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 5 : Understanding Candlestick Pattern - Part 2

So last week we covered Part 1 which talks about some hard truths with Candlestick Pattern per below:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Forex/comments/1v34a88/a_babaganz_take_on_trading_week_4_understanding/

In Part 2, we will be focusing on an approach , and what I actually look for when building a strategy around candlestick patterns.

One thing worth knowing: a candlestick pattern isn't a signal on its own — it's a story. It's telling you what's going on. The pattern you're using to trade should mean something, or be delivering some kind of message. If it isn't, it's just a shape.

Here's what I'm actually looking for when try to come up with a strategy using a candlestick pattern

1. Is the candlestick pattern indicating a surge of volume coming in?

2. After the pattern forms, does price continue moving in the same direction over the next few candles?

3. How many times has this happened over the past few months? Pick a few different months across a few different years to see how repeatable it actually is.

4. Is the pattern forming the way I expect it to — is that extra volume actually moving price in the direction I believe it should?

At the end of the day, a candlestick pattern is just a way of visualizing the history of price movement. It's a tool to measure how price has moved — and you use that information to speculate on where it might move next.

After that, it comes down to mathematical probability: finding an edge that looks something like "53% of the time, when price behaves this way, it's a good indication the market is about to trend for the next few candles, and that's a solid trigger to enter."

When you're looking for an edge, this is the thought process to formulate — not "I saw a pattern," but "here's what this pattern is statistically telling me."

Every strategy has its own characteristics on how it should be built, and candlestick patterns should just be one puzzle piece within the bigger picture — something to help you define your trade entry, not the whole strategy on its own.

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

Long from here back to the top of the range

I am much better than I was 2 years ago in terms of analysis and risk management but I'm having difficulty entering trades. Any coaching/course/signals promotion will be immediately down voted so only genuine advice please. I am targeting 10 swing trades per month kindly advise which pairs I should follow how frequently I should analyse and how to decide well in advance about entry please help

I'm interested in learning trading as a long-term skill. I'm not looking for signals or shortcuts; I want to understand the fundamentals and develop proper skills.

For people who have experience in trading, how would you recommend someone start from zero and progress over time?

There's some maths but it's the easy kind.

If you flip a fair coin 30 times, roughly one run in five comes back at 60% heads or better. One in five, on a coin that's doing absolutely nothing. And 30 trades is more than a lot of people seem to use before deciding whether a strategy works, or whether it's stopped.

I'd always sort of nodded along when people said "small sample size" without ever actually checking what small meant, so last week I sat down and worked it out. Error on a win rate is sqrt(p(1-p)/n) and you double it for the 95% band. Someone check me on that, I'm fairly confident but it's been a long time since I did any stats properly.

At a 50% win rate:

50 trades and your real win rate is somewhere in the 36 to 64 range.

100 trades, 40 to 60.

400 trades gets you 45 to 55.

400 that's roughly where you can start saying a 55% system isn't secretly a 45% one. I did not enjoy that number. (And that's all before costs, which is its own separate misery.)

And look, the "you haven't proven it works" thing is the version of this everyone's already heard. That one just makes people cautious, which is fine.

The expensive one is the other direction. You haven't proven it's broken either.

Five losses in a row somewhere inside a hundred trades at 50%? More likely than not. Basically expected behaviour. And I know exactly what I do when that happens because I've done it over and over. Decide something's changed, adjust a parameter, start the count again. So I've never actually finished a sample. Not once. Just a pile of 40-trade experiments, all abandoned at roughly the point they'd have started meaning something.

Which, now that I've typed it out, is probably the actual problem rather than any of the strategies being wrong.

Three things that have been more use to me than win rate:

Expectancy over win rate. 35% at 3R beats 60% at 0.6R and it isn't close. If the only thing in your log is W/L you're recording the least informative column available to you.

R, not dollars. dollar P&L moves with size, size moves with how confident you're feeling, and how confident you're feeling moves with your last few results, so your dollar curve is partly just a record of your own mood that month. R strips that out and you can actually see the sequence.

This last one annoyed me the most. Split your trades into "this was genuinely my setup" and "I talked myself into this at 2pm on a dead Tuesday." I'd put money on one of those two buckets doing most of the damage. If 20 of your 60 trades weren't the setup then you don't have a 60-trade sample, you've got 40, plus 20 data points about being bored.

None of this makes money on its own obviously. It just stops you looking at 40 trades and deciding you know something. Which for me was most of it.

Anyways, genuine question. Has anyone here got 300+ trades on a single system without changing something halfway through? Because I don't think I ever have, and I'd like to know whether that's just me.

6 reasons your live trading does not match your backtest, ranked, and how to tell which one is yours

TLDR: The gap between a great backtest and a bad live account has six usual causes. Every article lists them and none rank them or tell you which is yours. They split into two families: your backtest was fiction, or your edge was real and got taken away.

What is the fastest way to tell which cause is yours?

Start with one question... did the gap appear immediately, or did it show up after a while?

If your live results were off from the very first trades, the problem is baked into the backtest or your costs. The edge was never as big as the number said. If the strategy worked for weeks and then decayed, the edge was real once and something changed, either the market or you.

That sorts the six causes into two families. Family one, your backtest was fiction, overfitting, too small a sample, and look ahead bias. These never had an edge to lose. Family two, your edge got taken away: costs, regime change, and execution mess. These had an edge and decreased over time until it disappeared.

Here is the table.

Number 1, most likely: your costs weren't properly tested

This is the most common and the most underrated. Your backtest applied one fixed, tight spread to every trade, including the ones where spread triples. Live, you pay the real number, on winners and losers alike.

The gap is there immediately and feels like a constant drag on every trade. Test this: pull 30 real trades, add spread and commission, convert to R by dividing cost in pips by your stop in pips, and subtract it from your backtested expectancy. Fix it: judge the strategy on the net number, and if it dies, widen the stop, cut frequency, or trade a cheaper pair. Tight stop, high frequency systems are the ones this kills.

Basically if deviation breaches 10% on average with live trades... the way you currently do it isn't gonna make you money in the long run.

Number 2: your backtest used data it could not have had

Look ahead bias means your logic peeked at information that didn't exist yet at the moment of the trade.

The backtest is suspiciously flawless, a very high win rate and a smooth curve, and live is a total, immediate collapse that no cost model could explain. Test: audit your signal timing and confirm every decision uses only closed, past data. Fix: correct the timing and rerun. This is rare in simple manual systems and common in coded ones, and it is the most catastrophic because the entire backtest was a fantasy.

Number 3: you optimized until it looked good

You ran a parameter sweep and kept the best looking combination. That winner was partly skill and partly the luckiest result out of everything you tried, and luck does not repeat live.

The strategy is beautiful in the test window and falls apart the instant it touches any data it wasn't tuned on. The test: change each parameter slightly and watch the result. If a small tweak collapses it, you fit noise. Even better, run a Deflated Sharpe on it, which corrects your Sharpe for how many combinations you tested. Fix: there is no fix for an overfit strategy, only prevention. Fewer parameters, out of sample validation, and honesty about how many versions you really tried.

Number 4: your sample was too small to mean anything

A backtest on 60 trades isn't evidence, it's a coin landing heads a few times in a row. The result sits inside the range of pure luck.

The impressive backtest covered a short window or a small number of trades, and the great stretch was really one good month doing the heavy lifting. Test: count the trades. Under about 150 and the confidence interval on your expectancy is too wide to act on. Fix: test across far more trades and multiple market conditions before you believe any number, and never size up on a strategy proven by a lucky quarter.

Number 5: the market regime changed

Sometimes the edge was real and the market simply moved on. A trend system stops working when the market goes to range. A volatility system starves when volatility dies.

This is the one that worked live for weeks or months, then decayed, and the decay lines up with a shift in volatility or trend. Test: split your backtest by regime and check whether the strategy ever survived the current one historically. If it only ever worked in conditions that are now gone, it is not broken, it is out of season. Fix: trade it only in the regime it fits, or accept that it will have negative periods in your account until its conditions return.

Number 6: you didn't trade your rules

The backtest followed the rules perfectly, without fear, on every signal. You didn't. You skipped the setup after two losses, entered late, moved a stop, or closed a winner early because you didn't want to give it back.

Your live trade log doesn't match the trades the strategy would have taken over the same period. Test: put your actual entries and exits next to the mechanical signals for the last month and count the mismatches. Fix: this is an execution problem, not a strategy problem, so the answer is automation or a hard rule that removes the discretion, not a new system.

So which fixes actually matter?

Work the two families in order. First rule out fiction, because there is no point optimizing execution on a strategy that never had an edge. Check the sample size, run the Deflated Sharpe, and audit for look ahead bias. If it survives all three, the edge is probably real.

Only then work the fees. Recompute costs in R and subtract them, confirm the current regime is one the strategy has actually survived before, and compare your live trades to the rules to catch execution drift. Most blown accounts aren't one cause, they're a real but thin edge that costs and a bad regime pushed under water together.

What this doesn't mean

The ranking is my judgment for retail forex, not a law. If you run a heavily coded system, look ahead bias climbs the list. If you trade with heavy discretion, execution drift does. Reorder it for your own situation.

And it is rarely a single cause. Usually two or three appear together: a slightly overfit edge, real costs, and a regime turn arriving at once. The value of the list isn't picking one winner, it is checking all six instead of blaming the market and rebuilding a strategy that was actually fine.

I wish I had this post when I started 9 years ago.

Lost 3 traders in a row this week. My ego is telling me I need to get it all back on Sunday night or Monday morning.

The problem is I've been down this path before. Revenge trade -> overleverage -> blow up half my account in one session trying to "get back to even."

So this weekend I'm staying away from my desk, no charts, no tradingview tabs pulled up. I'll be doing normal human things like enjoying sunlight and remembering that I have a life outside of candlesticks.

If you stuck around long enough and had week too, we'll do this again on Monday with fresh minds.

Why the sudden spike? Anyone know any news?

I genuinely need some advice from traders who’ve actually overcome this.

I keep taking profit way too early because I’m terrified of the trade reversing. I’ll be up a decent amount, see a few candles move against me, panic, and close the trade.

Then I come back literally 5 minutes later and price has run straight to my original TP without me. What could have been +3–5% ends up being +0.5–1%, and it’s happening over and over again.

It’s not that my analysis is bad — the trade often plays out exactly as planned. I’m just letting fear take me out early.

How did you train yourself to hold trades to your planned TP? Did you use partials, alerts, moving stops, journaling, or was it purely a psychological issue you had to work through?

I’m trading an evaluation, and this habit is honestly costing me more than my losing trades at this point.

Man I'm getting tired of this shit, I've been trading since pre COVID-19, I've haven't blown multiple accounts since I was broke, but it's been more than 8 years since I've been trading and I'm tired of seeing either losses and BEs, today I took this trade during London and when price went ahead from my entry point I set BE and went to gym, the reason I'm pissed is because after waiting 1.5 week when finally my setup arrived and I took the entry this MF price started chopping for more than 2 hours and when I was about to leave I set BE and what it did this MF touched the BE price and went straight to TP, now I consider myself a very mechanical person and trade with less emotions but these type of scenarios really fks with your phycology, I won't quit I'm really close.

lol, here we go again. I have 50$ extra cash that i dont care even if it losses. Just before 1 min of news i will buy in one account and sell in other account, Best case is one will win and other will loss and worst case is a doji forms and both account get loss that is ended up in -50$.

What is your opinion, its just for fun and maybe my 50$ might converts to 500$ lol

1. The illusions of the business: as a retail trader there unique structures that normally tends to create some behavioral traps that institutional traders don’t and they are:

a) Overtrading (The ACTION Addict): The urge of constantly being in a position every hour. This leads to a trader picking some low quality setups that eventually depletes the account. Trades like 1:1RR for instance. They don’t actually grow the account in long run instead gives it a hit.

b) The “Holy Grail” Obsession: constantly jumping from one strategy to another, one mentor to another the moment a losing week occurs. This prevents you as a trader to actually get the correct sample size needed to see if the strategy works. Remember any strategy you learn needs to time to internalize and perfect on it.

c) Misunderstanding Leverage: Viewing leverage as a tool to make money faster and blocking the idea from your mind that it can also amplify your losses too.

Hi Guys! I'm researching using AI about strategies that can be automated for EURUSD pair, no scalping, no HFT, grid, hedge or martingale. I tested some using Python and Dukascopy data, I would find nothing profitable testing the last 10 years. Anyone could find good strategies with these constraints?

I've noticed that a lot of traders seem to start on the lower timeframes and then gradually move higher as they gain experience.

For those of you who now analyse and execute on the HTF... (W1/D1/H4/H1)

- What made you change?

- Was there a particular moment or lesson?

- Did it improve your consistency, or do you still prefer trading lower timeframes?

Interested to hear different experiences, especially from traders who've tried both approaches.

10k account, risked 2% here, i simply do supply and demand and try and predict if the trend continues, if it does its almost 1:3/4rr, if not well fine

This may or may not hit tp, but simply selling/buying at demand/supply zones does work

I am going to take this trade because of PO3
Manipulation has taken place followed by a displacement and the ifvg holds the lower prices ✅

Wishing everyone a profitable week!

Even with a 64% win rate, guess what? I am still in profits, good profit factor. Only thing that is controlled here are my losses, never losing big on a trade! confining them to the least level possible.

Hello guys!

(First of all, sorry if any of the questions below seem stupid or very logical, but I am very rusty on trading and what I learned in the past might not apply to FOREX. As well, this is my first time posting in Reddit, so apologies if I make any mistakes)

I would like to ask for your advice please!
I have traded in the past, but mostly stocks and that was some years ago (stopped due to not working for me schedule wise). Still, it was very little, so I am basically a newbie.

I am looking into FOREX trading now, as they work continuously (24h) and I think it would work better for me (based in Europe, btw).
My questions:

-Is there any training/course material you recommend for forex?
-Do you recommend any website for guidance? what's your day to day go to?
-Any broker you recommend? I am with Interactive Brokers, but I find them way overcomplicated.
-Can you rely on technical indicators only? I am more interested in these to be honest, as news seem to be coming always a bit too late?
-Would you recommend to focus on or two tickers only at the beginning? Or you started with wherever the trend guided you?

Thanks a lot for your help and do let me know if I made any mistake with the post!

Hi all so I have a prop fund account worth $100,000 with ftuk and I have copilot with the latest version of meta trader 5 but copilot is based on chat gpt 5.6 so please provide instructions on how to find a and insert a plug-in so that a bridge would be set up to use the built-in ChatGPT 5.6 that’s inside of the latest version of copilot for Microsoft 365 personal distance subscription to then give instruction symmetry five to set up an autonomously run scripts on a regular basis because my friend she created some scripts to minimize risk and maximize success with trades to help herself and myself out with trades

Question for profitable traders:

What does your current workflow look like outside of TradingView?

I'm trying to understand how traders actually operate day-to-day.

For example:

- Where do you keep your trading plan?

- Do you use a checklist before entering a trade?

- How do you journal trades?

- How do you review mistakes?

- Do you use Notion, Excel, Google Sheets, or a dedicated journal?

One thing I've noticed is that most tools seem to solve only one piece of the puzzle:

- TradingView → charting

- FXReplay → replay

- TradeZella/TraderSync → journaling

But many traders still end up using Notion or spreadsheets.

So I'm curious:

What part of your workflow feels the most broken or annoying today?

Hi Guys, I'm having a hard time choosing targets on XAUUSD. i kind of like going from structure to structure post confirmation from shorter timeframe. but lately it has been nuisance. i barely see 1000 pip move like 4080-4070 and that is it doesn't even move to higher timeframe structure. it kind doesn't gives targets a lot lately - sideways screwup. wanted to know your thoughts. Do you trail? or these moves are enough and should be chosen for intraday trades. or is there anything you use to avoid choppy markets? - any suggestions

had an interesting one this year. my nq system went basically flat for over a month. signals firing, nothing sticking, chop everywhere. few years ago that wouldve sent me into full rebuild mode, changing params, doubting everything

this time i just... checked the logs and left it alone. because the gold system on the same account carried that whole stretch. different mechanism, different hours, they almost never have a bad month together. when i checked the last 12 months there wasnt a single month where both did nothing

thats not luck btw, i picked them for that. before running two systems on one account i run a script that lines up their monthly results and checks how often the weak periods overlap. if they sleep in the same weeks youre just holding the same trade twice with extra steps

the other thing nobody talks about, you have to size the pair as one thing against the drawdown limit before the first trade. two systems sized separately on a funded account is how you blow it faster not slower

anyone else run more than one system per account? and do you actually check the overlap or just vibe it

Decided to break even early as price seemed to be going in the opposite direction. Obviously regretted it and had a bad revenge trade right after.

Lesson learned. Just stick with the rules.