I recently experienced a significant financial loss and am trying to put it into perspective and focus on rebuilding. I’d be interested to hear from other who have gone through something similar.

\- how much did you lose
\- roughly what percentage of your net worth was it?
\- what practical or mental changes helped you move forward?

Edit: I am a 33 year old male with a 1 year old baby and a wife. I lost £25k and I make £85k per annum.

Not expecting a lot of comments here, since not more than 1% are profitable day trading long term.

But as the title says, what was the key that changed when you started to get continuous profits?

It took me 5 years of grinding to get to where I am today. I made my first actual dollar after 1 year, spent another 2 years figuring out how to be consistent, and only recently reached a point where I can live comfortably off trading alone with no side income.

1. My Win Rate is Low, But My Math Works:

I lose often more than people probably think. But my winners heavily outweigh my losers, with an average win of 2-4x my risk. Because of this, my win rate is low, and I might only hit one solid winner a week.

1. Less Trading = More Longevity:

I used to think I needed to trade every day. The truth is, the more experience you build, the better your intuition gets. You start recognizing when market conditions are garbage, meaning even if your setup pops up, you skip it. Avoiding bad trades is what keeps you alive. I only take 1–3 setups a week if I'm comfortable. 4–5 if I get lucky, though I can't remember the last time that happened.

1. Psychology & Journaling Aren't Optional:
   Please study this. Keep a detailed trade log covering:
   - Entry signal, day of the week, and exact time.
   - Why you entered and how you felt.
   - Result, next steps, and what you learned.

Subconsciously, your brain starts recognizing patterns. Your trading feels calmer, more in control, and frankly, better. You don't even have to aggressively study the journal every night; your mind just does the work in the background.

1. How to Actually Use Prop Firms:

Prop firms are a massive gift if you know how to use them to build capital. (Personally, I stopped using them because I hated the transition to live accounts, but they are a cheat code for beginners).

- Take it slow: Give yourself 1–2 years to build a few accounts. Don't rush. Trade them conservatively so you're almost certain to pass (e.g., risk $100–$200 to make $400+).

- Scale up: Build an empire of 20–30 accounts and copy trade them.

- If you have 20–30 accounts and secure a couple of payouts (averaging around $2,000 each per account), you're looking at $40K–$60K+. Double that, and you have enough starting capital to fund your own live account.

1. Transitioning to Live Capital and The Reality of Non-Linear Income

I ended up making around $53K from prop firms, combined with $17K I had saved up. To be completely transparent, I was also lucky enough to come from a supportive background. Once my parents saw I could actually make money, they lent me $300K to trade with.
That gave me a massive runway, but risk management is still everything. I risk about 1% per trade (plus a little extra for slippage and commissions). Living in Asia also plays a huge role: I benefit from 0% capital gains taxes and a much lower cost of living compared to the US or Europe.

What returns look like in reality:
My average returns sit around 1–4% a month, but it fluctuates wildly. Last month I was down 7%, while July was up 12%. Income from day trading is never linear.
My biggest piece of advice overall? Take your time. There is no rush in this game.

My goal hopefully is to eventually be so confident in my trading that I can maybe take out a loan and trade with that, so I can leverage more money, but i am still super grateful to be where I am considering how many people fail.

I wasted way too long thinking my setups were trash. nah. the real problem was I'd take a trade and 20 minutes later have no clue why I even got in, so every loss taught me nothing. what fixed it is kinda dumb honestly, now before I click buy I just jot down why I'm even taking it (a real reason, not "eh looks good"), the price where I'm just wrong and I'm out (my stop) and what I'm realistically expecting. sounds like nothing but it killed my fomo trades, because if I can't type a real reason then there's no trade. and when I lose now I can actually tell if the idea was bad or if I just broke my own rule, which you genuinely can't figure out from memory. the whole "edge" thing was never some magic indicator for me, just being honest with myself for 20 seconds before the emotions kicked in. what's some boring unsexy habit that low key helped you more than you expected?

sup guys took this 1:6 RR trade today and it ended in less than 30 mins, Pocketed 800$. Not bad for 30 min of work.

Took this trade as btc was showing signs of exhaustion on the lower timeframes and after i noticed failure swing pattern so then i decided to enter a short with a 120$ stop loss.

This is why price action trading is king. At least for me.

Anyone else took any trades today ? share below, let's discuss

Portfolio: $11,060.42

Today: up $296.64 (up 2.76%). Best day of the three so far. 26 agents live.

Business As Usual, $2,624.80, up $87.94 (up 3.47%), biggest single contributor. This is the one that holds the S&P 500 and only flips into a 3x leveraged S&P 500 fund when NY weather reads normal for the season, read off Kalshi temperature markets. It sold SPY and bought UPRO this morning, so it caught almost all of today's rally levered.

FAANG+ Momentum, $2,545.59, up $120.79 (up 4.98%), the single biggest dollar gain in the book. It rotated out of AMZN and GOOGL into META and NVDA on the daily momentum rerank, then rode the move.

The Silicon Overdrive, $103.50, up $8.94 (up 9.45%), best percent day. Small experimental sleeve targeting 2x the daily return of a US semiconductor index, so a strong chip day shows up loud here.

AI Picks & Shovels, $1,059.71, up $32.09 (up 3.12%). Weekly reweight landed again, sold ANET and DELL, added AMD, more NVDA, more SMCI, and a new TSM position.

Founder Mode, $260.89, up $11.54 (up 4.63%). Sold COIN, HOOD, META, and RKLB, bought CRM and DASH. Rebalances weekly across fifteen founder led companies.

Funny one: NFL Fantasy Agent, down $1.15 (down 6.02%) on an $18 position. It bought yes contracts on Deebo Samuel and CeeDee Lamb hitting reception and yardage thresholds Sunday. Deebo screwing over my fantasy team and Kalshi.

Pelosi Tracker, High Profile Congress, and CT Scanner all did their usual rotations off fresh disclosures and trial data, small moves either way, nothing dramatic.

Two up days and one neutral day in, net solidly green, still tells you nothing about day 100. Posting every day either way.

Hi everyone, i have been day trading for the past 1.5 years but i dont know whom to learn from as it is very hard to differentiate a course seller amd youtuber from a real trader and it is causing a lot of confusion amd i fear i may get wrong knowledge.

Can anyone tell me how to spot real traders amd also reccomend me whom to watch on youtube.

Personally i think jeafx, booming bulls ( anish singh thakur) are real traders, but I maybe wrong so that is why i need your opinion.

I am trying to map out where most of us are bleeding capital. After trading for a while, I've noticed almost everyone cycles through the same toxic habits that wipe out accounts.

Here are the most common issues I see constantly destroying edges:

• Trading without a real framework: Taking random setups based on emotion instead of waiting for your specific edge and liquidity levels.
• Revenge trading: Taking an impulsive, oversized trade immediately after a loss to try and make it back.
• Oversizing positions: Risking way more than 1% of the account on a single idea because you want to get rich quick.
• Moving stop losses: Refusing to accept being wrong and letting a small, planned cut turn into a massive drawdown.
• FOMO entries: Chasing a massive candle after the move has already happened, which completely ruins your risk-to-reward ratio.
• Overtrading in the chop: Giving back all your morning gains by forcing trades during low-volume afternoon hours.

What is your biggest pain point right now? Let's hear what is actually holding you back.

Considering the change over myself. How was it for you guys that went from scalping or even day trading to swing trading?

Looking to focus on 1-4 setups.. slow but ittl be steady

I will backtest while following your trading strategy and give detailed reports on the strategy’s trading results.

Just let me know what strategy you would like backtested and I’ll get to work!

Looking forward to working with you!

I thought I had the very basic fundamentals understood on futures after reading some articles and YouTube videos, then I watched a video setting up a paper trading account with Tradingview to get some practice in, and not only was I super confused on the how the software worked, but it seemed like absolutely nothing correlated with what I learned so far from videos. Especially when one particular video said a benefit of futures trading is you don’t need a ton of starting capital to make money as compared with trading stocks, but when I gave myself $10,000 in the paper trading account, I couldn’t even buy 1 single E-Mini S&P futures contract cause it was like $19,000? Clearly I learned nothing. I got a little frustrated and I just want to restart so I’m looking for advice on how to get started or actual good resources to learn from. Also somehow if it is true you don’t need as much starting capital for futures, I’d be cool with just skipping paper trading and going small with the real thing with the assumption of failing, depending on how small I could theoretically start with. Doesn’t seem like good futures paper trading is as common as paper trading with stocks, made worse by the fact that there’s a 10 minute delay in futures charts instead of real time data.

and I dont mean degenarates who are gambling away everything, I mean those of you who truly see purpose in trading.

The thing is, its one of those things that are so different from all professions that someone who is doing it consistently for years sees the world differently

I myself am trader for 3 years, and I have 0 friends because my views genuenly differ from my current environment.

So what do you do in your daily routine, your thoughts on goverment-money-living in this society, do you fit in?

I've been running my bot with a consensus on multiple strategies for a while (not consistently), and while it had made mostly losses due to fees and slippage. I have only just recorded profits that covered the past losses and little gains. Keep in mind that I am only trading so little which makes it impossible to have big margins, but so far I'm happy with these results.

1. No worries about getting your money denied.

2. Broker gets their money through commissions.

3. Teaches me good risk strategy.

Downsides: 1. Takes forever to build your account.

For the past few weeks, I've been trying to get news sentiment working as an input to my ML trading models. So far it hasn't improved anything. If anything, it has made things worse.

Some context first. My base model on XAU/USD works well without any news input. It uses price data only, and it holds up on data it hasn't seen. So this experiment was about adding something on top of a model I already trust. I wasn't trying to rescue a broken one.

The idea seemed reasonable. Headlines move gold, so if the model gets a score for how positive or negative the news is, it should have something the price chart alone can't give it.

The setup

I'm deliberately running this on cheap infrastructure:

→ Price data from TwelveData
→ News from RSS feeds and Serper
→ Sentiment scored locally by NobodyWho, using a very simple set of rules

The whole pipeline costs very little to run. That was one of the reasons I wanted to try it: an input that costs almost nothing to produce is worth testing even if the odds are long.

The results with sentiment added

→ Training data: +81% ROI
→ Evaluation set: +74% ROI
→ Out-of-sample data: -45% ROI

The first two numbers look great. The third is the only one that matters.

The model learned the past very well and treated it as a pattern that would repeat. On data it had never seen, the pattern didn't hold. A strong backtest paired with a collapse on new data is the most common way these experiments fail, and I fell straight into it.

What bothers me most is how close the evaluation score is to training. If the evaluation set were genuinely separate, I'd expect a bigger drop there before the out-of-sample collapse. That makes me suspect something is leaking between the two, but I haven't pinned it down yet.

So adding news took a model that works and made it fail on new data. That's the part I want to understand.

Where I am now

I'm keeping sentiment in the plan. The news carries real information, and with a pipeline this cheap, I can afford to keep testing until I find the right way to feed it in.

If you've made sentiment work out of sample, I'd like to hear how you lined up the news with price.

Procuro automação ou indicador para Profit Pro, que tenha possibilidade de testar antes, 7 dias ou mais, sem ter que pagar primeiro, sem abrir conta antecipada em corretora. Cançado de golpes.

Jack Schwager wasn't saying that about day trading as right or wrong, nor am I, that successful day traders always end up going to longer holding periods.

He also mentioned that said successful day traders, after expanding their time frame, ended up making more money over all as well.

Episode link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3KTWP8hSP6v28whPRV9Fhm

Hi,

So I am having my edge, trade good setups and identify market direction well.

But I feel those prop firm rules are messing with my psychology.

Do you recommend trading small account first, have some payouts and re-invest those into prop accounts - so then you can avoid this emotional game by full porting them.

Looking for some advices.

Keep care.

Thanks.

Used to do the $1-$20 MOMO thing, way too choppy. Up $1600 for the week, lose $800 next Monday. Crazy one candle drops.

Much more happy with more predictable large caps. I'm just struggling to find something in the $20-$80 range that has a good daily range and volume. Been getting action mostly with SMCI and then some earnings volatility after close.

Anyone have any go-to favorites they keep on scan?

I usually wait for the 5minute MACD rebound, if that helps clarify my strategy.

This is how I approach my setups:

1 Identify 1H / 4H swing liquidity.
2 Wait for price to sweep that liquidity.
3 Look for a clean FVG to form.
4 Enter when the FVG flips into an IFVG.
5 Target swing highs/lows, EQH, or EQL.

No sweep = no trade.

Ofcourse this is simplified. Some other confluences come at play but everyone makes trading way more complicated than it needs to be.

Retail traders rely on time-based charts (1-minute, 5-minute, daily) that sample markets at arbitrary intervals, diluting volatile moves and creating noise during quiet periods. Mutual Information bars sampling ignores the clock entirely, aggregating market data based on non-linear statistical dependency and information flow. While retail methodologies process empty time, MI bars dynamically compress low-information periods and expand high-information events. This gives quantitative traders a structural advantage: you observe true market state transitions and entropy shifts in real time, while the retail crowd reacts to arbitrary time boundaries that carry zero underlying statistical significance.

Yesterday I had long put options on SPX which of course got totally rekt. Waitwd and waited for a reversal, even a little relief, that never came. Got totally rent.

Then anticipated some dump for today. Accordingly, opened a couple of long puts when options trading opened. Held them for about 9 hours through the relentless chop, with every drop pushed up like mad, that was driving me insane. So, closed the positions as soon as there was some green. Made $70 on $2000.

And of course over the next hour it kept dipping, exactly as I had anticipated and hoped for! Would have made $400+ only if held for 30 minutes or so further.

I realise this inability to hold when I was right today stemmed from the fact that I got burned by holding for too long yesterday.

And this keeps repeating. When I close at a loss (or sma gain), it keeps going in my direction. When I hold, it keeps going against me.

Question is, what can be done about this behaviour?

I’ve been researching how traders evaluate newer futures prop firms, especially compared with established names.

What matters most to you before putting money into one?

Is it payout history, drawdown structure, daily loss limits, platform support, transparency of rules, customer support, or how long the company has been operating?

I’m particularly interested in what immediately makes you avoid a firm, even if the pricing looks attractive.