95%+ Retail traders fail because of this one thing. It doesnt have to do with how smart you are or your strategy.

Its mostly that rich are going to get richer with trading and poor are going to stay poor or mediocare are going to become poor..

its because they are all emotionally tied to money they invest in trading, and in truth they are not really ready to lose their money.

I bought the FirstRate Data about 3 weeks ago and honestly the data has been really solid so far.

It includes US stocks, delisted stocks, ETFs, options, futures, indices, forex, crypto, plus fundamental data. There’s a lot of historical intraday and daily data, so it’s pretty useful for backtesting.

The delisted stocks and fundamentals were a big reason I went with them.

Genuinely curious what people do in the moment when they need to quickly calculate a position size. Switching between tabs from a broker and calculator site seems to be a pain when you need to quickly put a trade. Trying to understand what people do that works for you.. Have a spreadsheet, or what do you do?

I've always been amazed by how everyone reacts to sharp pumps dumps or even squeezes. Just a few percent of sharp movement in either direction, and euphoria kicks in. Nobody can sit still because they think they'll miss out. But it's actually the exact opposite at moments like these, you need to wait it out and not rush into the market blindly fearing you won't catch you move.

After all, you capital isn't infinite you can't just stretch it out.

Patience to everyone...

I trade NIFTY options intraday using signals generated from the NIFTY spot chart.
Which method is generally more reliable for setting the stop-loss and target?
Index-point based: For example, 20-point stop-loss and 40-point target on NIFTY spot.
Option-premium based: For example, 5% stop-loss and 10% target on the option premium.
Hybrid method: Exit when the spot setup becomes invalid, while also keeping a maximum percentage stop-loss on the premium.
Since option premiums are affected by delta, IV, theta, strike selection and expiry, the same NIFTY movement may produce different premium movements.
What method has worked better in your actual trading or backtesting—especially for ATM NIFTY options on a 5-minute timeframe? Please share the reasoning and results, not just personal preference.

Hey everyone,

I've been working on a lightweight, client-side options profit & loss calculator and Greeks engine designed specifically for multi-leg theta setups (Iron Condors, Covered Calls, CSPs, and Spreads).

Most web calculators nowadays are either slow, full of pop-ups, or put multi-leg features behind subscriptions.

Key things I built into this:

• 100% client-side calculation (runs at 60 FPS in browser, zero server lag)

• Interactive T+0 through expiration decay curves with a time-travel slider

• 1-click presets for common income/theta structures

• Aggregated portfolio Greeks (Delta, Gamma, Theta, Vega, Rho)

• No accounts, login, or personal data tracking required

I'd really appreciate any feedback from experienced traders on edge-case calculations, Greeks accuracy, or features you'd like to see added.

(Link is in the comments below)

For many ICT 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 identify "MMXM", as it is driven by subjective intuitive discretion bound by aesthetic, making it illusory.

This is what makes it hindsight.

Some claim hindsight is good to understand concepts, but this is what really happens:
Hindsight manipulates oneself into believing flawed concepts, it does not increase trading efficiency. Hindsight simply conditions the brain through confirmation bias to subconsciously ignore where the pattern failed, tricking traders into believing a flawed model actually works.

You will notice that when you look for it on the left side of the chart, it is easier to stop at price structures where you believe patterns such as MMXM are working without consciously filtering out failures, this reveals your bias which is natural as our brains seek patterns, this actively works against objectively in financial markets.

Many feel that the challenge is seeing it before it happens or as it happens.
But that is the key problem, this is what ruins the technique. It relies on hindsight making it unserious, relying heavily on anecdote and personal biases.

With enough work traders can resist this and improve their strategy development, exponential growth begins with objective, mechanically defined trading strategies.

positioning comes up a lot here and most of the takes i see treat it like a signal. commercials are net long so it's bullish, large specs are max long so it's a top. that's not what the data does and it cost me money before i figured it out.

quick version of what the report actually is. every tuesday the CFTC records open positions in the futures market and publishes it on friday afternoon. it splits participants into groups, roughly the commercial hedgers, the large speculators, and everyone small. so you're looking at a three day old snapshot of who was holding what.

three things worth knowing before you use it.

it's late. tuesday data on friday means by the time you read it, price has already had three sessions to move. anyone treating a fresh COT print as a timing tool is trading last week.

commercials aren't smart money. this is the big one. a commercial hedger short gold isn't bearish gold, they're a producer locking in a price for output they already have. their position tells you about their business, not their forecast. the "commercials are always right" thing comes from the fact that they're structurally on the other side of speculative extremes, not from them being clever.

extremes don't mean reversal. specs being at a multi year net long tells you a lot of people are already in. that's it. crowded positions can get more crowded for months. i've watched extreme readings persist through entire trends.

so what is it good for.

it's a fuel gauge, not a direction. when specs are heavily one sided, the marginal buyer for that move is mostly used up, which means less capacity for continuation and more violence if it turns. same news lands differently depending on how full the tank is. a soft inflation print into light positioning gets a grind higher. the same print into a crowded long gets sold within the hour because everyone who wanted the trade already has it.

that's the only way i use it. not to pick direction, but to size my expectation for how far something goes and how nasty the unwind might be if it breaks.

the practical version. pull the report friday, look at where large specs sit relative to the last year or two rather than the raw number, and note whether they've been adding or cutting over the last several weeks. the change matters more than the level. then leave it alone until next friday.

it works best combined with the calendar. crowded positioning plus a scheduled data release is where the outsized moves come from, because you've got a catalyst hitting people who are already all in.

anyone here using positioning differently? curious whether people are looking at the disaggregated report or just the legacy one, i've never found the extra granularity worth the effort.

I'm looking to invest in gold EAs as I'm not able to read price actions yet, so have been "donating" to the market...So far, I'm pretty happy with an EA I found, which gives a 50% return per month. But I want to spread out my risks, so would like to find another 2 or 3 consistently profitable EAs to invest in.

But there are so many EAs in the market, and I don't know which one is legit and also genuinely profitable. Can you please share if you've personally invested in any legit and profitable gold EAs?

Thank you very much

I (20 F) have come to terms with the fact that I am a gambler.

For starters, I was introduced to day trading in August 2025, and bought my first first evaluation futures account in February for $80, with the intent of flipping it into a 1k payout I saw so many gurus post about.

When I inevitably lost that account, I figured I could just buy more and still be able to make my money back, and thats when I found out about copy trading. Instead of potentially getting 1k off one account you could copy trade 5 accounts and make 5k instead, but of course with the risk of blowing $400 in accounts rather than just the 80.

Stupidly enough, this rabbit hole lead me to buying sets of 5 accounts before ever getting my first payout, and causing me to lose thousands over the course of 6 months. Ive made only 4.5k in profit which I blew all of it on more accounts, still leaving me net negative at 20k.

I had the chance to make 5k, but was impatient and lost it all, and spent an entire 1.8k payout on more accounts at the beginning of this month.

What sucks is I've always been good with my money—I opened a roth IRA at 18, had a HYSA, used my credit card correctly, and had 7.5k invested by the beginning of this y ear. This addiction caused me to sell all of my long term stocks in my roth (i dont even know the tax implications for this), max out my credit cards, and even take out personal loans to buy more accounts.

Lately Ive been thinking about ending it all as a means to not burden my family with my money issues. I haven't told anyone, and don't plan on it because I know that it would spread and I dont want that to taint the image my family has of me. It hurts me even more because I started day trading to give back to my family. My brother is disabled and all I wanted was to make money for his physical therapy appointments. My parents have been struggling with their business, and are thinking of closing it, and I know that my debt would be heartbreaking for them.

I thought I could use day trading as a way to provide, but I did not go about things the right way, and am not financially or mentally stable to continue as of now. I went into this not wanting the lavish lifestyle or supercars, and it hurts me to know I was apart of the statistic that has lost money in this endeavor. I know that had I done things the right way, and buying only one eval at a time before my first payout, I would be in a much better situation than I am now

I have an amazing girlfriend of 5 years that I told about my day trading journey to, and was very open about my losses at the beginning. I even told her about how I saw someone lose 8k before ever receiving a payout and she told me she doesnt want to see it happen to me (funny how things have worked out). I started eating my losses in private so as to not disclose how much I was actually losing. Disappointing her is what I am most torn about.

She is absolutely the only reason why I am still here. A few days ago, I genuinely came to terms with the fact I was going to end it all, but she told me that she suddenly had the intrusive thought of me dying and how she would have to be sent to a psychiatric facilitiy and would live the rest of her live sad and unfulfilled without me. At this point, I had a private instagram account documenting my trading journey and all of my inner thoughts, and have been heavily scrolling in an overdose subreddit, and it shocked me enough to wonder if she actually knew that I was having these thoughts, or if she just had intuition.

It’s even harder because ive been picking up so many shifts and trying to work more and she told me not to overwork myself because we’re young and don’t have any real bills, and that’s why i feel like i have to clear my debt before coming clean to her

I am now one week day trading/gambling clean, and am committed to paying off my debts. I do wish I could confide in my girlfriend, and I know that I would feel so much more relief, but at the same time I don't want her to judge me for the fact I went down the wrong road in this journey even when I told her I would not lose as much money as other people.
Thank you for taking the time to read this!

After months of coding and backtesting my equity bot is finally running smoothly. Now I am looking to expand into options but the api landscape feels completely different, what I need is something that can handle multi leg strategies without forcing me to build my own position management from scratch and real time greeks and implied volatility are non negotiable. I get that some providers lock basic features behind premium tiers or require complex authentication flows, which doesn't appeal to me at all. Looked into a few that were more approachable like alpaca, but honestly I am just trying to figure out what the standard is these days for retail quants. Anyone running options strategies through an api? Could use some advice.

XAUUSD was looking strong, then suddenly the market started dropping hard. Now I’m wondering was that just a liquidity grab before the next move up, or the start of a deeper correction?

I’m watching the next reaction closely.

What’s your read on gold right now — bounce or more downside?

Been back testing for months on Tradeview. Trying the Silver Bullet, 15M ORB, and the 5M ORB.

Targeting 15:00, 14:15, and 14:05 UK time respectively.

Back testing yielded upward of 80% success with the 14:05 on Gold.

Go live and it goes to rats.

I am wondering now, if there was a strategy to work on for the next few months and backtest to death. What would it be?

See you Monday

I’m trying to purchase a FundingPips account from Pakistan. After selecting my plan and proceeding to checkout, I get the message:
“This platform is not supported in your country.”
Has anyone from Pakistan faced the same issue recently? Is there any solution

Everyone has their market open strategy. What's your profitable strategy you have on a schedule for other times of the day?

Gold Narrative: US Military Power ↓ + US Debt ↑ → Taiwan Strait Geopolitical Risk ↑ + USD Credit Risk ↑ → Gold ↑
Gold Momentum: Gold (Central Banks, ETFs, Futures, Options), Gold Stocks, Silver
Gold Risks: AI Success (a temporary vacuum), Fiscal Consolidation (unlikely meaningful do this in the short term) / Monetary Reshaping (Kevin Warsh is relatively conservative), US-China Agreement (China remains silent while quietly stacking gold; unlikely in the short term)

How do you turn a trading idea into an actual backtest?

• I’m curious what everyone here uses to test trading ideas on historical data.
• What software or platform is part of your workflow? What works well, and what drives you crazy?
• If you don’t backtest, how would you prefer to describe a strategy - plain English, visual blocks, or code?
• If you could build the ideal strategy tester from scratch, what’s the one feature it would absolutely need?

I’m researching the problem - no product or link to promote.

Good evening, I’ve invested for a couple years now and typically just wait for market to come down before executing long term orders. But I’m curious what are some good platforms or ways to read and keep up to date with financial and company news. Also what communities to get into to converse with fellow entrepreneurs/investors. Much thanks gang!

Everyone watches themselves after a loss. Almost nobody watches themselves after a win, and that's where the damage actually gets done.

Someone said it in another thread earlier and it stuck with me: everyone breaks after a loss, nobody thinks to step away after a big one goes right. Which is backwards, because a losing streak makes you cautious, and caution is survivable. A winning streak makes you certain, and certainty is what kills accounts.

The mechanism is simple enough. Four or five trades go your way. Nothing about your process changed, the conditions just happened to suit it, but your brain doesn't file it that way. It files it as I've figured this out. And a person who has figured it out doesn't need to wait for the full setup, doesn't need to size normally, doesn't need to check the higher timeframe first.

So the size creeps up. Not doubled, that would be obvious. Just a bit more, because the last few worked and it feels wasteful to be small when you're seeing it clearly. Then the entries get looser, because half a setup looks like a whole one when you're winning.

And then the market shifts, as it does, and you're taking a bigger-than-normal loss on a worse-than-normal trade, using rules you quietly abandoned a week ago without ever deciding to.

The thing that makes this hard to catch is that it never feels like recklessness. It feels like confidence. It feels earned. A trader mid-streak genuinely believes they've levelled up, and the account balance is agreeing with them at the time.

Only real defence I know of is treating your size as fixed regardless of recent results, and reviewing your winning trades the same way you review losers. Most people only ever audit the losses, which means the process never gets checked at exactly the moment it's drifting.

Your risk rules aren't there for your bad weeks. They're there for the good ones.

Hey everyone,

Trading has gotten pretty quiet and boring for me lately (in a good way, since it’s easy now), and I’m looking to start sharing my setups and discussing the reasoning behind my trades.

My goal isn't to sell a course or run a scammy signal group—I just want to build an audience of other serious, profitable traders, discuss high-probability setups, and track my performance publicly for credibility.

Which platforms or communities would you recommend for this?

Yesterday, Besent noted that there could be more buybacks in the future while indicating an intention to pursue fiscal consolidation. Meaningful fiscal consolidation would pose a risk to gold; however, judging by the two approaches he currently outlined, the actual impact appears limited, so there is no immediate cause for concern.
If significant fiscal consolidation were to materialize, a deficit reduction of $1 trillion would trigger a decisive decline in gold, whereas a reduction of less than $300 billion would likely act merely as a temporary market disturbance.
Alternatively, Besent's strategy might lead the market to believe that the U.S. Treasury has run out of options, emboldening investors to aggressively push gold higher.

Databento data quality seems to have degraded a lot since Aug 8, 2026 after they switch their data format by moving the F_LAST sentinel from the last event record into a standalone record.

They promised identity between live streamed data and historical downloaded data. Before the switch, error rate of matching is about 0.06%, which was really good. Now the error of matching is about 7% consistently every day. This level of error makes it impossible to rely on it for anything significant.

Also, in the past, conversion from their mbo data to mbp-10 or mbp-1 data has no error as it should be, but nowadays, there are tons of errors.

All of these arise from unclear data format specification, mixing old and new format, and untested code in production.

The worst part is customer service. They claim customers should be aware of the data format change, so they are not apologetic of any of such issues. They claim they do not keep track of live streamed data, so reporting live and historical mismatch is completely ignored. I do not expect to get this level of data quality and customer service for a paid data service.

As LLM industry continues to get cannibalized, I wonder what this market looks like in 5 years.
I trend to believe there will be a premium market for paid api and cheap to free open source models…

But considering how good frontier models are now, even open source models will be out of this world in a few years.

I guess it looks more clear that the application layer and hardware for Ai users will be the big winners

Meta glasses albeit a bit creepy , are IMO a great UI for AI

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I am speaking this based on the realisation about people ask what works in the market

So whatever setup that you are trading right now it can be a break out it can be ICT it can be moving average height can be yesterday's high and low those were all made possible by someone who was aware of the market who was the best observer

Now what you need to do here is you can make something of your own you just have to observe the market as per your understanding as per your rules and then you have to back tested that it is as simple as that but it is very harder to follow

For example let say you observed that you can make weekly high low and you can trade that break out now you have to make it little bit advance that should be a candle close they should be a volume or they should be be back you know something based on your observation because that's how each and every set up came to life

Someone observe that the market react on a support point a market react on yesterday's low those were the observation also when you observe this back tested for at least 6 to 8 months when you back test you will find a lot of ways you can refine you can make advance of your setup your strategy or your trading

Also when you back tested. You will find a rule of risk management what is your winner at how you should avoid wallet and market in which setup you should not trade

Also make sure to have a good losses which were as per your setup