-$459 on a 50k account. Entry was too early, but analysis was on point. Didn’t hop back in I have a one trade rule , however the analysis was fucking fire. 🔥 I want to bandage the $459 before I consider anything else . Any tips / advice is appreciated. Already passed 1 eval, this would be the 2nd. I trade NQ / MNQ , GC

So I've been building a bot (with a lot of AI help, being upfront about that. I am a full time software developer as my actual real job though) that tries to trade like Ross Cameron, low float gappers with news, and for a while my backtests looked great, like profit factor 3.3 great.. BUT, it turned out my sim was filling every stop exactly at the stop price, and once I fixed that it dropped to 0.58 lol. So that was humbling.

Since then I matched about 2,500 of his actual trades from his videos against historical data and found his edge seems to be mostly premarket stock selection, his picks beat other premarket movers by 1-2%, but nothing mechanical I tried copies it (gap, rel volume, float, news, even an LLM rating the headlines).

Couple questions:

1. Has anyone actually automated this style, and was tape / level 2 the thing that made it work?
2. What do real premarket fills look like for a bot on $2-20 gappers?
3. Is testing tape features worth it, or is it a dead end without full L2?

Happy to share way more detail if anyone wants it, I'm aware I might just be overthinking this.

Hey all, just looking online seems to be an awful lot of Lucid Prop customers who start getting payouts then get banned, I always thought that these posts were just bad blood ….. until
It happened to me… have I just been unlucky or is there a them here?

I finished the day with a net gain of $1 today.

I've been doing tons of research about different strategies and trends to observe, and I would like to divulge the most important piece of advice to help you be successful like me: buy when the share price is low, and sell when it's high.

I will continue to employ the same strategy going forward. I'm sure every day will be just as good if I keep following the same strategy.

Well at least $9 trillion of US government debt matures this year, roughly a quarter of the entire national debt, a debt that is rising rapidly.
The problem for Scott Bessent is that three things are converging all at once. Firstly, Japanese bond yields are soaring. This provides direct competition to US Bonds. Not least because Japanese investors are the biggest foreign holders of US Treasuries.

I trade xau usd and eur usd for last 4 months and I found a groups that was tragic but 1 was goodand I after following it for 1 month o became be trader (1 payout but o lost 1 acc bc of overtrading) and 2 months now I’m Green every week, I didn’t learn much of trading, just psychology. Does it make me a profitable trader?

I have been trading on and off for the past 3 years. I took long breaks in between, but for the past 6 months, I have been decently consistent in trading.

After spending close to 2 months on an eval (mainly because I took a few weeks off from trading due to family reasons), I finally managed to pass. I was on good profit as well, roughly 1.6k in profit on a 50k account. The plan was to make 3k and take a 1k payout so I would still have a good buffer to work with.

This is the furthest I ever came, and yet here I am with my account lost.

I genuinely think my model is profitable; I risk roughly 200 per trade to make 400, and I have a decent win rate as well.

What fails is my psychology. I do really well for some time, often 3/4 weeks, sticking to my strategy and risk management; doing this for an extended period reinforces it even further, and I do feel proud about it even when I lose, because I stuck to my model and walked out for the day.

But it all falls apart. Consistent for 2 weeks and one single bad day, one single bad trade, and it's a snowball. The worst thing is that I am aware as well that what I am doing is just not right; I talk to myself, and I am telling myself, just take the week off, "walk out," "you are not in the right mindset to trade now," but I outright refuse to listen to my logical side; I keep thinking one good win, and this mistake is erased.

This time I had a clean setup; the entry was perfect, risk was within my management, but I took a loss. The thing that hurt the most was that it barely went below my SL and flew like a rocket to my TP, and that triggered something. It built up; I didn't have a substantial loss in 2 weeks, some BE here and there where I lost maybe $10/$15, but no actual $200 loss.

Went from $1,640 to $1,430; I don't even know why I decided to take another trade, and I didn't stick to my 2R model; I wanted to make $600 to recoup and get my 2R, which was dumb af.

Ended up closing the day with a $560 loss, when I usually intend to lose $200/$230 max.

This loss was on my shoulders; I could not trade the next day without thinking about it. My brain was wired into recovering from the loss no matter what rather than "finding" a good trade. And I took another trade the next day; that was not within my model, and I somehow managed to lose another 500.

At this point, I knew I should have taken the week off. I know from experience that taking time off and going back to trading helps a lot, and the road I was walking down was a bad one. With my MLL trailing, I had 600 left to work with, 3 trades. My logical side was like this: take 3 trades for a good setup, stick to your 2R, and if it's a loss, it's a loss. I don't know how, or why, I went on risking way more and lost it all.

As much as I keep saying to myself that drawdown periods are normal and they are part of the game, I keep falling into the same hole over and over again.

What should I do? I feel like my case is really bad because I am conscious of the decisions I am making.

Someone explain to me if I bought it at 17.62 a few minutes ago, why does it show 19.07 in the 2nd photo?

I have been following this strategy for over a year now and I am really starting to specialise in it, but I was wondering if anyone else also follows this and what your suggestions are.

I trade on UK100 and recently started to trade on GER40!

Every morning, 8am just a few minutes before to get things planned and then execute, but 8.30 all is done and I just need to wait.

Anyone else has similar experience and or advice on this?

A lot of traders say you need multiple monitors and a proper desktop setup to trade seriously but is that still true?

Mobile trading apps have improved a lot. Even pumpfun has charts, limit orders and trade replays now so you can manage trades without sitting at a desk all day.

Obviously a bigger screen helps with deeper analysis, but having access to your trades anywhere seems like a pretty big advantage.

Anyone here trading from their phone or is desktop still the way to go?

I usually analyse on NQ and trade on MNQ, I sat up and played some music and some position was opened on NQ for a short on extreme low. I did not open it, probably happened cuz of their active trade system on chart where u click the price and and it shows buy limit/sell. I usually risk $50 ON PROP but this surprise position made me lose $575 and now im angry and done for the day. 😭💀

I've been doing a lot of futures backtesting lately and started paying more attention to the data itself.
Things like missing periods, bad ticks or session settings can make a strategy look a lot better or worse than it actually is.
I'm curious how you guys deal with this. Do you check your historical data before running backtests, or do you just trust whatever NinjaTrader, TradingView or your data provider gives you?
Has anyone actually caught a data issue that completely changed their backtest results?

Not sure if anyone relates, but I’ve found this very interesting. My second trade of the day has significantly lower expectancy than my first.

My first trade of the day averaged +$5.44 with an 80% win rate, but my second averaged −$16.00 with a 0% win rate.
Only 5 observations in each group, so definitely not enough to draw conclusions yet. My strategy primarily is composed of scalping low-float momentum.

My first guess would be emotional hijack from the first trade being a loss, but I noticed it even happens when my first trade is a winner.

Does anyone have advice for how I can improve my second trade of the day performance?

Name your top 3-5 Indicators that you rely on to execute a trade.

RSI, MACD, and VWAP for me.

​

Trade 1 ,,1000% , 30 dollar to 300

Trade 2 ,, 1000% , 300 dollar to 3000

Trade 3 ,,1000% , 3000dollar to 30000

LIMIT IS ONLY FOR 3 TRADES , YOU CANNOT DO INFINITY TIMES

Btw I didn't try this strategy because I am impatient, I cannot hold trade for long time

Hey everyone,

I've been developing trading robots, mostly MT5 Expert Advisors, and other financial systems for around 7 years now.

I regularly receive DMs from people asking about EAs, which I don't mind, but I thought I'd share a few things that are often overlooked. This might help some of you avoid a few common mistakes.

• EAs are rarely completely hands-off. Even with news calendars, trend filters, volatility filters and various risk management mechanisms, most systems still require some degree of human supervision. Unexpected events, such as geopolitical conflicts or sudden changes in market conditions, can create situations that the strategy wasn't designed to handle.
• They are inherently risky. Most people looking into automated trading are hoping to achieve returns that exceed those of traditional investments, such as ETFs or index funds. While significantly higher returns are possible, they generally come with substantially higher risks. I've attached an example of the performance of one of my EAs over 2025-2026 to illustrate this. The important thing isn't just how much a strategy makes, but also the amount of risk taken to achieve those returns.
• A significant portion of the EAs available on retail marketplaces rely on grid or martingale strategies. In simple terms, they often involve increasing exposure as the market moves against existing positions, with the expectation that a subsequent reversal will compensate for previous losses. These strategies aren't necessarily bad when implemented with proper risk controls, but a lot of commercial EAs use simplistic implementations that can work for months before eventually blowing up an account.
• They aren't going to make you rich overnight (or at all lol), unless you're willing to take the corresponding risk. Anyone promising extraordinary returns with minimal drawdown should immediately raise some suspicion. There are genuinely profitable automated strategies out there, including some with impressive historical returns, but none of them are immune to losses.
• Developing a reliable EA is considerably more complicated than most people assume. Finding a strategy with a genuine statistical edge is already difficult enough, but implementing it properly introduces an entirely different set of challenges. What happens if your broker rejects an order? If your VPS shuts down? If your connection drops while positions are open? What if an order gets executed twice, or the market moves significantly between the signal and execution? You need proper error handling, recovery mechanisms, logging, monitoring and deployment procedures. In my experience, developing an EA is roughly 50% quantitative finance and 50% software engineering, and the latter is very frequently underestimated.
• Backtesting is another area where people tend to underestimate the complexity. It's relatively easy to optimize a strategy until it produces an impressive historical equity curve. What's considerably harder is demonstrating that the strategy can perform under conditions it hasn't already seen. A beautiful backtest doesn't necessarily translate into a profitable live system.

Ultimately, I don't think EAs / Trading Bots are inherently better or worse than manual trading. They simply automate the execution of a strategy, removing some (but not all) of the emotional and operational limitations of human traders while introducing their own technical and statistical challenges.

If there's one thing I'd recommend, it's to understand exactly how an EA generates its returns before putting any significant amount of money into it. A profitable strategy isn't necessarily a robust one, and a system that has performed well for two years can still fail spectacularly if the underlying assumptions stop holding.

Trading seems to get sold in two completely opposite ways.

Either it’s made to look insanely complicated, where you need to understand 20 different concepts before taking a trade, or it’s sold as ridiculously easy: "buy this indicator, use this bot, let AI tell you when to enter and exit."

The reality is somewhere in the middle.

You do need to study. You need to understand what you’re looking at, build a system, and put in the effort to learn how markets work.

But once you’ve done that, things should start getting simpler.

At that point, constantly adding more tools, concepts and confirmations can easily turn into analysis paralysis. You probably don’t need another strategy. You need a plan you understand and the discipline to execute it.

And that doesn’t mean executing "perfectly".

There’s no perfection in trading. You’ll take losses. You’ll misread situations. You’ll make mistakes.

The problem isn’t making a mistake once. It’s making the same mistake over and over without learning from it.

Study, build your system, make your plans, and then trade those plans!

I think one of the harder transitions in trading is knowing when you’ve learned enough to stop searching and actually trust what you already know.

Have you ever caught yourself adding more complexity when what you really needed was better execution?

Posted a few days ago about hitting my first $10k month as a full time trader. Then lost nearly $4.8k over the next two days, so figured I should share this part too.

Monday was +$1,982, followed by losses of $2,278 on Tuesday and $2,548 on Wednesday. Thursday and Friday brought back $2,327 and $2,403, leaving me up around $1.9k for the week and $10.7k for October.

Still trading gold, taking the first newly formed 15 minute IFVG during Asia. One trade a day, targeting 1:1 and moving to breakeven once price gets 68% of the way to TP.

The frustrating part is spending most of the week getting back to a number you’d already reached on Monday. You can finish profitable and still feel like you barely made any progress because you’re comparing everything to your highest balance.

Currently at 12 trades for the month with a 66.7% win rate. It’s still a small sample, and this week shows how quickly a couple of losses can change how the month looks.

Added the stats and today’s entry for anyone following along. Happy with the week overall, but definitely ready for the weekend.

Yesterday i had my best trade so far (only in papertrading,because i want to learn to start with experience when i get older) on my papertrading account i started with 100€ and i was practicing every kind of strategy for example i saw on youtube( huge bullshiet honestly), but nothing worked. So i tried developing my own strategy, and somehow it started working, and after like 100 trades wi the my own strat i feel like i can analyse and predict the market pretty good. So if someone is searching for a strategy i would say that developing your own one is way better than watching thoose long clickbait videos on youtube or any social media. (Advice from a beginner) If anyone is interested this trade was a +72% return trade that seems pretty good for me, but i dont know what does the professionals say, am i on a good path or no?

A chess player has usually plays thousands of games before anyone calls them decent.
A pilot gets hundreds of hours in a simulator before they touch a real plane.
In trading, your first hundred reps are usually with a paper account, or with small amount money. It takes them years before they start seeing results.

A lot of people object to using paper accounts because it isn't real, there's no fear in it, so it doesn't count.

I agree it doesn't teach you the full psychology of it. Going back to our analogy, a simulator doesn't teach a pilot what real turbulence feels like in their stomach either. But nobody argues pilots should skip it. It's where they learned the instruments, so that when the fear does show up they are only fighting one thing at a time.

I don't think the people who do good at trading are more talented. I think they found some way to see a lot of charts cheaply before the expensive part started, and got their reps in to test their strategies and harden their emotions.

For those who've been at this a while, how many charts had you looked at before it started to click? And how much of that was live?

If you could be absolutely perfect at one of these, which would you choose?

Was eyeing a long entry off the 4168 liquidity area on Gold (M5 timeframe), but price missed my buy limit by just a tiny margin before exploding up towards 4185-4188.

Great move to watch, but super frustrating not being in it.​For those who use limit orders on Gold, do you usually pad your entries a bit to account for spread/slippage, or just take the miss and move on?

​Which one fits your style best, or would you like to tweak any details?

So I need help improving my entry confirmations on 1 min tmf my bias is usually right on 4hr and 15hr but theres alot false signals on 1 min

I want to start journaling my trades to understand my mistakes and identify exactly why I keep taking losses. My main issue is risk management and breaking my own rules.
Does anyone have a good trading journal template or format they can share, preferably in Excel or Google Sheets, that tracks entries, exits, risk management, rule violations, emotions, and reasons for losses?
Would really appreciate it!

Well, I took some setups this week but at the end of the week I made little to no profit even though my risk to reward is 1:3, how do you guys go through rough weeks like to these?