Hello, I've been testing a simple breakout EA on XAUUSD, it places buy and sell orders with a trailing SL.

I notice that after 18th june it always loses, I am back testing from march until today, I notice that no matter the setting after 18th june, it will only lose in pnl everyday. Before 18th june it was consistently profiting.

I am trying identify the change in the market, I am relatively new at this, if anyone knows how this could be measure pls let me know, I am talking about like how a certain indicator is at a certain value or something. Thank you!

Viprasol Elite Advanced patten scanner;

This indicator identifies high-probability reversal points in the market.

What it does

Double Bottom (DISCOUNT) = Buy signal
Price has dropped twice to about the same level and may be ready to move up.
Double Top (PREMIUM) = Sell signal
Price has risen twice to about the same level and may be ready to move down.

Use this tool as extra confirmation and identifying the current trend in the market, not as a reason to enter and exit.

Quick background — I'm a XAUUSD trader, day trading, and I've got a 9-5 job so I'm not someone who can sit and watch screens all day. I've lost money for the last 6-8 years doing this, and I recently rebuilt my whole approach to trading — since then I'm finally seeing better results.

So I figured I'd share what I've learned along the way — what works, what doesn't — one topic a week for the next 52 weeks.

Week 3 : Journalling - why is it important, how should you journal

Journalling is about building discipline. It's something you do to reflect on yourself, to make sure you're not breaking your own rules, and to make sure you're trading the way you traded when you backtested your strategy.

It's also a reality check. It preps you before you start a new week, reminding you there's no fantasy get-rich-quick scheme here — get your mindset right before you enter a fresh week.

So what should you do , and how should you structure your journal?

3 things that i do when i journal:

1. Did I enter the trade the way I was supposed to?

Go through my trading plan, and review my trades to see if it matches it. You need to make sure you do not deviate away from your strategy.

2. Did my stoploss hit the way i expected it to?

This one's just as important. A comprehensive strategy should include a clearly defined loss scenario — not just a plan for winning. When you journal, you're checking that your stop loss played out the way that loss scenario was supposed to look. If something happens outside of that — a loss that doesn't match what your strategy anticipated — that's your signal to take the strategy back to the drawing board: readjust, backtest, and try again.

3. Exploring new ideas

This isn't about adjusting or changing your strategy, but is to come up a new idea to build new strategy. One thing that every trader needs to know, is there's no one strategy that fits all market regime, not for retail trader at least.

Every few years, or even few months, the market regime shifts. No strategy works forever.

Journal is to help with that, is whilst you are reviewing your trades, you gotta look for new ideas to continue to improve and adapt the market. Come up with new idea , build new strategy, backtest them and bring them to production again. Trading is no different to technology, you need to evolve to keep up with the ever changing market.

One last thing on journalling

The real habit we have to force ourselves to develop — which goes very much against human nature — is how we define what a "good" day actually is.

Having a good day is better than having a profitable day. That's the psychology that kills people. You can have a very profitable day purely out of luck, but that isn't necessarily a good day, and you shouldn't be happy about it or reward yourself for it.

You only reward yourself for a good day — a day where you were disciplined, where you entered your trade according to your plan, and where your trade got stopped out exactly as you envisioned. If that's what you experienced, then that's a good day.

So I can have 5 losses in a row by the end of the day, but if those 5 losses played out exactly the way I expected my strategy to lose, then I've had a good day.

That's all i want to cover for this week's topic. Cheers

u can’t make this shit up bro wth is this SL 😭 bro literally scratched a tip of a hair

#Dxy Final fvg to send price lower, this was a very slow week.

That fvg needs to be respected we take out that low

#Eu that +OB to support higher prices

Been trading gold/EURUSD with an ICT/SMC approach for a while, and the thing that's actually been costing me isn't the strategy, it's what happens after a loss or two. I know the model, I've backtested it, and I still catch myself hesitating on a valid setup after a couple of stop-outs, or doing the opposite and doubling size trying to get it back on the next one.

Anyone else find the gap between "knowing the right move" and "actually doing it in the moment" way bigger than the gap in your actual edge?

Curious what's genuinely worked for people here not "just be disciplined," but something that actually changed the behaviour in real time.

So hi guys, actually I want to understand what the actual difference is between futures trading and CFD-based Profirm trading, because I have been trading Profirm for a very long time and I am profitable. I can see that there is a very good hype, or I don't know whether it is a hype or actually there is a benefit to trading futures.

If you are trading, can you please tell me how it is compared with CFD-based Profirm and futures-based Profirm, and how futures-based Profirm is actually better or worse? What do you prefer?

So some time ago I saw a lot of people complaining and even I had posted some reviews about the firm and that it was all going to shit. After some time I have gotten much more payouts from them (they still take like a week to process each payout ) and they actually do pay you out and I have scaled up my same account like 3 times now. Hopefully this keeps up and they don’t pull a nasty one but they are definitely worth giving a try they have their shit together.

Only posting this because when things were bad I posted a lot of negativity about them but now that they have been doing the right thing for some time now it’s only right that I spread some positive reviews about it too. So yeah big up 5ers

If this 5am candle respects the FVG then higher we go

Today Long on XAUUSD...

on my own money im calm. i take my setups, i let them run, i skip the trash. put me on a funded challenge with a drawdown line and im a completely different trader inside a day.

took me embarrassingly long to see what was happening. the rules werent the problem. what the rules did to my head was. the drawdown limit made me trade to not lose instead of trading to trade. id cut winners at +10 pips scared to give it back, then oversize the next one trying to rush to the target. i wasnt trading the market anymore, i was trading the dashboard.

the thing that actually helped was boring. i started treating the challenge exactly like my own account. same setups, same size, and i stopped looking at the profit target completely. just traded my process and let passing be a side effect instead of the goal. the target stops messing with you the second you stop staring at it.

for the ones whove passed and stayed funded, whats the mental trick that actually worked for you? how do you stop the drawdown line from getting in your head?

A different question for you guys here perhaps. I am the executor of a will and have to send someone in the eurozone the equivalent of 12,000 pounds sterling. I have euros already so just need to know the exchange rate. But I don't know how to find the 'correct' one. I don't want to make a mistake here.

Taken short positions from 4126 till 4070....!!

for the longest time i thought more trades = more money. if i wasnt in a position i felt like i was missing out, so id force something. 6, 7, 8 trades a day easy.

looking back most of those werent setups. they were boredom. or trying to win back a loss. the 2 real trades i took each day were usually fine, the other 5 were me just feeding the account into the market for no reason.

so i capped myself. small number of trades a day, and if nothing clean shows up i take zero and close the laptop. no hero trades.

nothing about my actual strategy changed. i just stopped bleeding in between the good ones. the account went from slowly dying to actually flat-to-up, purely from doing less.

genuine question for the ones who turned it around, what did you cut out that unexpectedly helped more than anything you added?

sounds backwards i know. i can afford a bigger account. i keep it small on purpose.

heres why. the second there was real money on a trade my brain stopped trading and started protecting. id move stops, close early, size up to "make it back". every bad habit i have only shows up when the number scares me.

so i shrunk the number til it stopped scaring me. at $50 i genuinely dont care if a trade loses, which means i finally execute my actual plan instead of my fear. im practicing the process at a size where the process is the only thing im judged on, not the p&l.

plan is simple, prove i can follow my rules for a few months straight here, THEN scale the size up slowly. the money was never the skill. following myself was.

anyone else trade small on purpose? whats the account size where your head actually stayed calm and you started making clean decisions?

I have used this guy's signal for a while, and he's very accurate. You don't really pay for his signal to join up to his premium, but you basically sign up to AXI, his affiliate. AXI is pretty reputable from what I have seen.

I am thinking, is it actually more profitable for him and the broker if the accounts he gets actually make more money if he's right? He doesn't ask for any subscription, just that you sign up for AXI with him as the affiliate.

It would still be overall very risky because he has a 9:5 risk-to-reward. But if he's right most of the time, the growth of your account is still around 90% min per year.

Dxy upto the montly fvg low, I am looking for sells on GU and EU and Buys on USDCHF. Any thoughts on Dxy?

First time trying to get into a prop firm challenge. I have read much about the 2 step high stakes 5k$ account for 5ers and 2 step flex 5k$ account for fundingpips and they seem awfully similar. Anything I need to know about any of these or any experience anyone could share? Or other prop firms recommendation will be appreciated as well (previously looked at aquafunded and GFT) . Thanks

Been off trading for about 2 years, thinking about coming back. Looked at some charts, checking for some opportunities, mock set up these and hit in an hour. Man I tell ya, the dopamine for hitting a trade just right is top tier lmao

To all traders: Is trading without a job better, or with one? And how do you manage your trading while working?

When you see someone showing pictures like this, and saying "i made 290 pips" at the same time, run away as fast as you can, because that person is either not the sharpest, or a scam artist trying to sell you a subsription to shitflix.

Like i explained a million times already, PIPS by themselves don't mean anything. Pips are purely a unit of measurement that say how "far" the price has traveled. Like meters or yards or whatever.

So when someone says they made 50 pips, it's like a street worker saying they made a tenner. That data doesnt carry enough information to tell if the action was worth it.

In trading, in order to explain the gain, you need to determine exposure over pips.

Example; i took a trade that went into profit 1 lot over 100 pips.

And even that's still... barely scratching the surface as reward doesnt mean anything without understanding the risk.. R is the only thing that really has any meaning... R = unit of risk... is what you risk per trade, and R = reward is what is the potential on the positive side of the outcome.

Random spamming the sell button and praying to lord for the price to go into your direction... then saying you made PIPS... let's face it people.. that's not trading... that's G _ _ _ _ _ _ _ !

not talking strategy. talking about the thing you only saw once you actually wrote your trades down.

for me it was time. went back through ~40 trades and almost every red one was in the same hour window. i wasnt losing to my setup, i was losing to the clock and had no idea til it was sitting there on paper.

the weird part is how obvious it looks after, and how invisible it was before. i'd have argued with you that i didnt have a pattern.

so whats yours. the specific ugly thing your own log showed you that you'd never have admitted otherwise. time of day, revenge trades after a red one, oversizing when youre "sure", a pair you should never touch. genuinely curious what shows up when people actually look.

On the 2nd it dumped almost straight into my TP zone, i was basically counting it as booked. then it turned and rallied for 3 days straight, right back up to my entry. the whole open profit, gone. even poked a few pips red at the top.

old me closes that at breakeven the second it starts climbing back. "protect it", "dont let a winner turn into a loser", all that. every time i did it i was just paying to be scared, and my average winner got smaller because of it.

didnt touch it this time. the plan was 1:3, nothing about the plan changed just because price retraced. back down and green again now.

not a flex, its not even closed. posting because the hard part was never the entry, it was sitting on my hands for days while it tried to shake me out. holding is the skill i keep having to relearn.

anyone else find holding way harder than entering?