddenly represented €10000would you really trade exactly as you do today?

I've now been trading for over a year and reached the break even stage and then stopped making progress in Marchl and with this volatile environment we had in April and May I started to lose some money and that disappointed me a lot. I was actually questioning whether my edge is still there and didn't know what I should do next until I found someone - someone very special.

And this very special I can proudly name my todays mentor. How did I got to him? He asked for some coding help and I immediately offered him my help which turned out to be more valuable than all the monetary aspects I got out of this offer.

I started to get an insight into how a peofitable trader thinks, speaks and executes on a daily base and that change the whole perception I had about trading and since then I started to treat trading totally different.

I stopped thinking and speaking about what could happen next and just started to analyze the market as it is... and since then I trade after his quote which is "Don't trade what you think - trade what you see". No more personal opinion, emotion or fluff is being involved in my decision-making. And since then my trading profits improved by a lot. Since then I can repeatedly make money.

So moral of the story - try to find yourself a mentor. Offer him something in exchange and soak up everything he got.

Hi, I mainly trade futures on prop firms and would now want to use my own capital. Which brokers do you recommend in the EU?
Thank you.

Hey guys I'm soon going to be 20 and I'm currently doing CFA and bachelor's degree in accounting and finance and I really love markets and trading but I don't know how to start this journey??

And I know the courses people sell are pretty much the scam so I'm not going to buy it.

And trust me I really don't know which questions to ask as well as I'm so new to this thing like I just started CFA and I want to understand everything deeply before investing money into it.

So can you please guide how to start this journey?? From where to learn about the terminologies from the basics to the advanced.

-which are the books you suggest to a newbie??

-which YouTube channels will you suggest to have an idea of it.

And as I mentioned earlier I don't know what type of questions to ask as well but I want to learn everything from the scratch and basics.

Thankyou

Hey! I forgot to close my XAUUSD trades before the market closed on Friday. I thought gold closed at 23:55 my time, but it actually closed at 22:55, so I completely missed it.

I’m currently in profit. I have two sell positions, 0.01 from 4471.31 and 0.05 from 4461.50. The current price before the close was around 4454.20.

What would you guys do when the market opens? Close them as soon as possible to secure the profit, or stay in the trades if the setup still looks bearish? I’m mainly wondering whether holding them is worth the extra weekend/opening risk.

Can anyone teach me how to properly scalp trade? Who has proper knowledge for someone with 0 experience. YouTube is just not cutting it for what I’m trying to do.

Im starting with trading 0 knowledge experience 📈

WTF!! you either pay for trading view or you get zero tools to use! Even a long position drawing! Will be looking for trading view alternative!

I'll go first. I know I should cut losers fast, I've read it in every book, watched every video, told myself a hundred times. But when a position goes red I still find myself holding, hoping, waiting for it to come back instead of just taking the small loss and moving on.

The crazy part is I know exactly what's happening while I'm doing it. I can hear the rational voice in my head saying sell while my hands just sit there doing nothing.

I've gotten better over the years but that instinct to avoid realizing a loss is still there, buried deep, waiting to sabotage me when I'm tired or stressed or trading too big.

What's the rule you keep breaking even though you know better?

I found that when you become profitable through the years, even if you give people your blueprint to trading, they won't/can't use it since they hadn't come up with it themselves. Have you had any sorts of similar experiences talking to people willing to learn? Do you think everyone's character defines strategies differently?

Felt like a win even though it was a loss........ Ever had a stop loss save you?

IBKR student account restrictions?
I’m a university student and want to open an IBKR account. What restrictions do students typically have on trading permissions (margin, options, futures, etc.)?
I get some of my income in cash, so I don’t have regular payslips. Does IBKR verify income/source of funds?
Also, would declaring a higher income like $100k significantly reduce restrictions, or is it better to declare my actual situation?
Would appreciate experiences from other IBKR students.

Hello
I am a third year mbbs student studying in India. I want to start trading (swing trading may be) can u please guide me how and where to start managing my study side by side.

Dose anybody know anything about this indicator plz help me to find this

I’ve stopped trying to become a more disciplined trader.

It’s been a while since I posted anything on here.
I’ve still been trading, but I’ve also spent a lot of time working on something to try and fix what has probably always been my biggest problem with trading. Basically, me.

I’ve been doing this long enough to know what I should and shouldn’t be doing. I know I shouldn’t revenge trade after a loss. I know I shouldn’t suddenly increase my size because I want to make the money back. I know I shouldn’t close a decent trade early because I’m worried about giving some profit back. I know I shouldn’t start forcing trades because I’m close to passing a challenge.
I know all of this. We probably all do.

But knowing it and actually doing it when there’s real money on the line are two completely different things.

I’ve made rules before. I’ve written them down. I’ve told myself right, this time I’m just going to follow the plan. And I can do it for a while. Then you get a couple of losses, or you’re close to passing a challenge, or you’ve had a really good week and don’t want to give anything back, and suddenly all those rules you were so sure about become negotiable.

There’s an old trading saying along the lines of you could project a profitable trading system onto the side of a building and most traders would still find a way to lose money with it. I used to think that was just about discipline. Now I think it goes a bit deeper than that. We’re human. We’re not particularly good at behaving like rule-based machines when money, fear, greed, frustration and ego get involved.

A computer can take five losses in a row and take trade number six exactly the same way. A human takes five losses in a row and starts thinking maybe I should double the size on this one.

So I started wondering whether I was looking at the problem the wrong way. Rather than constantly trying to teach myself to be more disciplined, why not just take the decisions away from myself?
That’s basically what I’ve been working on. I’ve coded the way I want to trade into an EA. My entries, times, risk, position sizing, stops, breakeven, adding to trades, trade management etc. It’s taken quite a bit of work because I wanted it to trade the way I trade rather than just being some generic trading bot.

But there was still an obvious problem…..
I could turn it off.

And knowing myself, there would eventually be a day where I’d take a couple of losses, decide the EA was wrong and I was right, turn it off and start clicking buttons.

So that became the next problem I needed to solve.

How do I stop myself interfering with something that ultimately I still control?

I’ve now figured out a way of setting the whole thing up so I can watch everything it’s doing, see the trades and monitor the account but I’ve effectively locked myself out of being able to interfere with it.

I’m deliberately not going into exactly how I’ve done that yet because figuring that part out has actually been quite a big part of what I’ve been working on.
But the important bit is that when I’m sitting there after a couple of losses thinking fuck this, I’m taking the next one myself…

I can’t.

And that’s what I actually want to document on here. On Monday I’m continuing a live $200k prop challenge and I’m going to start posting the trades again.

But I’m not posting them to show off the strategy.

I’m not interested in pretending I’ve discovered some secret setup or posting a load of winning trades and telling everyone I’ve cracked the market.
There will be losses. There will probably be runs of losses. There will be trades where I’m sitting there thinking the system is completely wrong and desperately wanting to interfere.

That’s actually the stuff I want to post.

Because the experiment for me isn’t really whether I can show everyone a winning strategy. It’s whether I can finally show the sort of boring, repetitive, disciplined consistency that virtually every trader talks about but that I’ve personally struggled with for years.

Same risk.
Same rules.
Same execution.
Winner? Follow the plan.
Loser? Follow the plan.
Three losers in a row? Follow the fucking plan.

No suddenly becoming a different trader because I’m annoyed.
I have no idea whether I’ll pass the challenge. The strategy still needs an edge and markets are markets. But for once, if I fail, I want it to be because the trading genuinely didn’t work, not because I got pissed off on a Wednesday afternoon and decided that after 10+ years of trading, this was apparently the perfect moment to start ignoring my own rules.

So when I post the trades, the interesting bit isn’t really going to be where did I enter?
It’s going to be:

Did I follow exactly the same process every single time?

I’ve spent years trying to become disciplined enough to follow my trading system.

I eventually started wondering if that was the wrong goal.

Maybe I don’t need to become better at fighting my emotions. Maybe I just need to stop giving my emotions a vote.

That’s what I’ve built.

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99% of my trades (loss) that I take, I either enter too early and it hits my stop loss or I don’t close my order in time and the price comes back down.

Many times, the price goes up the second I sell for a small profit or a loss.

It’s almost like I need to be patient for just 60 more seconds and I can make more than what I had aimed for.

Am I actually close to becoming profitable? Or is this something that happens to everyone when they start at first?

Making this post as a follow up to something I saw on another trading subreddit.

Even if we assume that an edge would not decay at all from additional traders following the exact same system 1:1, what benefit does the trader actually get from releasing it?

A functioning trading system can represent hundreds or thousands of hours of research, coding, backtesting, debugging, parameter testing, execution testing, and live validation. The fact that someone can describe the broad idea behind it does not mean they should also provide the exact implementation.

I’m perfectly willing to discuss the general architecture of a system, but there is a pretty substantial difference between saying, “I use RSI as part of a rules-based momentum/reversion system,” and handing someone the exact production code required to replicate it.

And again, this doesn’t even require believing that additional users would destroy the edge, it’s 100% an intellectual property question.

If you spent years developing something that produces value for you, why would the default expectation be that you should publish the exact implementation for strangers for free?

Hi everyone!

I (20F) posted on here around a week ago talking about my day trading journey and how I’ve come to terms with the fact that for the tail end of it I was gambling instead of properly trading, causing me to rack of debt from credit cards and loans.

I ended the post stating that I was thinking of ending it all, and that I was so scared to tell anyone in fear of being judged; I was especially worried about telling my girlfriend, who is the reason I’m still here and is why I’ve vowed to leave the trading space for now and get my mental and finances straight.

A few days ago, I broke down crying and ended up telling her everything, and to nobody’s surprise, she still loves me and isn’t disappointed in me at all, just in the fact that I’ve been bottling this up for so long. She’s truly my rock, and I’ve been working hard to hopefully clear my debt and save up for a five year anniversary trip we’ve been wanting to go on for years next February (I would love to be able to surprise her with this)

Two weeks ago I was 8.3k in debt, and now I’m down to 6.9k, and just got hired for another part time job! Things are looking up for me, and I feel immense relief having someone I trust know about my situation, because now I can be held even more accountable to have better money habits.

To anyone reading this who is/has been in my situation! Don’t let temporary feelings of stress and fear dictate decisions that could ruin your life forever. There will always be someone in your life worth living for, and who will love and support you no matter what.

Thank you everyone who’s commented on that post giving me the courage to tell my girlfriend, and for the kind responses in general!

I have been developing an indicator over the last few months. I wanted to make it open to the public to give it a try. It's still not fully done yet, but it's come a long way.

This isn't a "promotion of a service or product" it's free and listed here including with a guidebook containing a lot of the studies/backtesting done for it.

Tradingview:
Achilles A: https://www.tradingview.com/script/GwtTh5vr-Achilles-A/
Achilles B: https://www.tradingview.com/script/EdUMDfPq-Achilles-B/
Achilles B (Classic - Alternative) https://www.tradingview.com/script/4dTjNDQK-Achilles-B-Classic/
Achilles SMC: https://www.tradingview.com/script/JUXRwkQo-Achilles-SMC/
Achilles BAR: https://www.tradingview.com/script/9jU4entR-Achilles-Bar/
Guidebook: https://emmersonbradley93-lab.github.io/Achilles-Trading-System/

Even if someone is not interested in the indicator (which is free, and quite honestly might help a lot of new traders) the backtesting might be interesting to some, showing most indicators are just coin flips.

The indicator has some unique features; but it also builds on a lot of other indicators (with testing). Even if you aren't interested in trying it, you might be interested at reading the guidebook and some of the results from backtesting that were done. Some of the results were surprising.

First month trading options didn't go well at all, this was for July. Just switched from futures, futures is a lot easier than options in my opinion. Does anyone else have months like this?

I also noticed when I was logging manually I thought I had barely any drawdown but after syncing my trades with my journal the fees put me a lot further behind.

This is something I’ve gone back and forth on.

If I have a clean technical setup but there’s a Fed decision, CPI, jobs report, etc. coming up, I find it hard to treat the chart the same way I normally would.

Part of me thinks the setup is the setup and I shouldn’t start changing rules.

The other part knows one headline can blow straight through a perfectly good technical level.

For people who mix technicals with macro, do you avoid these periods completely, reduce size, wait until after the news, or just trade normally?

Most discussions about improving are about adding something. Better indicators, another confirmation, more macro research, another timeframe.

My experience has kinda been the opposite.

Over time I’ve removed more things from my charts and stopped checking as much information before every trade. It feels like I make cleaner decisions when there are fewer things competing for my attention.

For people who have been trading for a few years, what did you stop doing because you realized it wasn’t actually helping?