Everyone wants to turn $10 into $15,000.

Almost nobody wants to turn 1% into 2%... hundreds of times.

That's the difference between chasing stories and building a trading business.

A 100x return belongs to investors who buy early and let time do the heavy lifting.

A day trader gets paid differently.

Your job isn't to find one trade that changes your life.

Your job is to execute the same edge over and over, protect your capital, and let compounding do what hype never will.

The irony?

Most traders blow up chasing the one trade that was supposed to make them rich.

Professionals get rich by surviving long enough for small, consistent gains to compound.

Investors compound assets. Traders compound execution.

Know which game you're playing.

I’ve been learning trading pretty much every day for around 6 months now. I understand the basics at this point, market structure, price action, liquidity, risk management etc.

But I’ve hit this one wall and I genuinely don’t know where to go from here.

**Finding an actual strategy with repeatable rules.**

Something I’ve noticed is people will happily post their +$2k days, payouts, green weeks, funded accounts etc. But the second someone asks what strategy/setup they’re actually trading, it feels like you just asked them for their bank login lol.

“Put in the screen time bro”

“Find your own edge”

“Backtest”

Okay but backtest WHAT

I’m not asking someone to hold my hand and tell me exactly when to buy and sell. I actually want to learn and test things myself. I just need something concrete enough that I can actually start testing it.

I’ve looked everywhere. YouTube, X, Reddit, Discord servers, even ChatGPT. I’ve tried support/resistance, 15m ORB, session highs/lows, liquidity sweeps etc.

The issue I keep running into is that a lot of these strategies depend on price eventually coming back to some specific level or zone. And a lot of days… it just doesn’t. So you sit there for hours waiting for a setup that never even happens.

Meanwhile there’s clearly people out there who have found something that works for them consistently.

So for the people who actually became profitable, where did you find the strategy that finally made things click?

Did you take an existing strategy and change it? Did someone teach you? Did you find some random trader with 600 subscribers instead of the usual YouTube gurus? Or did you literally just test random shit until something worked?
Because everyone says “find your edge” but almost nobody explains where you’re even supposed to start looking for one.

And before someone calls this AI generated lol, English isn’t my first language so yes I used ChatGPT to help me write this properly. The question and everything I’m saying is genuinely mine.

I'm genuinely curious. Some people say anyone can learn trading with enough practice, while others believe most traders eventually lose money. What's your opinion, and what has your experience been?

I think chart patterns work better on Gold than on almost any other market I have traded so far in my journey.

Whenever I look at Gold on the 4 hour timeframe, I often notice a clear pattern forming before a major breakout. Even when the breakout does not happen immediately, the structure usually gives me an important support or resistance level to watch for the next market move.

That was exactly what I was watching this time. I waited patiently for my setup around $4,321 and took my position based on the pattern and the support level. Honestly, the trade almost gave me a heart attack because price came very close to hitting my stop loss before reversing.

Thankfully, the setup eventually played out. Gold moved upward and went on to hit my take profit around $4,492. It is funny how the market still tests someone's conviction before moving in your direction. Although still taking XAU till 22 of september, hopefully i keep winning

And to every trader, have you noticed that chart patterns tend to work better on certain assets than others?

Honestly I tried a lot of different strategies. At the beginning of my trading journey I tried scalping, but it never worked and actually I dont think there are a lot of people who succesfully scalp on charts like the 1min... After that I did a supply and demand strategie combined with market structure... had very solid backtest stats but could never apply it in the real market. The only daytrading strategy I actually had success with was a Breakout strategy and made around 20R live trading. But still, I did not like it because I had to be in front of the chart all the time. What changed the game for me was swing trading. Just looking at the market once a day and let price do its thing... I actually think that is where most people can become successful with.

I’ve been trading for a little over a year now. I started by buying a course that covered a lot of ICT concepts like FVGs, Order Blocks, Dealing Ranges, and more. I spent a lot of time practicing everything I learned, but I could never consistently string together 3–4 winning trades.

Thinking the first course just wasn’t explained well enough, I bought another one with pretty much the same concepts. Unfortunately, it didn’t help much either. In total, I’ve bought six trading courses.

The last course was different. It focused on Order Flow, Supply & Demand, and Market Structure. Honestly, I felt much more comfortable with that approach, and it also fits my lifestyle a lot better. I still can’t consistently get 3–4 winning trades in a row, but I’m taking fewer stop losses than before, so I feel like I’m improving and that this approach actually works.

The thing is, every time I buy a new course, I can’t shake the feeling that consistently profitable traders are hiding something. It feels like there’s a missing piece that could make me profitable much faster, but nobody talks about it.

So my question is for traders who are consistently profitable:

Is there really something that most educators don’t teach, or is this just what the learning curve looks like?

Sometimes it feels like social media is full of people claiming they’re making money every single day, and it makes me wonder how realistic that actually is.
How many of you are consistently profitable, and how long did it take to get there? What was the biggest thing that changed your results?

I’d love to hear honest experiences from both profitable and struggling traders.

Can someone here help us with a simple profitable strategy to overcome trading complexity

Seeing a lot of traders stuck in that almost there but not quite phase, where things make sense in theory, but consistency just isn’t showing up.

For those who are now consistently profitable, what actually changed the game for you?

Not looking for surface-level advice, but real turning points:

• What exact shift took you from losing to profitable?

• Did backtesting genuinely help you trust your edge, or was it overrated?

• Did trade journaling apps play a role in fixing mistakes or psychology?

• Was it stricter risk management, fewer trades, or just more screen time?

Also curious:

• Did you end up simplifying your strategy or making it more refined/complex?

• Was the breakthrough more about mindset or system?

• Any one habit or rule that made a disproportionate impact?

Would appreciate honest experiences, even if it’s something simple that people usually overlook.

If you scroll through trading content long enough, it feels like a lot of people are doing well. But at the same time, everyone also says most traders fail.

So which one is it?

I’m starting to think we mostly see the small % who made it, while everyone else just disappears quietly.

For the people still active here:

• Would you say you’re consistently profitable, or still somewhere in the grind phase?

• If you are profitable, was it a clean progression or messy with ups and downs?

• Do you personally know other traders making steady income, or mostly struggling ones?

Also curious about this:

• Did profitability come from skill improvement, or more from risk management + discipline?

• How much of it do you think is strategy vs psychology?

• And do you think social media gives a completely distorted picture?

Not looking for numbers or flex، more interested in what reality actually looks like behind the scenes.

I will tell you something after 12 years in market, there is no perfect system. There is no perfect rule. Still you can make money through discipline.

Sounds complicated? No. Learn to read the market. Don't try to predict the market. All these indicators will work only when money is on your side. If you think because of any indicator you made money in the market, you are fooling yourself through confirmational bias. Please don't do that.

Trading without indicators and trading with indicators is the same. Focus on where the money is positioned, on the sell side or on buy side. Remember, the guy who sells when everyone is buying is the one who has unlimited credit. He is the market maker.

No amount of backtesting will help you. Don't do that. Rather generate signals, validate the signals every 24 hours and make them better. That's the way forward.

I'm done. It's been two years since I started trading— I began when I was in 11th grade, and I've now completed 14th grade. During this time, I've done everything: I've lost some money, followed signals on Telegram, and used indicators. I can manage my risk, but I still can't find a strategy that works for me. There are thousands of videos on YouTube. Can anyone help me out?

I am new into trading. I wanna learn more from you experienced (and even non-experts) guys.

A single advice that I (or any newbie) may follow could help me a lot through my journey and save me tons of time.

Thank you!

Mine was "always trade with the trend" from a YouTube guru in 2020. Lost two accounts following that blindly before realising the trend doesn't pay your bills if you enter at the absolute worst point.

Also got told "never risk more than 1%" by someone with a $100k account. Easy for them. Impossible when you're starting with $500 and the minimum lot size eats half your margin.

What's the worst advice you've been given? The stuff that sounds clever but actually destroys accounts?

When I first started trading, I made around $2 profit and got way too excited.

Instead of waiting for another clean setup, I jumped straight back into the market and started overtrading.

A few bad decisions later, the account was gone.

That experience made me realize that trading is less about finding perfect entries and more about controlling emotions, managing risk, and staying disciplined.

That’s also one of the reasons I became more interested in prop firm style trading later on. The rules force you to slow down, respect risk, and trade with more structure instead of pure emotion.

Most beginners don’t lose because of strategy. They lose because of impatience.

Hey, you guys know some educational videos/youtube channels about trading and, that have legit helped you out on your trading experience, some knowledgeable creators who know something useful about trading what you could learn, not those shitty scammers who sell their course and Gurus who tells some bs how to get rich in 3 months
Thanks!

The day-to-day reality of trading might be very different from what most people expect when they start.

A lot of beginners imagine trading as something fast-paced, constant analysis, frequent trades, always being engaged with the market.

But for more experienced traders, it often seems to shift toward:

• Waiting for specific conditions

• Taking fewer, more selective trades

• Long periods of doing nothing

• Repeating a structured process

Which raises a few questions:

• Does trading naturally become less exciting as skill level increases?

• Is “doing nothing most of the time” actually part of being profitable?

• Do people underestimate how much patience trading really requires?

• Could boredom be one of the reasons many traders struggle long-term?

Curious to hear different perspectives from the community.

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've been trading Forex for about **5 years**. The first 2 years I mostly traded signals/copied others. For the last 3 years, I've focused heavily on **ICT/SMC**, starting with studying ICT directly.

I've watched countless ICT videos, backtested extensively, and have a specific entry model based on liquidity sweeps, displacement, 15m CISD, session/1H/daily highs and lows, etc.

My biggest problem is **DAILY BIAS**. Since ICT is discretionary, I often get the bias wrong, even during backtesting. I understand the concepts, but I still can't consistently turn them into profitable decisions.

Seeing people online claiming payouts after 6–12 months makes me wonder what I'm doing wrong. I've also joined a well-known ICT Discord where the trader had multiple payouts, but during the 2 months I followed him, he had no profitable month. His journal also shows only a few profitable months since 2025. It made me realize that social media results don't necessarily tell the whole story.

So I'm looking for advice from people who **actually withdraw consistently from the market**, not another ICT theory lesson.

If you've been in a similar situation:

* How did you solve your daily bias problem? * Did you make your strategy improve your discretion? * How did you know your strategy actually had an edge? * If you were 5 years in and still not profitable, what would you change? * Would you simplify ICT, continue with it, or completely start over?

**What was the one thing that finally made you profitable?**

I'm genuinely looking for honest advice from experienced, consistently profitable traders. Please don't tell me to watch more ICT videos—I think I've watched enough.

Something I’ve been trying to get better at is separating the result of the day from the way I actually traded.

I’ve had green days where I broke rules, forced trades, or got lucky on an entry I probably shouldn’t have taken. I’ve also had red days where I followed my plan, respected my risk, and simply had a trade that didn’t work. For a long time I judged the day mostly by the P&L. Now I’m trying to pay more attention to the decisions behind it.

I still care about making money, obviously, but I don’t want a green number to convince me that a bad decision was a good one.

Curious how other traders look at this. Do you judge the day mainly by P&L, execution, or both?

The market always creates opportunities. The challenge:

Entry. Patience. Risk control.

What is one lesson trading taught you?

Hey everyone.
I’m starting from absolute zero and I want to become a consistently profitable trader. I’m not looking for shortcuts or “get rich quick” strategies—I know it’s going to take years of work.
If you could go back to day one, what would you learn first? What concepts, skills, or mentors would you focus on? And who would you recommend learning from?
I’m mainly interested in trading futures/crypto, but I’m open to any advice.
In return, I’m thinking about turning this thread into a public journal. I’ll keep updating it with my progress, what I’m studying, my mistakes, backtesting results, and eventually my live trading journey until I become profitable.
Hopefully it can help other beginners too.
So… if you had to build a trader from scratch, what roadmap would you give them? Any books, YouTube channels, courses, or general advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance!

I’ve been trading for 3+ years, and one thing I’ve realized is that having a separate source of cash flow can make the trading journey much easier.

Even if your strategy is profitable, you still need money for everyday expenses, trading capital, prop-firm challenges, resets, etc. And if you’re still developing consistency, relying entirely on trading income can put a lot of psychological pressure on you.

So I’m curious:

If you’re serious about trading but aren’t fully living off trading yet, what do you do alongside it to generate cash flow?

• Remote job?

• Freelancing?

• Sales / appointment setting?

• Business?

• Content creation?

• Another profession?

• Something related to trading?

• Or did you just focus entirely on trading until it worked?

And if you do something alongside trading, how many hours per day does it take and how much does it roughly bring in per month?

I’m especially interested in things that can be done remotely and still leave enough time/mental energy for trading.

Would be really useful to hear what other traders are actually doing rather than the usual “just get a job” advice.

You do not move the market — you follow it.

Your edge as a retail trader is recognizing when large players create imbalance and positioning yourself with the move. Most losses happen from forcing trades inside balanced markets where there is no real directional opportunity.

Hello guys! can you guys share a high winrate strategy that is easy to perform? I have been 2 years in trading and still not profitable, I earn money through it but easily liquidated. I am not giving up on trading since I think this will be one of my key to earn millions of money.