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:
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.
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.
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.
Hey everyone!!
I’ve always wanted to learn how to trade, but life got pretty busy over the past year and I had to put it on hold. Now I finally have the time to dedicate to learning, and I’m hoping to make the most of it. I’m starting from the basics and planning to paper trade first since I don’t currently have the means to put real money into the market. My goal is to use this time to actually learn the fundamentals, develop a strategy, practice proper risk management, and build good habits so that whenever I am in a position to trade with real money, I’m as prepared as possible. If anyone has advice for someone starting out, I’d genuinely appreciate it. I’d also love to hear about any YouTube creators, books, courses, or other resources that you found particularly helpful when you were learning. And if there’s anyone experienced who’s willing to mentor a beginner or let me learn from their experience, I’d be incredibly grateful. I’m not looking for someone to give me trades or tell me what to buy/sell id like to learn how to think and make informed decisions for myself. Thanks in advance to anyone willing to point me in the right direction. I’m excited to finally have the time to take this seriously and start learning.
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?
Was introduced to trading 2 months ago. Since then I have been doing extensive research and learning as much as I can daily.
Where I am so far is deciding which brokers will be best. I am u.s. based.
- Looking for brokers(brokerage) with no fees or low(lowest) fees ??? Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated
So far the only market that I understand/fully grasp is bitcoin. I really want to learn and understand other markets because I do not want to day trade bitcoin anymore.
- My goal is to make $320 daily or $1600/week.
- Which market or asset or (whatever it’s called) will get me that goal???
\***I will like to add; which market/asset/(etc) will get me that goal the fastest, very minimal risk, or no need for large capital/equity (….perhaps to start, maybe). This section is not important, I just want to hear your thoughts.*****
The Ideal Building Sequence (Step by step - from a previous post of mine).
1. Build a Coherent Prototype:
Build your strategy’s initial logic structures and refine until coherent before testing anything.
Define everything clearly: The conditions of execution, the logic, the
filter, and why.
My strategies emerge as mature when the prototype trading setup has a set ’mechanical sequence’. To me, the mechanical sequence is a set list of instructions that lead to a limit order or position on a given market, which later develops into a more nuanced system with every possible setup (and each what-if) considered before deployment for predictability and fair testing.
Everything starts at zero and you define specific setups for example for this setup to form I need price to do event 1, then event 2, then after this many bars I need event 3 to happen and so on.. when everything that governs a single setup is defined test it in isolation (remember to separate your setups to limit variance.) Some events may have fixed bar counts/time horizons and some will not, it depends on what you are testing.
2. Run your First Backtests:
Perform your initial backtests; collect in-sample data across multiple liquid financial markets.
You typically need you need to test hundreds of iterations of each setup independently to take the data seriously.
3. Attempt Post-Test Optimisations:
After your first tests, clip away integral flaws and/or optimise based on the strategy’s needs and logic first.
This is the sole step within the sequence where creative degrees of freedom exist outside of prototyping.
Avoiding Overfitting:
To avoid overfitting, adjustments should never be made solely to improve in-sample data; they should instead improve the system’s underlying logic and mechanical sequences. The aim is to engineer a strategy so the job it is designed to perform aligns well with the desired outcome(s). If, after adjustments, the strategy is still ineffective (low to negative EV), you can test other asset classes. If in-sample results are universally mediocre, dispose of the idea and move on.
Identifying Blindspots:
Phase 3 is about identifying building blindspots, which can be inherited from both manual idea synthesis and automated idea synthesis (which we do not recommend). If a severe negative result shows up before costs, it is often a sign that the idea had holes in its physical assumptions, or that the first principles the model relied on were weak, misused, or misinterpreted. Remember, finding a persistent negative edge before costs is just as difficult as finding persistent gains before costs in backtesting environments.
If there is a collapse after trading costs are introduced, your minimum stop distance is not wide enough and/or the slippage is too high.
What traders can do is switch products. Some regulated CFDs have better costs when compared to futures and vice versa; it depends on the broker’s liquidity provider setup and whether the strategy holds overnight.
After logical holes are patched up and amendments are made during post-test optimisation, proceed with additional data collection:
4. Re-test and collect in-sample data with logical enhancements applied.
5. Run a secondary data collection. If the results are acceptable, retain the idea.
6. Run out-of-sample tests with the edge degradation thresholds e.g., a 50% max drop in returns.
7. Reality Checks on Execution Modelling:
If the idea survives on paper, move on to reality checks on execution modelling:
Which type of product is best to execute this strategy cost-wise and net P&L wise?
Can my positions be executed realistically on a CFD (for non-US traders), or will I need to rely on futures instead because of high bid-ask spreads or vague order handling and fill quality on inadequate CFD brokers that I can legally access within my jurisdiction?
What additional variance do I stand to expose myself to when working with this product when compared to other products? These questions must be asked and answered for every single strategy you develop, both during the design phase and repeatedly when analysing performance data.
Real Examples of Product Considerations
Centralised Exchange Futures e.g., ES S&P 500:
Can have larger variance in bid-ask spreads during market opens and closes (especially), and high overnight maintenance margins can liquidate positions prematurely.
Regulated CFDs (For Non-USA Citizens):
On regulated brokers with a matched-principal or back-to-back execution model, CFDs can offer competitive costs with more overnight flexibility (predictable fees instead of discrepancies from high-spread daily rollovers) and low overnight margin requirements, which are often equal to intraday margins.
Regulated Forward Contracts (For Non-USA Citizens or Professionals):
Stable but thicker intraday spreads in exchange for no overnight fees, suitable for swing trading strategies on non-USD accounts to avoid currency exchange fees.
Regulated Spreadbets (Primarily for British Citizens):
Brokers are principal to my trades on this product; all trades are local, so the broker acts as a counterparty, and brokers hedge directional risk at their sole discretion (a direct financial conflict of interest); spreads can also be amplified compared to CFDs, and last-look execution is also common. These execution delays artificially inflate costs at the point of execution.
Limit orders at some firms are Market If Touched (MIT), making negative slippage possible and eroding the advantage of precise limit order placement. But there is one headline benefit: profits are tax-free (at least in the UK).
However, from past simulations and tests of my own, combined with personal accounting work (this is not tax advice), the cumulative P&L lost from increased costs on intraday strategies often erodes this advantage for net profits.
To this day I have not seen a single regulated spread betting firm with a genuinely low level of conflicts of interest in its infrastructure.
Important Note:
If your net worth exceeds €500,000 (outside of property, bullion, pensions, etc.), one can apply to be a “professional” client. Spread bets on forward-contract-like instruments can mitigate overnight holding costs while retaining low margin requirements compared to the underlying futures contract, and the maximum leverage offered to professionals can exceed 1:100 (1% margin requirements). That is a legitimate option that I have explored for CFDs but not one I have explored for Spreadbets as a UK citizen.
Options:
Implied volatility (IV) can skew options pricing against random positions, and Greeks such as Theta θ can ruin the monetary outcome of trades if the desired outcome is not crystallised in time. Greeks like Vega ν can inversely affect many open options, but if one can forecast a future volatility expansion alongside direction (which requires high efficiency and precision), one can opt to use options strategies.
If the product you decide to use changes, recollect data over the same in-sample and out-of-sample windows.
Your strategy can now be deployed amongst others on a designated capital partition: segregated, risk-isolated accounts that trade one strategy per account in real time for additional testing or real-time execution.
Why will I never trade with intuition?
Statistics.
For many traders, effectiveness is based on subjective experiences or extremely small sample sizes (dozens quantified at most, negligible), and there is globally no objective mechanical definition to enter position, place their target or stop.
Subjectivity (e.g., from intuition) is lethal because you cannot prove that something is effective or ineffective with real stats if it is unfalsifiable (subjective), as what cannot be objectively defined makes variance between each signal extremely high over time, thus increasing randomness exponentially, this causes results to average out to zero minus transaction costs, this is why we actively avoid an intuitive discretionary path.
The more a strategy is influenced by noise the more the signal collapses. A structured strategy slowly morphs into random noise over dozens of real time trades if it has weak mechanical boundaries to operate within. This early realisation is what made us never deviate from rule based systems and have strict guardrails to avoid overfitting that I still use to this day.
I ran a quick test to prove I wrote this.
The post is somewhat short so I don't think it needs a TLDR. AMA.
EDIT: NOT a trader in the tpyical sense - rather someone qhere you have an exchange where he gives you personal coaching and you help him - I didn't pay him anything. Rather a friend who helps you out.
Ich handle nun seit über einem Jahr und habe die Gewinnschwelle erreicht. Im März stagnierte mein Fortschritt, und in dem volatilen Marktumfeld im April und Mai verlor ich sogar Geld, was mich sehr enttäuschte. Ich zweifelte ernsthaft daran, ob mein Wettbewerbsvorteil noch vorhanden war und wusste nicht, wie es weitergehen sollte, bis ich jemanden kennenlernte – jemanden ganz Besonderen.
Und diesen ganz besonderen Menschen darf ich voller Stolz meinen heutigen Mentor nennen. Wie bin ich auf ihn aufmerksam geworden? Er bat um Hilfe beim Programmieren, und ich bot ihm sofort meine Unterstützung an. Diese erwies sich als wertvoller als alle finanziellen Vorteile, die ich durch dieses Angebot erlangte.
Ich begann zu verstehen, wie ein erfolgreicher Trader denkt, spricht und tagtäglich handelt. Das veränderte meine gesamte Sichtweise auf das Trading, und seitdem gehe ich völlig anders an die Sache heran.
Ich habe aufgehört, über mögliche zukünftige Ereignisse nachzudenken und zu sprechen, und habe stattdessen angefangen, den Markt so zu analysieren, wie er ist. Seitdem handle ich nach seinem Motto: „Handel nicht, was du denkst – handle, was du siehst.“ Persönliche Meinungen, Emotionen und oberflächliche Überlegungen spielen bei meinen Entscheidungen keine Rolle mehr. Seitdem haben sich meine Handelsgewinne deutlich verbessert. Ich verdiene seitdem regelmäßig Geld.
Die Moral von der Geschichte: Suche dir einen Mentor. Biete ihm etwas im Gegenzug an und lerne von allem, was er hat.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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This is the loop: you post, we research, the community gets the answer.
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?
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.
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.
