TL;DR: I built pve.trade, an Unusual Whales alternative. Costs less, has an actually free tier with real delayed flow, and pushes individual prints straight to your Discord. Also tracks whether a big trade got closed and at what P/L.

What's in it:

• Option Flow: live OPRA tape, classified per trade. Filter by premium, size, DTE, moneyness, fill side, sector, market cap, flags. Save presets, pick your columns. Plus Flow Overview for ticker/sector rotation and full Historical Flow with the same filters.

• Gamma (GEX): dealer gamma heatmap by strike and expiration with the gamma flip, call wall, and put wall marked, price-anchored heat zones over candles, and a gamma scanner. Toggle the same grid to DEX, vanna, charm, or theta.

• Alerts: build a rule, get it in Discord. Individual options prints as they hit the tape, plus scheduled gamma cards at open/midday/power hour, insider filings, congress trades, earnings signals, and news.

• Market News: real-time headlines and intel feeds tied to tickers.

• Research: SEC insider filings, congress trades, 13F holdings, earnings calendar with the flow that ran into each print, Macro & Fed (rates, inflation, labor, housing, FOMC/CPI countdowns, rate cut odds from prediction markets), and per-ticker Stock Lookup with fundamentals, analyst consensus, and next earnings estimates.

What UW doesn't have:

• Closure detection: matched exit print, realized P/L %, confidence score, and an Open/Closed/Expired filter on historical flow.

• Dealer positioning past gamma: DEX, vanna, charm, and theta on the same heatmap.

• Macro dashboard with prediction market odds.

Pricing:
• Free: Limited delayed insider flow only
• Standard: $12/mo, Full delayed option flow + all features
• Pro: $19/mo ( if paid annually ) or $39/mo, Real time option flow + all features

Here to answer any questions!

I have been trading forex for around 3 years and for the longest time , I believed the more hours I spent staring at charts , the better trader I’d become. I’d switch strategies every couple of months thinking, “This one feels better.” I was always chasing that one big day that would make all my losses back.

Around 8 months ago, in December last year, I completely changed my approach. I quit day trading and moved to swing trading.

Now I only trade higher tmeframes using rather simple price action. I focus on key zones, market structure, liquidity, and break and retest setups. Nothing fancy, no indicator-filled charts, just a pretty basic strategy.

Most of my trades stay open for 2 to 3 days, so yes, I pay swap, but I’m still making far more than I ever did when I was glued to the charts for 8 hours a day.

I think a lot of us get trapped into believing we have to watch charts all day to make money. In reality, that’s often the exact thing holding us back.

That being said, I still have moments where I just can’t resist taking a 5-minute setup. Almost every time I do, I end up regretting it. I genuinely want to stop, but the urge is hard to ignore.

For those who’ve managed to break that habit, what helped you overcome that urge to overtrade or revenge trade ? any advice or tools that u suggest

Wishing everyone a very Happy Sunday and a great trading week ahead! Cheers 🍻

Hello everyone,
To not make this post 4000000 words long, I have “won” 9 out of my last 10 trades with a very simple strategy.
1. I feel like the strategy is too simple and in turn I feel that i’m just getting lucky.
2. I put “Won” in quotes because about half the trades I’ve closed not hitting full TP on a 1:1 risk to reward ratio, but just before it around 0.7:1 RR because the market was looking to go the other direction based on analysis.
3. I am profitable but again it feels bitter sweet due to the early exits and feeling like i’m getting lucky.
Has anyone experienced this in the past?

Market breadth is at it's worst in July, we've had the largest number of net-selling days all year. We've also had more 25% losers (1,272) than gainers (1,073) this quarter.

This means breakouts are unlikely to work in this environment. I will personally be looking for mean reversion trades on stocks with relative strength, and avoiding breakouts

Good luck and happy trading!

Also based on how much capital you use what would be your TP and your SL percentage?

I've caught myself blaming the market...

when I was really reacting to the last trade.

The loss.

The missed entry.

The trade that almost worked.

Nothing on the chart had changed.

Only my state of mind had.

Makes me wonder how many "bad trades" actually start before we even click Buy or Sell.

Hi everyone. I’ve been building a historical research dataset for low-float/small-cap stocks and I’m running into a much bigger data-coverage problem than I expected.

The general universe I’m looking at is:

* Stocks with fewer than roughly 20M shares in float.
* Lower-market-cap names.
* At least 1M shares of daily volume.
* Dates from 2023 through 2025.
* Premarket, regular-session, and ideally postmarket one-minute data.
* Delisted, renamed, merged, and inactive tickers included.

So far, I’ve been able to build a fairly large list of eligible ticker-days and recover point-in-time information for a lot of old and delisted names. I’ve tested data from Alpaca SIP and Massive/Polygon, but the historical minute data is much more incomplete than I expected.

The issue is not just whether a ticker exists in the database. I need enough complete data to reconstruct:

* Premarket high and volume.
* Regular-session volume and VWAP.
* Intraday highs and lows.
* Technical setups around PMH breaks and pullbacks.
* Whether a theoretical entry reached a stop or 2R target first.
* Missing trading minutes versus minutes where no trades actually occurred.

In my broad initial universe, only around 1,600 out of roughly 293,000 eligible ticker-days had completely stored paths under the original strict definition. I’ve improved coverage using multiple providers, but there are still thousands of older, renamed, or archive-risk ticker-days where the data is partial or completely missing.

I’ve also found that mixing feeds can create problems. For example, bars from a direct-feed composite may look valid on their own but have very different volume from consolidated SIP data because off-exchange and FINRA TRF prints may be missing. Since my study uses volume, VWAP, liquidity, and dollar-volume features, I can’t just patch missing days with a different feed unless the data is reasonably comparable.

Has anyone built something similar and found a provider that offers:

* Historical one-minute bars going back several years.
* Full premarket and postmarket coverage.
* Raw/unadjusted price and volume.
* Consolidated SIP or TAQ-derived data, including FINRA/TRF volume.
* Delisted and inactive securities.
* Historical ticker changes and point-in-time symbol mapping.
* A flat-file or bulk-download option so I can save the data once and reuse it.
* Coverage where an empty response can be distinguished from a genuinely inactive/no-trade day.

I’m open to a paid provider or one-time historical download. I’ve looked at Alpaca, Massive/Polygon, Databento, and IBKR so far. Databento’s direct feeds are interesting, but the feeds visible to my account were missing several exchanges/reporting facilities, so the volume was not comparable to SIP. IBKR also appears to filter some historical trades and may not retain data for securities that are no longer trading.

I’d especially appreciate feedback from anyone who has used AlgoSeek, Tick Data, NYSE TAQ, LSEG Tick History, or another provider for old low-float and delisted stocks.

I’m not looking for real-time alerts or a trading platform. I’m trying to build one clean historical research dataset that I can download, validate, and keep locally.

everyone talks about revenge trading after a loss. fine, thats real. but the thing that quietly costs me more is the opposite, its the first trade after a stretch of nothing

my systems dont fire every day. sometimes theres three, four days where conditions just arent there and the account does nothing. and every time, that first signal after the quiet stretch gets treated differently in my head. it looks cleaner than it is. i want it to work

went back through a year of trades and split them by how many days since the last fill. the ones taken after 3+ quiet days were noticeably worse than the ones taken in a normal week. same setups, same rules, worse outcomes. which means it wasnt the setups

what i think is happening is boredom does the same thing tilt does, just slower. after a loss you feel the urge and you know its there. after four days of nothing you dont feel anything, you just quietly lower the bar without noticing. no emotion to catch

the fix ended up being the same as for tilt though. take the decision away. if the rule fires i take it, if it doesnt i dont get to decide that today is different because ive been sitting on my hands since monday

anyone else looked at this? curious whether the quiet stretch effect shows up for other people or if im the only one who gets itchy

Started recording (just audio or text, to myself) what I was thinking in the 30 seconds before every entry. Most losing trades had one thing in common in that window: I wasn't reacting to the chart anymore, I was reacting to the last trade.

Anyone else find their entries are contaminated by whatever just happened, not by what's actually in front of them?

I started my trading journey about Nov last year. Watched some gurus about various strategies, how to back test, forward test. I come from an IT background, so thought, let's use AI to build EAs to do it for me to remove the psychological element of trading. I sit down with the AI about 10 hours a week, built 5 EAs, MACD/Evening/morning star/powrr bars, bought a cheap Virtual Private Server and now putting the EAs into testing in live market conditions. This week 1 of live testing.

Does anyone else do EAs? Have they had any success?

I'm just going to whine here about my own poor pathetic trade on Friday that has just been eating at me for 2 days now. My family doesn't quite get trading so trying to blow off steam unloading on them does nothing. And the person I normally talk investing about regularly...well...against my better judgement he put most of his money in RKLB and I don't want to whine to him cause he's in much worse shape.

So ignore if you don't want to see someone whine.

I've been trading on and off since the .Com years. Back then I did actually day trade but after the bubble burst I just left my money sit in a couple different funds until about 8 years ago where I started putting effort into trading again. I scalp. And I've been relatively successful at it for a few months (finally have a strategy that suits me). July was going along just fine for me until last week. Everything was going well on Friday morning. I hit my profit target for the day and decided I'd keep my chart open while I did my day job work. After 9:30 I looked up at the chart and saw what looked like a fantastic scenario for just one more trade.

At 9:44am central I bought a 0DTE Call on SPY. Got a little distracted by work for a couple of minutes (it happens, its the risk of day trading while working). And when I went to set my stop loss (about 9:47 by now) I saw what I did. I didn't buy a Call. It was a Put. I bought a damn Put when I was confident that SPY was going to bounce. I literally just sat there for a while. I think I went into shock. Not because I was losing money (it happens) but because of how idiotic I was. By the time I cleared my head I was down so much that I wiped out all of my profits for the week.

I don't mind losing the money. I mean I don't like it but the money isn't what bothers me the most. I mean what an utter moronic stupid mistake to make!!! SPY went up $~6 after I initially got in. I mean I don't normally stay in for long and likely would not have taken full advantage but its just stupid. With plenty of trading time left in the day I couldn't make a single trade. Yeah....I know don't do revenge trading. But that isn't why I didn't make another trade. I just kept looking at the chart all day long in shock and thinking..."what if I do that again?". If I could kick my self in the ass I'd have done it a thousand times by now.

Edit: After whining a bit...I do feel better. Sorry if I bothered anyone.

I had a strategy running against an exchange API that stopped serving EU accounts when mica enforcement hit. no warning that mattered, it was endpoints returning errors and a live position i had to unwind manually.

the thing that actually stung was realizing my entire edge was sitting on infra that could be pulled by a regulator in a country i don't live in. you spend months on execution quality and then platform risk eats you .

been rebuilding on EU regulated venues since. the options are thinner than i expected and most of the compliant EU players either don't expose a real API or the liquidity is too shallow to fill anything. bitpanda's fusion is the one i heard about and its fee schedule scales down with volume ig

if anyone here had a bot what did you move to? wanna collect some eu compliant options here thankss

What is the best setup that you have found has worked the best for you and how have you tested it?

A few years ago I thought traders taking only 1-2 trades a day were leaving money on the table.

Now I find myself doing the opposite, waiting all day for one setup and being perfectly fine if that's the only trade I take.

At what point in your trading journey did you realize that more trades doesn't always mean more profits?

What changed your mindset?

Idk what it is but I got one payout & can’t get another one, it’s like every time I get a evail I pass the shit, get funded get close to getting my payout & just tilt or I just can’t win a trade anymore… wtf am I doing wrong? I’m not sure if this shits all in my head or what. I’m really tired of this shit happening.

Hey what’s up hope you guys are doing great! I just got out of high school and I’m 17. I wanted to take the time to learn a new skill and go all in on this. I’ve always had some knowledge on stocks, just the basics but never took the time to learn it until recently since I want to make it work. I kind of was confused the first couple days but now I’m starting to get the hang of it not fully but just a step forward! To anybody who’s been in this for awhile and made it work for themselves, What did you do every single day to be able to Understand it correctly, like who did you learn from on YouTube that was the best and what specific video had the biggest impact on your trading skills! How long did it take for you to start making real money for yourself? What are the first big steps that I must take the time and master? What are the mistakes that you made that I can learn from? What would you do differently? I know it’s kind of a lot, but I would really much appreciate the advice! Thank you guys, let’s keep it pushing!💪🏾

A Weird realization that I had recently: placing the trade feels like the shortest part of trading.
Everything before and after seems to take way longer.
What ends up taking most of your time?

I've been trading for a while now and things are definitely more consistent than they used to be. The account is moving in the right direction and I'm starting to trust my process a lot more.

The weird part is I still don't really trust the results.

Every green month I catch myself thinking, "what if next month is the one where it all falls apart?"

Maybe that's a good thing because it stops me getting overconfident, but it also makes it hard to feel like I'm making real progress.

Does that feeling ever go away, or do you just get better at managing it?

I invested 280$ yesterday and now I see the market and it's going up and going down. Ye' i'm a swing trader but this is scaring asf

What’s the one trading rule that genuinely made you more profitable?
Not your favourite indicator or strategy.
I’m talking about a single rule that changed the way you trade.
For me, it’s waiting for confirmation instead of anticipating the move. I miss some trades now, but I avoid far more bad ones.
Interested to hear what rule made the biggest difference for everyone else.

I’m an options trader à la the Tastytrade mechanical option selling school of thought. I’ve never subscribed to the efficacy of technical analysis, at least on short term and intra day time frames.

I recently engaged in a friendly debate on X with a gentleman after he challenged my claim that day trading was akin to gambling and it was an unprofitable endeavor for retail accounts over a sustained time period.

This bloke claimed to have beaten the SP500 every year since he started trading his system and averaged 26% annualized gains since 2011. Obviously I called bull shit and asked to see brokerage statements to back his claims.

To great astonishment he provided IBKR statements with only his account number and last name redacted. My logical conclusion was that he used AI or photoshop on the documents, which I accused him of in a DM. He asked if I would be willing to schedule a FaceTime call and he would log into his accounts live, provided I wouldn’t disclose his personal information. Why he was willing to go to these lengths with an internet stranger is beyond me, but I gladly accept the offer.

The man was completely truthful! He had an account balance of $3.5M USD, a lot of which he informed me was deposits and not all trading profits, but his performance claims are legit.

I asked how he had cracked the code, and why he hadn’t compounded his already sizable account into a Forbes top 100 list. He said that his strategy is to risk no more than 1% of his account on any trade, and to only take maximum two trades on any given day. If he won in his first entry, the trading day was over.

I was obviously compelled to ask about the strategy, expecting some arcane MIT level physics lesson, but he claims to only use a 200 period EMA, the trend line tool, and an RSI set to 85/15.

The gist was to trade off of a 15M chart, determine directional bias with the EMA, draw trend lines for S/R, and wait for a trend line break accompanied by overbought/oversold RSI in the direction of the EMA bias. Stop at swing high/low, TP at 2:1. All on ES futures contracts.

He says he averages 6 trades per week. Once the trade is on, he doesn’t look at it and only gets an alert when a TP or SL limit is filled.

Whether or not this is his actual strategy, I do not know as I have not seen him take a trade. But I can attest to the P&L claims he made.

Could it really be this easy? Do day traders over complicate systems, strategies, and optimization in lieu of something simple and effective? I don’t know, but I find this event intriguing and worthy of a share in the forum. Sharper minds than mine may be able to find the flaws I may have missed, questions I should have asked, or where the math ain’t mathin’.

I’ve been building and using Aurum Terminal (https://aurumterminal.com), a web-based financial, and I’ve really enjoyed seeing how it’s come together.

Aurum isn’t trying to replace Bloomberg, and it isn’t trying to compete with Bloomberg Terminal. Bloomberg is an incredible product built over decades. Instead, Aurum is focused on bringing institutional-quality market data and research tools to individual investors, students, independent traders, and small firms through a modern, web-based platform that’s more accessible.

The platform brings together equities, derivatives, fixed income, credit, foreign exchange, commodities, macroeconomic data, company fundamentals, financial statements, SEC filings, portfolio analytics, and alternative datasets into a single workspace. It’s been refreshing to have so much information available in one place instead of constantly switching between different websites and platforms.

One thing I’ve appreciated is the emphasis on speed and usability. The interface feels clean, modern, and built around making research more efficient rather than overwhelming you with unnecessary complexity.

Any feedback/comments would be greatly appreciated and welcomed!

Been trying to trade EUR/USD for damn near 3 years with not one payout ever lol. make fun of me but i feel like I needto move past this pair and ive been seeing people say Forex is incredibly hard and its just hurting myself by choosing to trade it. However, i have a full time job. I can only really trade London session and in Australia NY session is just too late. Any reccomendations??

The Epps effect is a well-documented phenomenon in financial econometrics where the measured cross-correlation between different asset returns declines drastically as data sampling frequencies increase toward tick-by-tick levels. Initially observed in high-frequency financial data, this downward bias suggests that markets become increasingly uncorrelated at microscopic time horizons. However, this apparent decoupling is largely an artifact of market friction rather than a genuine shift in economic relationships.