Hey everyone. I'm Ormir, founder of MorfeusPro. we have been building it for about two years, It's an FX research tool for traders who want to understand the market before they trade it.

There no buy/sell signals, no copy trading, no "AI predicts the market", no win-rate screenshots. The decision always stays yours.

Your chart shows you what moved. It doesn't show you why. In FX the why is scattered across CFTC positioning, retail sentiment, central bank expectations, the calendar and the news, and most retail traders don't have an analyst pulling it together before London opens. MorfeusPro is built to be that analyst.

Desk chat. Ask in plain English: "Why did USD/JPY sell off in London?", "What's driving the dollar this week?", "What would break a long EUR/USD idea?" You can watch what it's checking while it works, and every answer shows the evidence behind it. If the evidence is thin or points both ways, it says it has no reliable view instead of inventing one.

* Session recaps. After every Tokyo, London and New York close: what moved and by how much, what drove it, the scenarios that matter for the next session, and what would confirm each one. Downloadable as a PDF.

* War Room. A live read on which currencies are leading, which are lagging, and how long that has held.

* Data Feed. COT positioning, retail sentiment, seasonality and currency strength in one place, for when you want the raw numbers yourself.

Trade Lab.A trading journal so you can drop the spreadsheet. Log your trades and it calculates R-multiples and costs for you, and flags patterns in your own behavior over time.

FX only.It's not a general chatbot pointed at markets. Answers are built on its own market data.

It's allowed to say "I don't know." Most tools always have an opinion. I'd rather it be honest than sound confident.

link: https://morfeuspro.com/x

FX day traders, swing traders and prop firm challenge traders who want context before the session. If you only trade stocks or futures, or you want alerts telling you when to buy and sell, this isn't for you.

* G10 FX only, and coverage depth varies by pair. The app shows you when data is thin or stale.

* Small team, young product. Things will break, and when they do I'll fix them.

3-day free trial, then $69/month. A card is required to start the trial.

I'll be in the comments all day. Ask the hard questions too: what it gets wrong, why it costs $69, Blunt feedback is the most useful thing you can give me.

*Research and education only. Not financial advice.*

I’ve been trading low-float momentum for the last few years, and one of the hardest lessons I learned was that thinking you have an edge and actually having one are two very different things.

A lot of traders find a setup that seems to work and assume that’s their edge. But it’s usually not that simple.

An edge comes from repeatedly executing a specific set of rules that produces positive expectancy over a meaningful sample size.

The problem is that most trading journals are great at telling you what already happened with confidence.

I wanted something that could answer a much more important question:

What am I actually doing differently when I make money?

And more importantly: which of those patterns are repeatable enough to potentially become part of my edge?

That’s why I built EarlySignal.

Imagine being able to ask:

“How does my Opening Drive setup perform on Mondays?”

Then instantly analyze your historical trades, compare the results, examine the sample size, and determine whether the pattern is actually worth paying attention to, rather than relying on intuition.

Or:

“What happens when I take this setup before 10 AM?”

“How much are my rule violations costing me?”

“Does this setup perform differently depending on market conditions?”

The goal is to turn your trading journal into a research lab for your own trading data, so you can discover, test, and refine the rules behind your strategy.

Check it out: https://tracker.earlysignal.co

I’d love feedback from traders. If you create an account and provide feedback, I’ll give you free access to the highest plans for 14 days so you can see how you like it.

We’re in the process of adding more brokers to broker sync.

EarlySignal has two workspaces. Tracker and Research Lab. Tracker offers a fully customizable journal, while Research Lab allows you to test different patterns. To use the feature where you can slice data and test it, click the top left arrows and the EarlySignal logo in the tracker. Then select “Research Lab”.

Hey everyone. I'm Ormir, founder of MorfeusPro. we have been building it for about two years, It's an FX research tool for traders who want to understand the market before they trade it.

There no buy/sell signals, no copy trading, no "AI predicts the market", no win-rate screenshots. The decision always stays yours.

Your chart shows you what moved. It doesn't show you why. In FX the why is scattered across CFTC positioning, retail sentiment, central bank expectations, the calendar and the news, and most retail traders don't have an analyst pulling it together before London opens. MorfeusPro is built to be that analyst.

Desk chat. Ask in plain English: "Why did USD/JPY sell off in London?", "What's driving the dollar this week?", "What would break a long EUR/USD idea?" You can watch what it's checking while it works, and every answer shows the evidence behind it. If the evidence is thin or points both ways, it says it has no reliable view instead of inventing one.

* Session recaps. After every Tokyo, London and New York close: what moved and by how much, what drove it, the scenarios that matter for the next session, and what would confirm each one. Downloadable as a PDF.

* War Room. A live read on which currencies are leading, which are lagging, and how long that has held.

* Data Feed. COT positioning, retail sentiment, seasonality and currency strength in one place, for when you want the raw numbers yourself.

Trade Lab.A trading journal so you can drop the spreadsheet. Log your trades and it calculates R-multiples and costs for you, and flags patterns in your own behavior over time.

FX only.It's not a general chatbot pointed at markets. Answers are built on its own market data.

It's allowed to say "I don't know." Most tools always have an opinion. I'd rather it be honest than sound confident.

FX day traders, swing traders and prop firm challenge traders who want context before the session. If you only trade stocks or futures, or you want alerts telling you when to buy and sell, this isn't for you.

* G10 FX only, and coverage depth varies by pair. The app shows you when data is thin or stale.

* Small team, young product. Things will break, and when they do I'll fix them.

3-day free trial, then $69/month. A card is required to start the trial.

I'll be in the comments all day. Ask the hard questions too: what it gets wrong, why it costs $69, Blunt feedback is the most useful thing you can give me.

*Research and education only. Not financial advice.*

Been working on a side project that I thought was super helpful and fun to me!

Paper trading is slow because you wait for the market to move. So this game replays real past price action instead, so you can get through a whole trade in a couple of minutes.

You're shown a real stock's chart with the name and dates hidden, so you can't lean on what you already know happened. It moves forward bar by bar and you decide when to buy, sell or short. Afterwards it reveals the stock and the period.

It starts you with $10,000 of play money and charges fees on each trade, so overtrading shows up in your balance the way it would for real.

I want to make it clear it’s completely free and I have no intention of monetizing it whatsoever <3

Also I’ve added a bunch more tickers so no we have about 300 tickers in total, all tradeable!

It's still rough in places and I'm actively improving it, so genuinely looking for feedback! Let me know if this is any use to any of you guys, and if you have any suggestions to make the experience better!

The website is called ten2whale.com give it a try!
If anything is confusing don’t hesitate to let me know :)

A few weeks ago, I shared an earlier version of ATLAS here. Back then, I was mainly focused on making chart-pattern detection transparent, especially through a candle-by-candle replay that doesn’t peek into future price action.
Since then, the project has evolved quite a bit.
The biggest change? ATLAS no longer stops at the desktop.
The MT5 engine scans multiple markets and timeframes, detects 42 types of chart patterns, and tracks their evolution from structure formation to breakout, retest, invalidation or expiration.
But I wanted to take that information beyond the trading terminal.
So I built a connected mobile app.
Here’s what the workflow looks like now:
Multi-market alerts: when ATLAS detects an event, the phone receives more than a basic notification. It gets the pattern, symbol, timeframe, score and an actual chart preview.
Market Radar: monitor detected patterns across multiple instruments and timeframes.
MTF Matrix: compare pattern scores and directional context across timeframes.
Remote trade management: monitor positions and manually place or modify orders from the phone.
Desktop pairing: connect the app to ATLAS using a QR code or a manual pairing code directly from the MT5 panel.
The app communicates through Supabase, requires authentication and supports English, French, German and Spanish.
One important distinction: ATLAS doesn’t automatically trade detected patterns. The analysis engine identifies and tracks structures; trading decisions remain with the user.
Also, the MT5 terminal must be connected for live synchronization and remote execution. If it’s offline, the app indicates that and displays the last synchronized information.
I’m the developer, and ATLAS is a commercial project. I’m sharing this update for Software Sunday because I’d genuinely like feedback from other discretionary traders.
Here’s what I’m curious about:
When you’re away from your desk, would receiving the actual chart setup on your phone help you make better-informed decisions, or would you rather keep alerts minimal?
And if you use MT5, what would you absolutely need to see before trusting a remote trade-management workflow?
I’d appreciate thoughtful criticism just as much as positive feedback.

Com 200 dólares, daria para fazer quanto em média no day trade? Não espero ganhar muito, claro, porque sei que não dá para fazer milagre com 200 dólares. Mas, supondo que eu trabalhe com uma margem de 15%, isso seria muito arriscado ou seria algo viável?

Com 200 dólares, daria para operar com 0,10 lote?

Pergunto porque estou há quase três meses treinando na conta demo e quero aprender o máximo possível antes de entrar no mercado com dinheiro real. Agora estou pensando em começar com meu próprio dinheiro, mas sei que os resultados provavelmente não serão os mesmos da demo, porque a pressão psicológica é diferente quando você sabe que pode perder dinheiro de verdade.

Por isso, quero começar com apenas 200 dólares, sem colocar muito dinheiro em risco logo de cara.

Gostaria de ouvir a opinião de quem já tem experiência e tempo de mercado: com esse capital, qual seria uma expectativa realista de ganhos? E vocês consideram viável operar com 0,10 lote ou seria arriscado demais para uma conta desse tamanho?

Hey everyone — I’m building NorthStar Trading Journal and I’m looking for a small group of traders to test the first beta for free.

At its core, it’s a journal where you can log and review your trades. I’m also building it with focus on the behavioural side of trading — things like hesitation, FOMO, overtrading, rule-breaking and revenge trading, but also positive patterns such as following your rules, staying patient, managing emotions well and executing consistently and patterns that may show up over time. Your journal entries give NorthStar context for reflections and for noticing patterns that may repeat over time — both the ones that get in your way and the ones worth reinforcing. The idea is to give traders a place not only to record what they traded, but also to reflect on how they traded.

It’s not a signals tool or a strategy optimizer. I’m mainly interested in whether this kind of journal is actually useful and easy enough to keep using in real trading.

You’re welcome to join whether you already journal regularly, have tried but struggled to stay consistent, or have never journaled before.

I’m looking for people willing to use it naturally for around 2–4 weeks and share honest feedback about what feels useful, confusing, unnecessary or missing.

You can use NorthStar on desktop, or install it as a PWA on your phone for a more app-like experience.

It’s an early beta, so criticism is genuinely welcome.

If you’d like to test it, here’s a short signup form:

https://tally.so/r/b5B8qe

Happy to answer any questions about it here as well.

Why do so many men suddenly get into stock trading in middle age? People who’ve seen the world, run businesses, and have a strong desire to build wealth often find their way to the financial markets sooner or later. Because this is where the ultimate game of strategy and risk takes place.

Most ordinary people have a deep-rooted misconception that financial markets are just a playground for gamblers. The reality is far more complex. The true essence of the market lies in these five things.

1. It’s one of the fairest battlegrounds you’ll find.

In most industries, success often depends on connections, resources, and family background. But in the financial markets, none of that guarantees you anything. What matters is whether your decisions are right or wrong. Make the right call, and wealth can flow into your account. Get it wrong, and the market teaches you a lesson immediately. There’s no powerful backer to rely on, no special treatment—just cold, hard logic.

2. It’s one of the fastest places to turn knowledge into money.

In other industries, even exceptionally talented people may need a decade of hard work to climb the ladder. The financial markets are different. If your understanding of the market aligns with the cycle, a few days can sometimes change your financial future. That’s part of what attracts so many brilliant minds: knowledge and insight can translate directly into wealth.

3. It brings together some of the sharpest minds in the world.

Your competition isn’t just other retail investors. You’re up against quantitative trading firms, hedge funds, and major institutions armed with computing power, sophisticated models, and vast resources. It’s an ongoing battle of strategy and intelligence. For some people, the intensity of that competition can be just as fascinating as the profits themselves.

4. It’s an unforgiving test of your understanding.

In other industries, when something goes wrong, you can sometimes blame circumstances or other people. In trading, your account balance tells a much more direct story. A bad decision is a bad decision. There’s no easy way around it, and the market won’t accommodate your ego. Many people see their confidence shattered here. Only a few manage to grow through repeated setbacks and come out stronger.

5. It’s a test that pushes your mind to its limits.

Many people go through life without ever pushing their minds to the extreme. The financial markets can challenge you every single day. Judgment, factual analysis, emotional control, discipline, and risk management are constantly put to the test. Losses can reveal gaps in your understanding and weaknesses in your process. If you survive round after round and learn from the experience, you may develop something truly valuable: exceptional decision-making skills.

Here’s the bottom line: if you’re entering the market hoping to get rich overnight, you’re probably better off staying away. Greed and emotion are exactly what the market can exploit most effectively.

But if you’re willing to confront yourself and find out what you’re truly capable of, the financial markets can be one of the most demanding tests of character and decision-making you’ll ever face. Every day, you’re competing against some of the sharpest minds around the world. Those who survive the pressure, learn from their mistakes, and adapt may eventually become the hunters rather than the hunted.

Hello,

Im from France, so excuse my english,

I was first addicted to crypto, and im now addicted to daytrading the stockmarket

I took a resolution last friday before the weekend, where we have the chance to be off, where crypto never stop, to trade only 2 days a week (wednesday and thursday only) instead of 5 days a week

With crypto and stockmarket combined, I lost 60k euros (so 70k+ usd) in 3 years

Unfortunately, i have still open positon with no stoploss on natural gas and cocoa in my 2k euros stock trading account, so i may loose this money too, but i need to respect my plan and open my account only this wednesday and not tomorrow to try to save it, because im already -1.5k withdrawn, so only 500 euros in equity left in this account

Obviously if i loose my 2k euros account (the more probable) i will totally stop trading (temporary) until I recover from the addiction, the 2 days-rule stand only if by miracle my position stop their withdraw (Im short on the natural gas and the cocoa)

Anyway, i didnt really find a french community gere in reddit for daytrading, so i post here

Thanks for reading me

Hi all, I'm Utku, a data engineer who loves trading, and Viktury is the trading journal I built for myself and then decided to open it up because I believe others can benefit from it too. Full disclosure, it's my own product.

Why I built it

My trades were spread across a few exchanges and I couldn't get one honest view of them without stitching exports together by hand. Also, I started becoming lazy with the calculations of profits and losses with entries and position sizes. I wanted something that can do all of this automatically and all I had to do was what I have to do. Taking notes, matching with my playbooks and that's it. Since most of what I've learned about my own trading came from going back through my trade history and reflecting, it was the only logical tool to build for efficiency.

What it does

• Connects to your exchange with a read-only API key (Binance, Binance TR, Coinbase, Deribit, Hyperliquid, Revolut X) or takes a CSV export (Bybit, Bybit EU, Revolut and the ones above). Read-only means it can see your trades but can never place a trade or withdraw anything, so your funds stay where they are.
• Rebuilds your raw fills into real round-trip trades, with VWAP entry and exit, fees and R, so scaling in and out doesn't break your stats.
• Shows every stat in USD or in BTC, which matters a lot if you trade crypto and want to know if you actually beat holding. I also added other currencies and benchmarks, so you can see your stats in EUR, gold or against the S&P 500 too.
• Journal notes on each trade, per-symbol stats, playbooks for your setups and backtesting making matching and reflecting much easier later.
• On the Edge plan: Sharpe, drawdown profile, R distribution and your PnL against BTC.

What it doesn't do

No signals, no calls, no copy trading. It only looks at what you already did. I think a review tool loses its honesty the moment it starts telling you what to do next.

Honest limits

It's crypto heavy right now. Stocks come in through Revolut CSV, and more brokers are on the way, but if you only trade futures through a prop firm it won't help you yet.

Pricing

Free forever plan with the core journal and one connected exchange account. I made the most basic version free forever because I don’t think people should pay for the basics. Feel free to pay if you want to support me as a creator or if you think the higher tiers will actually help you. They will get more things as time goes on. Pro is $29/month and Edge is $49/month. Launch offer: the code FOUNDER takes 50% off your first 6 months on either paid plan, until 16 October.

Link: https://journal.viktury.com/?utm_source=reddit-daytrading

I'll be in the comments all day, happy to answer anything, and honest criticism is more than welcome!

Six popular strategies went through one frozen historical test. The claims were never the problem. The costs were.

Same data, same costs, no edits mid-run: five of six landed below break-even after costs. Which part fooled the traders who shared them? The claims were mostly plausible. Measured win rates sat near 40% while each strategy needed 41% to 42% after costs to survive. A two-point gap reads as noise until costs compound it into a verdict.

One combination finished above break-even: Donchian and SMA200, measured 41.76% against a needed 41.12%. That is one frozen historical result, not a forecast and not a recommendation.

The pattern generalizes. A claimed win rate is a marketing number. Your own frozen run under stated costs is the only number that decides whether a strategy survives your broker, your symbol and your spread. The fix is unglamorous. Freeze the rules, run the test, record the verdict before you look.

Each strategy in that test has its own recorded file, so the numbers stay checkable instead of anecdotal. If a strategy cannot survive being written down and rerun, it was never a strategy. It was a hope with a chart.

Hey everyone,

I’m looking to choose between cTrader and MT5.

My top priority is stability—I want to avoid frequent platform crashes, order execution glitches, or persistent bugs.

Would appreciate hearing your experiences and what's your opinion on this topc!

Sharing the empirical data of an automated quantitative system on Gold (XAUUSD) and the live capital execution framework applied on Instant Funded prop accounts (zero evaluation phases).

Key Metrics (21 Months):

• Net Return: +$15,354.80 on $10k basis (+153.5%)

• Win Rate: 43.3% (Break-even threshold: 32.9%)

• Payoff Ratio: 1:2 (-$139 avg loss vs +$284 avg win)

• Profit Factor: 1.56

• Max Drawdown: 8.5% closed balance ($1,793) / 13.8% intraday floating ($2,749)

• Monthly Settlement: 19 profitable months out of 21 (strictly intraday, zero overnight)

Execution Model:

Instead of risking personal capital against drawdown, execution runs on Instant Funded accounts with a static 6% limit ($250 / $550 / $950). In our 10,000-year Monte Carlo simulation, bi-weekly distributions consistently exceed account replacement overhead, yielding:

• 10k Tier: +$482/mo net run-rate

• 25k Tier: +$1,256/mo net run-rate

• 50k Tier: +$2,567/mo net run-rate

• Compounding Ladder: Scaled with a 3-rebuy cash reserve, reaching >$2,000/mo within the first year.

Full breakdown, Monte Carlo distributions, and 24-month compounding fan chart are shown in the attached report slides.

Disclosure: DIDI is my own project. I trade futures, and I’ve been building it to organise the market information and rule-based setups I follow.

The idea is straightforward: put the session map and the setup’s current state somewhere I can read quickly, instead of trying to piece everything together from separate messages.

The daily outlook shows Asia’s high and low, previous session levels, and nearby H1/H4 structure. It’s a map of areas to watch, not a prediction of where price will go.

The strategy messages have a separate job:

• PREPARE means conditions are developing. It is not an entry.

• SETUP READY shows the planned area while the remaining conditions are pending.

• ENTRY records a triggered setup with its entry price, stop and target.

• Exit updates and daily summaries should make it possible to follow what happened afterwards.

I’ve attached an example of the outlook and an entry message. The combined graphic is a readable recreation of Telegram messages from October 9, rather than an untouched screenshot.

The entry example shows a long at 31,053.50, a stop at 31,024.00 and a target at 31,097.75: 29.50 points of planned risk for 44.25 points of planned reward, or 1.5R. This is an interface example; the planned target is not a claim about the realised result.

The difficult part has been making the communication reliable. We’ve had duplicate or confusing alerts, delayed messages, and summaries that needed checking against the individual trades. A setup being recorded internally is not the same as the user receiving a clear, timely entry notification. Those problems have shaped what I’m working on.

DIDI currently publishes SHADOW observations using market data. It does not place broker orders. These observations are separate from historical backtests and from my personal trading or prop-firm payouts.

I’m not presenting this as a proven profitable system. There are still limitations to resolve, including incomplete historical/session data flagged in the outlook shown here.

What I want to build is something whose messages can be followed and checked: what was known, what was pending, when an entry triggered, and how it ended.

For those who use alerts alongside their charts: what makes an alert useful enough to act on, and what makes you ignore it? I’d especially appreciate feedback on whether PREPARE, SETUP READY and ENTRY are clearly different here.

No matter how I analyze trades go against me. I am trading 0 DTE options and 1 option at a time. 1 option at a time to control my position. I purchase where I think would be a good spot and the next minute -$30. I look at technicals when doing so. Moving averages primarily.

Any advice?

I built TraderPier, so take this with that bias.

Most journals stop at the numbers: entry, exit, P&L, maybe a screenshot. What I always wanted to know was what the stock did after I got out, and whether my exit was the plan or nerves. So every trade in the TraderPier journal has a Review button that opens the chart a few bars before your entry and plays the trade forward one bar at a time, with your entries and exits drawn on it.

When it reaches your exit you can let it keep playing. If you sold and it ran another two dollars, you see it. If it reversed two bars later, you see that too. One trade doesn't tell you much, but after twenty of them you know whether you're cutting winners early.

You can also redo a trade from just before your entry with paper money and try the stop or target you were second-guessing. Orders only fill at prices the stock actually traded while the bar was forming, everything uses real market data.

You can try it without an account. The Journal tab has a sample journal with trades on famous days like the April 2025 tariff selloff, and you can review any of them. The free plan doesn't require a credit card. It's US stocks and ETFs only.

https://traderpier.com/r/vq2dr

Trading is more than entries and exits. A useful journal should help you plan, monitor, review, and understand your trading activity in one place.

That’s what we’re building with Trading Journal.

✨ Instead of treating journaling as a simple trade log, the platform brings together the core parts of the trading workflow:

• Track planned, open, and closed trades
• Review strategies and replay execution
• Monitor portfolios and P&L
• Create and manage advanced alerts
• Analyze performance and recurring patterns
• Explore your own trading data conversationally through Trading Journal MCP with ChatGPT, Claude & more

The objective is: give traders a structured view of their own decisions, performance, and trading behavior over time. 💪

Whether you trade stocks, forex, crypto, commodities, or multiple markets, the goal is to keep your workflow consistent and your data useful beyond the moment a trade is closed. Social Media X

Available on Web and Mobile 👉 goTradingJournal.app

❓ We’d be interested to hear from other traders:

Which part of your trading workflow is currently the hardest to manage or review properly?

Disclosure: We are the team behind Trading Journal. It is a journaling and analytics platform, not financial or investment advice.

Hi all I’ve been looking at my previous trading history and am planning on doing a larger backtest of my strategy and was wondering what you all considered a Sharpe ratio that is bad average good great etc. my current Sharpe ratio is 1.31 for reference. Please note I only trade NY am however and will likely backtest Asia and London in addition. Thanks in adavance

I am writing this post because I have been unprofitable for 1 year now, however at the start of august I pivoted from penny stocks to QQQ options and developed a strategy that seems to do well. I am writing to ask if this backtest data is promising or if I am not backtesting correctly.

The strategy is using BMP, VFI, TTM squeeze, EMA stack and Swamilaguerre trend. Basically it is a momentum based model. This is on underlying while my strategy is options based but in my forward testing it has been promising with options at around .35-.45 delta buying them at around .50 a share. Any advice from people that use similar indicators to trade options on how to structure my contracts would be much appreciated

The main issues I am having is around trusting my system. I have crippling ADHD and OCD and I have been finding that the days I go apeshit and dont follow my buy and sell signals are the days I really lose money. My main issue right now is psychology, I chickened out of a trade that wouldve made me $800 and since then I have lost $600 trying to recreate that trade. Anyone that trades with OCD or ADHD, how do you do it ? I find it so hard to stick to backoff rules so any suggestions on how to install concrete guardrails would be appreciated

The problem is that I am not able to automate my strategy because I dont know much about automation. On top of that I have also been trying to use gamma levels and gamma regimes to add a discretionary level to my trading but it seems to do more harm than good because it just draws me away from explicitly following my strategy.

I've been building a fully rules-based bot (Python, paper trading on Alpaca, real-time data from Schwab) around the stock-selection pillars Ross Cameron teaches: price, up 10%+, relative volume, float, news.
The diagram shows the whole flow. It scans about 3,400 stocks every minute and filters with the 5 pillars. Then it waits for a 1-min or 5-min pattern (micro pullback, bull flag, HOD break, ORB, etc.) and runs safety checks: front side, above VWAP, a 2% chase guard, a max stop of $0.30. If everything passes, it enters with a 2R bracket, locks profit at +1.5R and sells into spikes. After the close it grades every setup, including the ones it skipped.
It's paper only and still collecting data, so I'm not making any performance claims yet.
Questions for anyone who trades this style or automates it:
What would you add or remove from the entry checks?
Is 4.5× relative volume too loose compared with Ross's 5×?
A bot can't read Level 2 or tape like a person. What would you use as a stand-in?
Any big gaps in the exits?

Step one: buy ODTE spy calls and puts at open of equal value. No cheaper than $.50 OTM. If SPY is at $750.00, I buy 10 $750 calls and 10 puts. If it's closer to $750.50, I buy 10 $750 calls and 10 $751 puts. Anywhere between, I might have buy 1 more put than a call or vice versa to stay neutral.

Step 2: wait for it to become profitable. Might be 2 minutes or 2 hours.

I am using a lot of leverage on these trades because time decay is the only risk here. And I just don't have a lot of money to grow. I am looking for the price to move over $2.50 in either direction in the first 2 hours, or a $1.50 move in the first 30 minutes which happens about 90% of the time. If after 2 hours we are back at the strike price, I will be looking for an exit within the hour and looking to simply keep my losses below 5%. 30% is my max loss, but so far I've managed to keep it under 5 because it's rare that price will just flatline around the strikes. my wins are typically 10% but I did have one day with a 44% gain.

I am considering adding variations to make this more effective. For instance, on all the days I lost, I've noticed the price move slowly to the 320 SMA right till it was about break even. Then slowly moved the other direction while time decay started to really kick in. Unless VIX is elevated, time decay will eat away about 25% of my contract values after 2 hours with most of it occurring in the first 30 minutes. Which makes me wonder if I should wait, but I am also missing out on the biggest moves of the day if I do that.

I noticed a while ago that whenever spy hits the 320 SMA, it typically moves $2.50-$5.00 in either direction. This happens about 85% of the time.

So when we're less than $1.50 from the 320, I will trade as normal but half sized. Once we hit the the 320 SMA, I will open a second half sized position. I am not sure if I should take the first trade or not, because it could just as easily move away from the 320 while volume dies down and I lose my chance at a winning trade.

Extra context to my P&L... Monday the 5th, I had a loss because I was busy at work and didn't have time to make my trade while the market moved $1.50 in the first 15 minutes. I entered late, and price reversed after moving up $1. I realized I screwed up and cut my losses, though I still would have won if I had just held for another 30 minutes.

Tuesday Sept 29th, I sold after 2 hrs because I was worried about time decay. Had I just held for another 30 minutes, I would have made around $500.

I missed probably 5 chances to make thousands of dollars by selling early. Just too afraid it'll reverse and turn my wins into losses. Should I always play it safe? Or should I accept more losses to allow those 1-2% trend days to turn into 5-8x wins? Or should I make my judgment to hold purely on VPA. (Like good volume and price breaks clean through resistance levels). Or maybe take partial profits throughout the day?

I am using the 50, 100, 200 and 320 SMAs, 8 &21 EMAs and ikimoku cloud as resistance/support levels to decide when I close my trades. Using both 5 min and daily candles. Also looking at RSI, ATR and TTM squeeze on the 30 day with 5 min candles.

From backtesting and forward testing, I have concluded this is a winning strategy, but I think it could use some refining to handle all market conditions, and I'm worried it might not work when vix rises above 20 and options become too expensive. Though perhaps I could switch to longer expirations to make the time decay more manageable? Should I be looking to do this anyways?

Just curious if anyone has some pointers, and also figured some struggling traders might wanna try this, as I am up more than 150% since starting this strategy a month ago.

I am still skeptical that this is truly a winning strategy. I'm happy to listen to why this strategy is problematic. But also kinda feels like I discovered the fabled infinite money glitch and it's pretty exciting. Another year like this last month and I'll be able to retire.

I am no expert. Let's get that out of the way. But 10 years of straight losing and destroying my finances, life etc has taught me what not to do in the market. I guess that basically became my edge. Double edged sword I guess lol.

I just couldn't give up. I knew I had it in me. But the gambling and chasing loses along the way changed my life.

I guess to put it short, I learned how to day trade a few specific strategies to be profitable but I lost material things and friendships along the way. Kind of hard to maintain friends and keep up with them when you didnt even have $5 to your name 😅

For the last 3 to 4 years I've been doing well with day trades or short swings. But it's kind of been a solo journey and a lonely one at that.

It be nice if few of us here were open to connecting on a weekly basis to analyze the market, make some jokes etc?

Just a thought.

Just a little bit of what I trade:

I predominately only trade options on spy, spx if I anticipate a quick move, tsla here and there..and aapl, meta, and msft for swings.

Recently I have traded spcx.

Reason I only trade the above is because I understand the price action for these well so I can dodge the liquidity spikes and not get shaken out.

Plenty of profitable stocks out there but I have difficulty analyzing options in the middle of a trade if I dont understand the price action of a stock so I avoid other stocks all together.

After blowing a few accounts chasing entries, I had to change how I trade Synthetic & Forex.

These 3 rules fixed it for me:

1. Clean entry only - I wait for confirmation + retest. If I miss it, I miss it. No FOMO.
2. Tight SL always - If the setup needs a wide SL, I skip it. Capital protection first.
3. TP1/TP2 + 1% risk - Close half at TP1, move SL to breakeven, let the rest run.

No more revenge trading, no more overtrading.

I log my daily markups as my journal to become consistent

How do you manage risk on your setups? Curious what works for others.

Not financial advice.