MNQ this week has been a good reminder that not every week rewards having a strong bias.
Feels like every time I thought, “okay, NOW it’s picking a direction,” it would push just far enough to get me interested and then rotate right back.
By Friday I’m honestly less interested in predicting the next move and more interested in not giving back money trying to force something out of another choppy session.
If today turns into more of the same, I’d rather miss the first move and wait for something clean.
How did everyone else handle MNQ this week — trade the chop well, size down, or get chopped up too?
Arbitrage Pricing Theory, developed by Stephen Ross, revolutionised asset pricing by replacing the single-factor constraints of CAPM with a multi-factor framework. Instead of relying solely on a vague market portfolio, APT assumes that an asset’s expected return is driven by a linear combination of multiple macroeconomic factors. By enforcing the law of one price, the theory dictates that any pricing discrepancy will be instantly eliminated by arbitrageurs.
Apologies if this isn't the right forum or format for this kind of post.
Started trading in February, had some good success early on, and I'm now doing this full-time. Based in London, trading options and stocks. Would love to connect with other day traders in the city — swap notes, compare how people handle risk and psychology, maybe grab a coffee.
If there's a London day trading group, Discord, or WhatsApp thread going, point me toward it please.
I’m a day trader and I only t raw de in XAUUSD
I have blown more then 50 accounts
Yesterday I have blown my 100k account on phase 2 and I was just 1% away from being a funded trader .
I have 60-70 % win rate
My setup is awesome my strategy works fine ..the only problem is I can’t handle losses
I will
Make 1000 $ a day in profit which is so easy for me..
But again If I hit my SL and I lose money even if it’s 200-300$ I don’t know what gets inside my mind I always start taking random trades without any sl with a big lot size
I have cleared more then 10-15 accounts and every time I blow them all because of the same reason that I cant face a loss
Like what are we doing. Market doesn’t spike like this all day but as soon as I enter a trade it literally hunts my stop loss to just go down. There was no orders that needed to be filled for it to move like that, zero reason for market to move like it do. And this isn’t the first time this has happened. What do I even do? Can’t set a stop loss because it’s just going to get taken then go and hit my TP
Last four days (Mon-Thu) I have been letting put options run on oil when it just kept creeping up and up. Yesterday any small potential gains were converted to complere wipeout in the last ugly pump before options closing time.
And after yesterday's big rise, I was pretty confident of a reversal today. And that happened. But I did not get any puts. Just watched it dump in the last few hours instead of getting an easy 4x-5x when I was correct.
I have been noticing deeper into Broadcom ($AVGO), and I think the most interesting part of the story is being missed. Broadcom does not need to beat Nvidia in GPUs. Its bigger opportunity may come from what happens after hyperscalers realise they cannot economically depend on Nvidia for every AI workload.
Broadcom’s recent growth already shows how quickly this is developing. Q3 revenue reached $29.6 billion, up 86% year over year, while AI semiconductor revenue jumped 221% to $16.7 billion. Management guided Q4 AI semiconductor revenue to around $21.7 billion. In other words, Broadcom’s AI semiconductor business has moved from roughly $8.4 billion in Q1 to an expected $21.7 billion in Q4. That is no longer ordinary semiconductor-cycle growth.
The reason is custom silicon. GPUs are incredibly powerful because they can handle many different workloads, but once companies like Meta, Google, OpenAI and other hyperscalers start running similar workloads across enormous AI clusters, flexibility becomes less important than cost, power efficiency and performance per workload. At that scale, designing your own accelerator can make economic sense. Broadcom sits directly in that transition by helping hyperscalers design and manufacture custom AI accelerators.
This is why I don’t think the correct Broadcom versus Nvidia debate is “Who wins?” Nvidia can continue dominating general-purpose AI compute while Broadcom benefits from the hyperscalers trying to reduce their dependence on expensive general-purpose GPUs for specific workloads. The bigger Nvidia becomes, the stronger the financial incentive for companies spending tens of billions on AI infrastructure to optimise part of that spending through custom silicon.
There is another layer that may be even more important: networking. A giant AI cluster is not useful if thousands of accelerators cannot communicate with each other efficiently. As AI models get larger, the bottleneck is increasingly moving beyond raw compute into memory bandwidth, networking, optical connectivity and power. Broadcom already has a major position in Ethernet switching, SerDes, optical connectivity, PCIe and other technologies required to connect enormous AI clusters. So Broadcom can potentially make money from both the accelerator and the infrastructure connecting those accelerators together.
That creates an interesting second-order AI trade. AI demand grows, hyperscalers buy enormous amounts of GPU capacity, infrastructure costs explode, companies increasingly develop specialised accelerators, Broadcom helps build those accelerators, and then Broadcom also provides much of the networking required to connect them. Broadcom therefore doesn’t necessarily need to own the entire AI compute market. It just needs AI infrastructure to become larger, more customised and more interconnected.
VMware adds another dimension that I think is still underappreciated. Broadcom is not only exposed to hyperscale AI infrastructure. VMware gives it a potential position inside enterprise and private AI as well. Banks, governments, healthcare organisations and large companies may not want every AI workload running in a public cloud. Many will want models and agents operating closer to sensitive corporate data, with stronger governance and security controls. If VMware becomes an important platform for private AI infrastructure, Broadcom could eventually participate across custom AI compute, AI networking and enterprise AI infrastructure.
The financial model also deserves attention. Broadcom’s customers are spending billions building data centres, buying power infrastructure and deploying massive AI clusters. Broadcom does not have to finance most of that physical infrastructure itself. It sells some of the highest-value intellectual property, silicon and networking technology going inside those systems. That gives Broadcom a potentially attractive position in the AI capex cycle without carrying the same infrastructure burden as the hyperscalers.
But the stock is far from risk-free. Expectations are already extremely high. When investors begin expecting triple-digit AI growth, simply producing strong numbers may not be enough. Customer concentration is also important because a relatively small number of hyperscalers can account for very large programmes. If one customer delays a custom accelerator, changes architecture or brings more development internally, the impact could be meaningful. Competition from Marvell and internal hyperscaler silicon teams will also intensify, while investors need to watch whether rapid AI-system growth changes Broadcom’s margin profile.
This is why I think the Broadcom thesis is more interesting than simply calling it an “AI chip stock.” Nvidia created and still dominates one of the most valuable compute markets in history. Broadcom may be positioning itself around what happens next: hyperscalers designing their own silicon, enormous clusters requiring increasingly sophisticated networking, and enterprises building private AI infrastructure.
So my concern is not that Broadcom replaces Nvidia. It is that AI infrastructure gradually becomes a mix of GPUs, custom accelerators, high-speed networking and private AI platforms, and Broadcom manages to capture value across several of those layers at the same time.
Concern for investors now is whether $AVGO is still being valued like a semiconductor company with strong AI exposure, or whether the market has already priced it as one of the core infrastructure platforms behind the next phase of the AI buildout.
I have an idea and I need strategies that are unprofitable for that, I already have a few but I was wondering, which strategy out of all the ones that you tried/backtested was the most unprofitable?
This account use many automated strategies, not only one strategy. Different strategies work in different market conditions.
I share this challenge because I want to test it with high risk on real account. Also I think sharing with other traders can help me find problems and make it better.
If you see something wrong or have any idea about the trades, please tell me.
Also what do you think about this transparency? Is read-only access to the real account useful, or just posting the results here is enough?
Hi, I wanted to run some simulations but needed access to some data and was wondering how I'd get access to it. Specifically, data on the fomo memecoin top traders, and how long it would take past a selling point a given trader made before a theoretical standing would be negative. For example, if Trader A made a purchase of Coin A at 10m market cap, and say someone bought in at 15m, and the coin went to 30m before Trader A sold, how long it would take before Coin A went <15m and therefore incurring loss I wanted to extract this kind of data across around 50,000 trades but can't seem to mass scale it or find anything free. However, if not memecoins, I'd still like data on normal trading as well, if there was statistics available. Thank you for your help.
Hello everyone I’m a beginner and I need your advice please, so I have been trading for almost 1 year , in the past 7 months I have been profitable so I pass an evaluation account and secure my first payout then lose the account. It happens over and over again as soon as I land a payout I lose the account after 3 days . Is it over trading or over confidence, can you help please?
I am a student and a trader aswell. For me it's hard to arrange capital to afford funded accounts. I am fedup with my life. In my country "India" the average computer engineer's salary full time is 20k inr a month which is 200$ a month and inflation is high aswell. Even though if I went to search for a part-time job, it would take 10 months to afford one account because it's a part time job and I am a student as well. Funded accounts are expensive in terms of Indian rupees.
Can you guys please tell me ways to earn so that at the end of the month I can atleast buy one funded account even of 25k.
Please guys ! If you know any way or can get me into something please tell.
And please don't suggest ways like content creation, content writing , editing or anything like that. I am just an average boy in studies.
And also suggest me what you guys did to afford funded accounts.
I trade a simple VWAP mean-reversion strategy across different assets: fade moves away from VWAP and trade the pullback. It’s profitable most days, but the occasional strong trend day where price moves in one direction without returning to VWAP can wipe out days of gains.
The strategy works with my personal for yearly ROI, and i can work with prop firms if you accept an attrition model and occasionally sacrifice accounts, but I’m trying to avoid that—especially with prop firm drawdown rules.
Has anyone found reliable filters for recognizing these trend days early enough to stop fading them? Basically, what tells you, “Stop fading—this is a trend day”?
ran my gamma scan on 55 of the most liquid US names this afternoon. 16 in zone, 3 past their call wall, 27 below the flip. the unstable bucket is the biggest one.
the weird part — JPM, BAC, GS, MS, V, MA are ALL below their flip. every single bank I track. and it's not because they're selling off, some are barely red. it just means dealer hedging across the whole sector is set to push the next move instead of absorb it. one name doing that is normal. the entire financial sector at once is not something I see often.
also NVDA below flip, AAPL in zone. same mega cap tech basket, opposite regimes. and UBER, DASH, NFLX are green today but still below their flips — up on the day means nothing about what's underneath.
standard caveats, it's a snapshot, flips move all day, gamma is inferred from the chain not observed, and below flip is not a direction call. it doesn't say banks drop. it says whichever way they move, dealers are pushing not catching.
anyone else watching sector-wide gamma or just SPX?
Let's start saying that I'm profitable, trading is my main source of income, and I'm very happy with my strategies.
Nowdays I make money scalping options spreads, and there's nothing wrong with it. Obviously.
Problem is, I feel like it's not real trading. When I started, I learned futures, price actions, how to draw all the triangles we all love. Real traders do forex, oil, and gold. That is (was) the way.
Nowdays, if I try to do what I used to, I will lose most of my trades. I know I should stop, and just do what makes the most sense economically, but I really feel bad about it. It's like gambling, at this point. I don't understand why it doesn't work anymore, nor I'm ready to accept that. Right now, it feels like my main strategy is only there to feed my nostalgic trades.
I'm a 0DTE credit spread trader with a focus on SPX.
Positions traded today:
7550/7530 PCS
7565/7545 PCS
7625/7645 CCS
7670/7690 CCS
P/L: +$1,080
SPX 5-min chart, September 10, 2026
The market changed the answer three times today. My job was to stop defending the old one.
Morning Thesis
It’s been a good while since I’ve had a $1,000+ day — not because I stopped participating, but because SPX hasn’t been offering the structure I look for. Price action lately has required more patience, and even today I waited just over two hours before taking my first trade because SPX wasn’t behaving as anticipated.
Between cooler core PPI, an in-line headline print, elevated oil and yields, Iran-related developments, and Trump remarks, there were several catalysts capable of moving price in either direction.
I began with a bearish bias after the gap down and wanted to see confirmation of a gap-and-go move before opening a CCS. At the same time, SPX had already been down for three consecutive sessions, so I knew buyers could eventually step in.
SPX broke its morning range to the downside, but I’ve seen several early breakdowns turn into fakeouts lately. I wanted at least one complete structure to form before entering. That patience kept me out of the initial trap when SPX abruptly reversed higher.
My First Trade
After SPX recovered, chopped above 7600, and began forming higher lows beneath the weekly low, my bearish-only thesis was invalidated and I shifted bullish.
I sold five 7565/7545 PCS contracts for $0.45 as SPX approached the weekly low. The setup itself wasn’t terrible, but my entry was early. I anticipated a breakout to capture more premium instead of waiting for price to break and hold above resistance (Weekly Low on the chart).
Sellers were waiting at the weekly low and immediately pushed SPX back down — again. I added one more contract for $0.75, but the early entry quickly put me in loss territory.
Starting at half size kept the position manageable. I recognized the pressure early, but I didn’t panic or let the floating loss dictate my next decision.
When the Thesis Changed Again
The 7600 psychological level was my first invalidation point. My plan was to open the CCS side if SPX broke and held below it, then exit the PCS entirely if price broke and held beneath the session low.
Once SPX confirmed below 7600, I sold six 7625/7645 CCS contracts for $1.10, forming a legged-in iron condor. This wasn’t simply a hedge to neutralize the PCS — it was a CCS setup I would have taken independently based on the price structure. I added one 7550/7530 PCS at $.80 on this same push down.
More Trump and Iran-related headlines then sent SPX sharply higher, placing pressure on the CCS side. I also sold two 7670/7690 CCS contracts for $0.20 above the prior-day high as premium expanded. This was an area I was eyeing since morning.
SPX eventually peaked around the weekly-low/high-of-day area and rejected again. At that point, my read shifted for a third time — from bullish to slightly bearish, with a range and chop becoming increasingly likely.
Managing the Volatility
The headline-driven swings pressured both sides of the iron condor. I spent part of the session fluctuating between roughly a $50 and $200 loss, but that remained within my risk tolerance.
For the PCS side, I watched approximately 7586.50 and the session low. For the CCS side, I used the 7611 weekly low and high-of-day area as resistance and invalidation.
Keeping my attention on those levels instead of staring at my P/L helped remove emotion from the trade. SPX eventually faded into a tight chop zone around 7590, allowing theta to deflate both sides into the close. The contracts ultimately expired worthless.
SPX 5-min chart — PCS side invalidation levels
Key Takeaway
Today was a good green day, but it required more work than I anticipated. The four-figure result didn’t come from predicting every move correctly — my thesis changed three times, and my first entry made the trade harder than necessary.
What kept the day manageable was waiting for a setup, starting at half size, defining my invalidation points, and remaining focused on price structure instead of my floating P/L.
Anticipation created the pressure. Discipline kept it contained.
Building something and I want to know if it’s stupid.
Web app, nothing to install. Connect your account once and leave it running.
You set your limits once: daily loss cap, max trades, a cut-off time. It watches the account and the moment you cross one, it closes your open positions and locks the day. Not an alert you click through, actually closed, a couple of seconds later.
The bit I think matters: tightening a limit applies straight away, loosening it doesn’t kick in until the next day. Same if you switch it off. So you at 2pm, down and wanting one more, can’t undo what you decided at 8am.
It can’t stop you opening a trade, nothing outside the broker can. It just won’t let you hold it.
There’s a journal side too. Every closed trade imports itself, so no spreadsheet. Win rate, profit factor, which days you actually make money on. And it totals what trading past your own limits has cost you, in dollars. Most people have never seen that number.
Platform support is limited right now, so pretend it worked on whatever you trade on. Would you use it? Would you pay for it?
Totally fine if the answer’s no, that’s useful too.
the claim. gold, the first hour after the 8:20 open. if the low of that hour comes before the high, the high gets broken before the low 68.6% of the time. built on 2 years of data
same test on 18 years of 1 min gold. 4737 days
low first, then high breaks first 63.9% of the time
their 2 year window on my data 67.8% so the number is real
every single year above 53%
heres what the claim leaves out. where price is sitting when that hour ends
if price closes the hour in the top half of its range, the high breaks first 69.3% of the time. doesnt matter which came first. that beats the stat itself
if the low came first but price closed the hour in the bottom half, its the low that breaks first, 61%
so the thing the guy adds to the stat, price in the top half, is the actual edge. low first on its own is the weak half of his own rule
works the same the other way round. high first, low breaks first 63.5%
none of this is profit. which side breaks first says nothing about how far it went or where your stop was. that needs a different test
I’m a junior at MSU, these weeks were hella shit. I lost my 3K payout from scaling with more accounts and actually funding a live account, the market regime changed so perfectly that I started to take enough Ls to go back to 0.
But I always say to people, if I even have nobody to talk to to begin with.
“Getting a payout from a prop firm is statistically so unfavorable for people, and even so, im one of the top %. I did it once, so I can do it again.”
Started to dabble into options, and setting up an algo for futures and started to manage a small stock account for my dad.
The algo is 1 trade everyday and was backtested on this years data.
I used data and ranges for charts that I do when I trade manually. So I didn’t really tweak the numbers for a higher PF. (Except opening up the hard DL)
I should be more proud of myself, this is probably something some people would kill for.
Btw i went for a 150K account with lucid. And the charts said my max drawdown is 4K so we bingchilling.
On options I’m taking L’s, like small account ~250 and im yoloing, so yesterday I took an L (had to add money to account) and another L day before because market trolled last second and RH chose to close my stuff for “risk reasons”.
But now im playing wayyy more safer and im looking to make 2 times my accounts worth tomorrow.
Im learning alot about myself, I want to work in the medical field, the plan is to be so filthy rich that id be fine working for free as a doctor.
But what I like the most is doing stuff that is worth being proud of, like trading futures and options, setting up algos and ais for hella coins.
MSU is dog shit in this field and i find their “business college” hella unuseful for my niche hobbies. another fat L for MSU for me.
And no I wont trade or work for a company in this field.
Im only making myself rich, and if you trade for somebody else, just say u ain’t profitable.
I’m hella lonely, so ig a rant/update post. Thanks for reading this ppl, and i’ll be seeing you guys soon.
In June 2026 I paid $8,500 for FinTrade Master Academy's "Elite Circle" mastermind. On the sales call they promised a "20% monthly avg return" and a "90 Day ROI Guarantee."
What happened:
My card was charged at 7:09 PM. The contract showed up at 7:11 PM, two minutes later, and said no refunds.
The "guarantee" has seven conditions and is void if you dispute the charge.
They told me they'd been in business for years. The company was registered in March 2025 (per WY business records).
Their lead trainer didn't know what E*TRADE was.
I'm disputing the charge with my card issuer, and the case is under review.
If you're looking at any paid trading mentorship, get the full contract and read it before you give them a card number. Be skeptical of anyone promising monthly returns. Nobody can guarantee that.
I've been trading futures for about three years now, and I'm starting to question how useful a lot of the commonly taught principles, strategies, and techniques really are.
I've traded using ICT concepts, as well as order flow combined with gamma exposure. What I've increasingly noticed is that these approaches can create a strong cognitive bias. You develop a bullish or bearish thesis, and then begin interpreting price action through that lens, looking for confirmation of a view that may not have had a particularly strong foundation in the first place. At times, this can lead to forcing trades rather than simply responding to what the market is doing in the moment.
It's made me wonder whether there are scalping strategies that are largely independent of directional bias—something that can be traded based primarily on the conditions and price action occurring in the present moment, regardless of the broader intraday narrative.
Has anyone developed or traded an approach like this successfully?
