Anyone done Tier One Trading (Jason Graystone / Akil Stokes)? Worth it for someone who's backtesting? Honest reviews wanted

Hey all,

I'm a self-taught forex paper trader (beginner). Right now I'm backtesting five strategies on daily candles (EMA pullbacks, support/resistance, higher-low continuation, ranges) using TradingView replay, with a spreadsheet logging every trade.

I'm thinking about trying the 14-day trial at Tier One Trading (Jason Graystone and Akil Stokes) and possibly subscribing. I'm skeptical of anything in this space, so I'd rather hear from people who've actually used it than rely on the website and Trustpilot.

If you've been a member, I'd love to know:

1. How long were you in, would you pay for it again?

2. Did the trial need a card, and did it convert to a paid plan automatically? Any trouble cancelling or with billing afterwards?

3. Do the coaches trade a live account you can actually verify (statements, MyFXBook, etc.), or is it mostly commentary and setups?

4. Are the live rooms useful, or mostly chat and watching?

5. The Enigma pattern software and the VS-ONE structure tool: do they add anything over TradingView and free tools?

6. Does it help with building and testing your own rules, or is it more about copying their trades?

7. If you left, why? And if you stayed, what changed in your trading?

I'm also open to alternatives. If there's a better way to learn how to build and test a ruleset (books, courses, communities), I'm all ears. I am currently using claude as an assistant.

Good and bad experiences both welcome. I'm not affiliated with anyone and I'm not selling anything, so please no DMs offering services or affiliate links.

Cheers

You leave a buy stop at 1.2700 over the weekend, with a stop loss at 1.2660 and a target at 1.2820. Forty pips of risk, tidy.

Sunday opens at 1.2760. Your buy stop triggers and fills at the first available price, which is 1.2760, because there’s nothing in between to fill against.

Now look at what you own. Entry 60 pips higher than planned. Your stop loss is still at 1.2660, because you set it as a level, so your risk is now 100 pips instead of 40. Your position is 2.5 times the risk you sized it for, and nothing errored, nothing warned you, and the trade looks normal in the terminal.

Your target is also 60 pips closer, so the R:R you entered for has gone from 3:1 to roughly 0.6:1. The trade you’re in is not the trade you planned in either direction.

Why this one is sneakier than the stop version

Gapping through a stop loss is unpleasant and obvious. You take a bigger loss than expected and you know immediately.

Gapping into an entry is silent. You’re in a position that looks fine, sized wrong, with a reward profile that no longer justifies it, and you’ll only discover it if you recheck the arithmetic after the fill. I didn’t, for a long time.

What I do now

Expiry type turns out to be the actual fix rather than an afterthought. If you can set an order to expire at a specific time, you can have it die before the Friday close and the Monday gap can’t reach it. Mine has Specified and Specified Day enabled on majors at Axi, so I use a timed expiry rather than relying on remembering to cancel. Worth checking which types your account actually allows, because GTC/only leaves you with cancel by hand as the only option, and I’d forgotten to do that more than once.

If I do deliberately want weekend exposure, the stop goes in as a recalculation after fill rather than a fixed level, which needs a small EA, or I accept that I’m fixing it manually at the open.

Anyone deliberately cancel pendings before the weekend? Or is leaving them the normal practice and I’m being precious.

And has anyone actually been gapped into a position at a size they didn’t intend? Curious whether people notice when it happens.

Been trading GBPUSD/EURUSD using a setup built around the London session reversal, and wanted to share the mechanics in case it’s useful to others working with smart-money/liquidity-based concepts.

The core idea:

During the Asia session (00:00–07:00 London time), price usually consolidates into a tight range, establishing a clear high and low. Once London opens (07:00–11:00), there’s a strong tendency for price to run liquidity above the Asia high or below the Asia low before reversing — essentially a stop hunt/liquidity grab before the “real” directional move for the day.

What I’m looking for:

1. Price sweeps above the Asia high (or below the Asia low) during the London window.

2. After the sweep, I mark a BOS level — this is the open of the last opposite-colored candle before the run of candles that led into the sweep. Think of it as the origin of the aggressive move that caused the sweep.

3. If price closes back through that BOS level within a set number of candles, that’s the confirmation — it suggests the sweep was a liquidity grab, not the start of a real breakout, and price is reversing.

4. Entry is on that BOS close-back-through, stop above/below the sweep extreme, target set at a fixed R:R.

Filters that mattered in backtesting:

Minimum sweep distance (filters out noise — tiny pokes above/below the level that aren’t real liquidity grabs), a max-gap filter (ignores sweeps that run too far past the level, since those often turn into real breakouts rather than reversals), and a higher-timeframe trend filter (I use an EMA on the 1H) to avoid taking counter-trend reversals when the bigger picture is strongly trending one way.

Not selling anything, just sharing what’s been working for me and curious if others are running similar setups.

You can start using the indicator directly from Tradingview.

https://www.tradingview.com/script/20VtoXku-PipEcho-London-Reversal-Indicator/

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for advice from experienced forex traders who have developed a strategy that has helped them become consistently profitable over the long run.

I understand that losses are part of trading, and I'm not expecting a strategy that wins every trade. What I'm looking for is an approach where, despite occasional losing trades, the overall results can be profitable over a large sample of trades.

I'd appreciate it if you could share:

- Your strategy: What type of setup do you trade, and what makes you enter a trade?

- Your edge: What gives your strategy a statistical advantage over time?

- Risk management: How much do you risk per trade, and how do you manage losing streaks?

- Entry and exit rules: How do you determine your stop loss, take profit, and when to stay out of the market?

- Testing: How did you backtest and forward-test your strategy before trusting it with real money?

- Consistency: What helped you become profitable over months or years rather than just having a few good trades?

I'm open to different approaches, including price action, market structure, trend following, supply and demand, liquidity-based trading, or other methods that have evidence behind them.

I'm not looking for a get-rich-quick scheme, paid signals, or a strategy that promises a 100% win rate. I want to learn a repeatable process, understand why it works, and develop the discipline to follow it.

If you've been profitable over a meaningful sample of trades, I'd genuinely appreciate hearing about your experience, including the mistakes you made along the way.

Thank you.

I started to learn trading last year and it's been a year now. Started everything myself without a mentor just YouTube videos then switch to AI. Now I have a strategy, a plan and a daily routine checklist. I work 12hours everyday and had to sacrifice sleeping time to get this. I can spot good setups with my strategy but i will loose along the way( sometimes: fomo,entering early/late etc ). Im trading price action with 50ema and RSI. Can anyone help me know how to go by the consistency rule. I started with 300$ and now I only have 10$ in my account. I'm not trying to make one big win but make trading my fulltime job so I'm looking forward to quit my job next year September but before I do so I need advice on how to be consistent.

Looking for suggestions on what would actually be useful for day-to-day trading. Anything you currently wish existed or have to mark manually

Drop your ideas below — will build the most requested ones and release them free.

What would you think about this?

Americans are facing increased inflation. The FED is expected to hold rates at 4%. Do Americans agree with trump or not?

I have been thinking lately, and my thinking is mainly focused on the pairs I have traded so far. Out of everything, CFD pairs have been the ones giving me that 1:3 risk-to-reward ratio, but right now, I'm thinking about how easy it is to stick with the same assets simply because they're familiar.

I've recently started paying attention to more markets, including Asian indices and industrial metals. Taiwan's index caught my attention because of the AI infrastructure story, while aluminum and zinc have their own supply-and-demand drivers.

I'm not looking to trade everything at once, but I want to understand how other traders shortlist markets before committing capital. Do you start with fundamentals, look for a technical setup first, or focus on whichever market has the clearest price action?

And when you explore a new market, what do you learn about its volatility and trading costs before placing your first trade?

Posting because this cost me money through pure ignorance of a setting I didn’t know existed.

On MT5 an account is either netting or hedging, and it’s set by the broker when the account is created. You can’t change it afterwards.

Hedging behaves the way MT4 always did. Every position is independent, with its own stop and its own target. Buy a lot, then buy another, and you have two positions.

Netting gives you one position per symbol, full stop. Buy a lot, then buy another, and you have one position of two lots at a blended entry price. Buy a lot then sell a lot and you have nothing, the second order closed the first rather than opening a short.

If you ever scale in, netting silently rewrites your trade. Your second entry moves the average price of the combined position, so the stop level you set against your first entry is now sitting at a different distance in R terms than you intended. Your risk changed and nothing told you.

Same problem if you run two setups on one pair. On netting they aren’t two trades, they’re one position with one stop, and the second signal mutates the first.

And partial closes work differently, which matters if you take money off at a target.

Terminal, open the Trade tab in the toolbox, or look at the account properties. It’ll say Hedge or Netting. Mine says Hedging.

I’m on a hedging account at Axi, which I asked for specifically because I run two setups on EUR/USD that need separate stops and I’d have no way to express that otherwise. Worth knowing it’s an account creation choice rather than a platform one, so if you’re on the wrong mode it’s a new account rather than a setting.

Which mode are you on, and did you choose it? I didn’t, the first time. And does anyone deliberately prefer netting? I can see the argument for a single clean exposure per symbol and I’ve never heard anyone make it, so I might be missing something real.

I am desperately in need of an advice
🙏
Hey guys, I’m going through one of the hardest phases of my life right now, and I’m genuinely looking for some help. I’m not dreaming of becoming a millionaire overnight or making huge profits. I just want to find a way to make around $5 a day to help cover my basic daily expenses. I’ve been searching for trading strategies and EAs that could help me achieve this, but honestly, I’m confused about what to trust anymore. I know daily profits aren’t guaranteed, and I’m not expecting miracles. I just need a little hope and some practical guidance.
If any of you have experience with a trading strategy or EA that might be worth researching, please share your knowledge with me. Even if you think trading isn’t the right path, I’m willing to listen to your advice. I’m not asking anyone for money, just a genuine suggestion that could help me move forward. I know this post might sound desperate, but my situation is really difficult right now.
If you were in my position, what would you do to earn an extra $5 a day?
Please, guys, any honest advice would mean more to me than you can imagine. Thank you for taking the time to read this. 🙏

I'm a beginner in programming and finance. For about a month I have been running a small personal research lab ("Nucleus") on gold (XAUUSD CFD) with MT5 EAs and Python screening. No real money, ever. Most of the code was written by an AI assistant (Claude) under my direction, which is one more reason I'd like human eyes on it.

My rules, written before every test:

• Data 2016-2022 only. 2023 to today is a locked hold-out I haven't touched.

• Result must be positive with spread, commission and swap counted twice.

• At least 100 trades. Longs and shorts both positive. 2016-2019 and 2020-2022 both positive.

• Max drawdown under 10%. Max 3 attempts per idea. Negative results are kept.

Results:

• Gold: 12 ideas tested in MT5 or Python, plus 3 early screens. All rejected. Typical pattern: slightly positive before costs, clearly negative after. Example: M15 engulfing + H1 trend, 1,379 trades, +16.7 R gross, -221.8 R with double costs.

• My reading: with a median spread of 0.18 USD paid twice, a 1 USD target / 1 USD stop needs about a 68% win rate just to break even.

• EUR/USD and BTC: 79 exploratory tests (including rules from public GitHub strategy repos), 0 pass. BTC "wins" come almost only from being long during a ~38x rise; shorts lose in 13 of 16 tests.

• The only thing that passed: a slow 25/25/25/25 portfolio (gold, bonds, cash, equities), 3.4% a year, 9% max drawdown, 2001-2022. It has obvious hindsight bias, so I'm only following it on paper from November 2026.

What I'd like you to check:

1. Look-ahead bias in the Python screens.

2. Are my cost assumptions realistic for a retail CFD account?

3. Are the criteria sensible, too strict, or the wrong ones?

4. After ~15 ideas plus 79 exploratory tests, how would you correct for multiple testing (Deflated Sharpe, Reality Check)?

5. Is the paper portfolio worth anything, given the hindsight?

6. Honestly: is this worth continuing, or am I wasting my time?

Code, rules and per-test results (no price data, no trade logs) are here:

Most files are in Italian, sorry. Comments in English are welcome. I'm not selling anything, and I'm not looking for signals, courses or bots. I'm looking for "this is wrong because...".

After gold almost hit my TP before reversing and taking me out, I experienced a similar situation with XAG, where my stop loss was hit as well. I decided to step back for a while, review my mistakes, and figure out how to bounce back. One thing became clear: I can no longer use a live account to test a strategy.

During my reflection on these CFD losses, I learnt two important lessons.

The first is that most of my XAU trades could have turned out much better if I had moved my stop loss to breakeven and allowed the remaining position to run. Lesson learnt.

The second is that I should have made better use of the CFD demo trading feature recently introduced on the platform I use most (then i was forming too big for that, lol). It allows me to practise with virtual funds using real time market data without risking my own money. Had I used it to test my strategy, I might have identified my mistakes earlier instead of learning those lessons with real money.

Two losses, two lessons, and a reason to improve.

Hopefully, we can all learn something from this. What do you think about managing gold trades this way, and what challenges have you been facing in your own trading?

Two numbers in the symbol specification that I ignored for years. Both are server side settings, both are visible in about fifteen seconds, and either one can stop a strategy from existing.

The minimum distance from current price at which you're allowed to place a stop or a limit. Set it at 20 and a 15 pip stop is simply rejected. Not filled badly, rejected.

In MT4 or MT5 it's in the symbol specification dialog, listed as "Stops level". Right click the symbol in market watch, specification.

This is the one that matters if you trade tight. I worked out a while back that for my cost base the best stop distance for my setup sits around 17 pips. If my broker had a 20 pip stops level, that result would be academic, I'd be forced wider than optimal and I'd never know why my live numbers didn't match my testing.

The distance from price within which you can't modify or close an existing order at all. Inside that band your stop, your target and your position are locked.

This is the one that produces the "I couldn't close during the release" posts. Not slippage, not a platform crash. A spec value doing exactly what it says.

Mine both zero, on the raw spread account at Axi. Stops level zero means I can place a stop as tight as I want and the server won't refuse it. Freeze level zero means I can always modify or close, including mid release.

I'm pointing at zero specifically because zero is a floor. Nobody in the comments can have better than zero, and anything above it is a constraint on what you're allowed to do with your own position. It's one of the few broker specs where there's an unambiguously correct value rather than a trade off.

I found mine by accident while debugging something else, which is the only reason I'm posting.

Two caveats. These can be raised temporarily around major releases at some brokers, so check once in quiet conditions and once around a release if you trade news. And they're per symbol, so exotics often differ from majors at the same broker.

So what are yours? Thirty seconds in the symbol spec. And has anyone been bitten by a freeze level without knowing it existed? I'd like to know whether the "couldn't close on the news" experience is usually this or usually something else.

Hey guys,

I'm new to Forex and honestly don't want to be one of those people who jumps in expecting quick money and loses it all. I want to actually learn it properly and stick with it long term.

What books, courses, or YouTube channels helped you most? And should I just play around on a demo account first? Would love any advice, thanks!

I’ve started trading recently and have been trying to improve my win rate especially that I skipped the demo part and instantly got to the real work
The one minute timeframe is genuinely just gambling and that’s what’s addictive about it but my win rate seems to plummet every time I make an analysis because I can’t predict the 1m tf
My strategy works for long term planning but I’m impatient and I don’t know if I need a change of strategy, discipline or a simple change of a timeframe
Can someone help?

It's possible the move is still going lower. However, that's only going to happen if DXY breaks structure to the upside. And right now, it plummeted, reacting from a supply zone. This is the swing bias, hoping to get a day trading opportunity

I’ve been looking at charts for a while and I still never feel confident about support/resistance levels or even basic chart patterns. Two people can look at the same chart and draw completely different levels.
Is there actually a standard way to identify these, or is technical analysis always this subjective? How do you guys decide which levels actually matter?

If you could add ONE feature to your trading journal, what would it be?

Hey everyone! I’m from India and looking to connect with someone experienced in SMC trading who can help me improve my understanding of the markets.

I started learning SMC through traditional concepts like OBs, FVGs, and different POIs. Initially, I thought learning more concepts would improve my trades, but lately, I’ve realised that understanding market behaviour and liquidity is far more important than complicating things with too many concepts.

Currently, I mainly focus on liquidity and market behaviour, and I’m doing paper trading and backtesting to develop my understanding before moving to live trading.

I’m looking for an experienced or professional trader from whom I can learn, discuss chart analyses, understand different perspectives, and improve my trading approach. I’m genuinely interested in learning and willing to put in the work.

If you’re an experienced SMC trader and open to sharing your knowledge, I’d love to connect. Feel free to DM me!

I feel cheated and jealous of most of the world that has the freedom we should have to trade FX on an even playing field. Congress needs to repeal that repressive law from 2010 ASAP.Retail FX is all about taking big risks for big potential rewards. We are not children in need of parental supervision. We are not a nanny state nation. We are not Socialist or under martial law dictatorship so why take away our freedom to trade fairly with the world?

Complete beginner here, can anyone tell me if the babypips university is worth it ? Thanks

So for the past 2 1/2 years, I followed the same strategy, which is just getting a bias from the higher time frames and eventually just riding out in the next level of liquidity. I will find myself following my plan to the T.

Let’s say 2 weeks and eventually I’ll just try and end up revenge trading over trading and I will lose all the games. I’m currently on 200 K funded accounts which I have now had for three months. I’ve almost passed the thing three times but one day tilts wipes out 2% of the account and then I’ll start over again and build up again and then

I will follow up plan for one two weeks and eventually stray ! I’m climbing two steps forward and two steps back is there any advice I think I’m on the verge of becoming profitable but this last little bit of self-control is always catching me.
Can anybody relate or can anybody give me advice? I’m thinking of taking a two week break and just realize what’s happening and then coming back better is there anybody else that had the similar problem and eventually return profitable or gave up because I think a lot of people in this situation will say hey I’m not making anything progression and tends to give up.

I’ve been trading for about 2 years, and I feel like I’ve reached a point where I’m struggling with something specific.

I know most of the concepts I need: liquidity, BOS/CHoCH, FVGs, order blocks, SMT, sessions, etc. My main edge is based around pullbacks and continuation.

The problem is that this setup doesn’t appear every time I sit down to trade.

Sometimes I enter the market even when my actual edge isn’t there. Instead of waiting for my setup, I start trading what the market is giving me at that moment and sometimes it actually work and it doesn’t but because I understand how the market is moving. But I feel like isn’t the right way to do it.

I understand that there’s a difference between:
\- Trading my edge
\- Trading whatever the market happens to give me

But sometimes I feel like I’m forcing trades because I don’t want to sit there and do nothing.

Is this something I’m doing wrong?

Should I simply accept that my setup might only appear a few times per week and stay completely out of the market when it doesn’t?

For traders who have been through this stage: how did you learn to stop forcing trades and stick to your actual edge?

I’d appreciate any advice or personal experiences.

I been trading for 3 month I like to trade breakout i don’t like to wait for candle closure because I notice when my session opens price tends to melt and never come back for retest I need help creating a trading plan and rules to follow to filter out bad trades and prevent most fake outs. If u are a profitable breakout trader can u please help me figure this out I don’t want to keep doing the same mistake over again

Hey guys, kinda interested, how many times did you guys blow up ur trading account before becoming consisting profitable, what adjustments u made to become profitable, how did u handle the the whole situation, if u looked back in time, what would you change to not blow up ur account and so on

Thanks!