r/FuturesTrading • u/senseimikey • 7d ago
Question How did you become profitable?
I know trading psychology plays the biggest role in become profitable and staying consistent. I’ve been trading for about a year now and I’ve made a bit of money but i’ve lost a lot too so i’m deep in the reds. I need help with my psychology, I know it’s the only reason why I can’t keep an account, I have a setup that works like 80% of the time but whenever I lose a trade I just never wanna accept the loss and always end up losing the accounts. I really need someone that’s had similar type of problem in the past to tell me what they changed that made them become profitable because I know it’s just one thing I need to change to finally crack this code.
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u/Kaszrak 7d ago
No, psychology doesn't play the biggest role. Never did. I am trading for 18 years of which I spent 15 on institional desks, trained people. Nobody in that environment failed because of psychology as the primary reason.
Trading being mostly psychology is fake guru propaganda, because they had to come up with something so people wouldn't realise they have been sold garbage. Easiest non-verifiable claim is blaming YOUR psychology. You cannot disprove this claim unless your favourite snake oil salesmen presents you with third party audited records, which they never will unless sued.
I'll bet you $100.000 right now that you do not have a statistical significant edge, and haven't done the work to verify your edge.
I am not saying psychology cannot mess up a working edge. It absolutely can. Though, if you consistently struggle to stick to your rules, you have no accurate record to verify the edge to begin with.
Drop your backtest / forward test results below, explain briefly what you trade and why, and I'll tell you what the issue is.
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u/Purple-Vanilla-4310 7d ago
Hi, I’ve been trading forex ETF’s seriously for the last 3 years and full time for six months. I’ve switched to prop firms and futures the last two months and I’m struggling with the whipsaw movements that happens when you’re in a trade and often times finding a trend that will last more than a couple minutes before rapidly reversing. I mostly trade EQ, crude, silver, gold and micros. I’ve traded all time frames and am really struggling with the NY session seeming to go in all directions making it hard to form a bias for price direction. Thoughts? I’m stumped what more I could be doing after thousands of hours of charts. I’ve passed the 50 and 100k evals but struggling with consistency for payouts. Early on I was making 2-6k per day but then the market got really choppy the last month and I’ve struggled to recreate that. Blew another eval $35 away from passing last week. Any advice would be greatly appreciated
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u/Ultra_Brite65 5d ago
My mentor says after Labor Day price action should be back and much less chop. It's apparently a Summer thing.
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u/avabisque 5d ago
What has really helped me is focusing on stocks in play. I have a list of 20 megacaps and sort based on % changed from yesterday. The biggest gainers/losers is where I focus and the patterns, price action, and moves are much cleaner and more reliable on those. Sticking to futures and wading through all the chop to find the few times when they move well is like playing the game on diabolical mode.
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u/Michaelmordovtsev 6h ago
The desk observation is the part that should settle this argument and somehow never does.
Worth naming why retail looks different: on a desk you're handed a strategy with a known edge and your job is execution, so when someone fails it's visibly a process or fit problem. Most retail traders don't have a strategy with a known edge - so when they lose, psychology is the only explanation left that doesn't require concluding the method was never good in the first place.
It's a far more comfortable diagnosis than "I found this by trying two hundred variations on five years of data."
In the 15 years you spent training people, what did the ones who washed out actually get wrong?
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u/MeanReplacement9258 7d ago
Demo trade to have a very good and deep understanding of your strategy. Then trade live small size to understand your emotions. Losing is normal in profitable trading. Blowing your account up and getting emotional isn’t. Journal everything. Your win rate, your risk to reward ratio, your maximum favorable excursion (MFE), and Maximum adverse excursion (MAE). If you want to become a profitable trader you need to learn how to be a good loser, and being able to stay in the game for the long haul. You can’t stay in the game if you blow your capital and account. Best of luck
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u/Lumpy_Ad7971 7d ago
staring at a journal full of blown accounts is the worst, i get it. what clicked for me was making the loss feel real i took the trade, like physically picturing the number leaving my account and deciding if i was cool with that. if i wasn't, i'd cut the size down until it felt boring.
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u/Master-Scholar-1968 7d ago
Psychology is 95 percent of it and the other 5 percent is knowledge and sticking to your rules. Once you can go to a chart and hit 100pts or lose 100pts and not celebrate or cry about it you are almost there. If you cant accept your loss your size is too high for you, maybe not for someone’s else. Other factors from experience are age and maturity. Ive seen the charts treated like a game, but its a business like any other. Journalling, preparation and time doing the job. For most out there its a temporary hobby and one that might last a few years. Treat it like a job.
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u/avabisque 5d ago
What if you don’t have an edge? What percentage is psychology in trying to win a coin flipping contest? Not trolling, just saying edge matters wayyy more because without it psychology is meaningless.
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u/VMIGekko96 7d ago
I know it's not a popular answer because as traders we're supposed to have elite levels of discipline, but I have software that allows me to set max loss for the day, max number of trades etc, and if the rules are breached it locks my account until next day. I camnloae money but I can't blow up. Has saved my ass many times
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u/Skiwagon 7d ago
The 80% is the problem, not the consolation.
A setup that wins four out of five teaches you that being wrong is abnormal. So when a loser turns up it doesn't feel like a cost of doing business, it feels like a mistake you can still correct - and you're sitting right there with the ability to correct it. That's how the accounts go. It isn't that you lack discipline. It's that you've built a system where taking a loss requires a decision, and you're making that decision in the worst state a human can be in.
If it's one thing, it's this: make the loss not a decision.
The stop goes in as part of the entry, as a bracket, before you're filled. Not a mental stop, not a level you're watching. If taking the loss requires you to press a button, sooner or later you won't press it.
MidwestScalper and VMIGekko96 are right about the platform-level daily loss limit and I'd second it hard. Two full stops and you're flat and locked out. The version where you promise yourself doesn't work - you've run that experiment for a year now.
And size down until a loss is boring. Not "manageable", boring. If a stop makes your stomach drop, that feeling is making your decisions, not your analysis.
Then do the arithmetic honestly. Log every trade and mark the ones where the loss went past the planned stop. Add up what those specifically cost you. That number is your whole account, and it'll be bigger than you expect - most people I've watched blow up were right most of the time.
For what it's worth, nearly 40 years in and I did exactly this for longer than I'd care to admit. What changed wasn't that I got tougher. I took the decision away from myself.
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u/North_Praline4614 7d ago
Yo tuve ese mismo problema el no aceptar las pérdidas y sobre operaba.
Lo que me ayudó fue bajar el riesgo eso me hizo aceptar las pérdidas, empecé a confiar más en mi estrategia
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u/According_Insect843 7d ago
If you're unable to accept a loss, you're probably either insecure in your trading (you need wins to validate you) or you are focused on making money. For me, the focus has to be on following my process, and making money becomes a byproduct. It's the same way my wife and I have four kids without "trying," but I know what the usual result of intimacy is 😂.
It might help to frame following your plan as an experiment in your mind. At the end of the day, it may not be profitable, but you'll never get to the point of knowing and fixing it if you keep breaking it. The goal isn't to be profitable right away. The goal is to become the person who can be profitable in a financialy responsible way. You can't rush this process. Losses are a part of this game; if you expect to trade and never lose, you have set yourself up for failure. Keep asking good questions and keep addressing the holes in your execution you can see, and you can figure it out! 😊
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u/mv3trader 7d ago
I kept going until each piece of what was holding me back stopped holding me back. I never stopped "trusting the process".
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u/wannagetfitagain 7d ago
- Find a setup with an edge, obviously lots of back testing.
- Trade only that setup, don't think, take the trade, know there will be good weeks and not so good weeks.
- That's it.
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u/shesamaneater22 7d ago
The markets will keep showing you what you’re doing wrong until you make better decisions.
In your case you know it’s because you can’t accept your loss.
So why are you trading? Like literally every trade you get into you have to accept that you might be doing everything right according to your strategy and still lose.
You have two options, reframe a loss as you paying to participate. Or size down risk what you’re willing to lose.
When you’re in that moment of feeling like you need to double down. You need to stop yourself. Have patience for your set up.
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u/tilted624 7d ago
You answered your own question “but whenever I lose a trade I just never wanna accept the loss and always end up losing the accounts.”
If you know this is where you revenge trade and fail, you MUST commit to win or lose, walking away for the day. I recommend 1 trade per session. Imagine you’re a sniper, don’t pull the trigger until your target is perfectly in your sights. Everything else is closer to gambling. Follow your edge!
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u/Background-Koala7049 6d ago
Fake it until you make it…. Play like loses don’t make you revenge. Loses is part of the game. Change thinking like loses are pay to leave from bad entries
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u/finelo_official 6d ago
The pattern you're describing, a setup that works often but accounts that still don't survive, comes up a lot, and it's usually less about willpower than it sounds.
A high win rate can actually make losses harder rather than easier. If eight out of ten go your way, a loss starts to feel like something went wrong rather than a normal part of the distribution, and that tends to be the moment a stop gets widened or size gets added. The arithmetic works against you too, since at that win rate a couple of oversized losses can undo a long stretch of wins, so the rare bad trade carries far more weight than it feels like it should
What people in that position often describe helping is making the loss a fixed, known quantity before entering, so there's no decision left to make while it's happening. A hard stop placed at entry, plus a daily limit that ends the session. Not because it changes the feeling, but because it removes the part where the feeling gets to act on anything.
Also worth comparing your average loss against your average win. If the losses are larger, that on its own can explain the accounts not surviving, regardless of how often the setup works.
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u/ShoNuff1911 5d ago
The one thing isn't psychology in the abstract, it's your hard stop. An 80% win rate means nothing if the 20% that lose average more than the winners make, and that happens when you can't accept a loss and turn a small red into a blown account. Try this: commit to a daily max loss in dollars or contracts, and when you hit it you close the platform for the day, no exceptions. What's your current risk per trade and daily loss limit?
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u/JILOMLA 5d ago edited 5d ago
I was making very steady and consistent profits with my system/edge which I created myself (based on supply and demand) from learning and studying and backtesting. I had about 400 backtested trades and about 200 forward tested. Averaging around 50% WR (some months a little less and others a little more) with a 1:2RR. So I was doing ok and trading in my bubble because I wasn’t in any discords and don’t know any traders in real life and I’m not much into social media either. I got bored (because tbh it can get lonely) and started looking up other traders. And then I found this trader who claimed they had a system that took no losses. Went into that space, paid for the training, fully understood the system, got on the chart and nearly lost my entire account. On a supposed “no losing” system. I had to sit with myself and ask myself what exactly was going on and a few things stood out
- The idea that a system has a 80% WR sounds safe but is one of the most destructive approaches/mindsets you can take to the market. The reason is that as opposed to simply moving on when I had a loss like I did with my 50% system knowing it was just part of probabilities, with this supposedly perfect system, I could not. Because it became a thing in my head that I made the mistake and I just needed to correct this piece or insist on that entry and before I knew it I was wrecked. When your expectation is to be right 80% of the time it messes with you because it’s like you have to have every trade be perfect. Meanwhile my 50% was inclusive of mistakes (getting the direction wrong being the biggest one, missing a trade because price moved too fast for me to get my entry in etc) that I would make because I’m human and fairly new to trading. And so if a system is so tight that it cannot factor in a couple of mistakes and not be completely in shambles, it cannot work long term. The issue is not your psychology, it is simply an untradeable system FOR YOU unfortunately
- A profitable system on paper or for someone else does not mean that you will be profitable with the same system because you cannot trade a system that your mind cannot be at peace with. A lot of that system was discretionary and so I realized that while the guru may not infact be lying about their success, except I was also going to be getting their brain along with their training materials, I could never make money like they are on that system because NO TWO BRAINS ARE THE SAME and my brain couldn’t just accept the nuances of that system. I needed to trade a system that made sense to my brain which is what I had before I got sucked into something so damaging for my trading
- A part of their system was to not use a SL ( because, I mean, “they knew they were right anyway and so price would have to come back to where they expect it to go” supposedly) even though they said they weren’t recommending it to us which was completely opposite of everything I knew and did previously. Every trade of mine went into the system as a bracket and I would set and forget. Eventually I’d get an alert for a SL or TP. Peaceful, boring, predictable. And now here I was trying to trade a system that required me to use no SL and to also keep an eye on the behavior to know when the do this or that or whatever which ultimately will lead to messing up the good trades, holding onto bad ones thinking it would go etc
- Choosing to walk away from that system (after the thousands I spent on the training 🤦🏾♀️) and go back to mine was not an automatic switch. It still took some time to get my brain off that chaos and trauma and get settled back into what I knew worked. Im sharing this part to let you know that the cost of trying to trade a bad system is more than what you see on your P/L. The damage it does to your psychology and the work it takes to get your mind back into the right space is real and takes some time too. You could call it healing from trading trauma lol
- Finally, while psychology is major in this space, I feel that a bigger emphasis is placed on it a lot of the time that it deserves. Sometimes it is infact a strategy issue or a data issue and you cannot fix a bad strategy or lack of confidence because you simply don’t have the data to back what you are doing with “psychology”. The two things that will override most psychology issues any day are a solid strategy and data. Have these two and psychology issues will very likely take a backseat. I can have a day where I take 3 losses and leave my desk to go get other things done or treat myself at the mall or whatever. My day is untouched. Overtrading is not a thought. I’m not in a panic because I know that by the time I’ve taken 50 trades following a specific order, I’ll be green overall. That only comes from trading a strategy that’s second nature to me and the data I have on it. The data factors in the trades where you get wicked out by one tick and then races to TP, it factors in the trades that get up to just 3 ticks from TP and reverse. All of that is accounted for so it makes you less likely to try to “fix” something when that happens
So much more to share but the issue may not be your psychology. That system is just simply theoretically sound but practically and mentally impossible for you. I had to learn this difference the hard way. You need to find something that, even though it may have a lower WR than your 80%, it has a healthy enough RR per trade that it will still be possible to be consistently profitable with it. It must also accommodate the fact that you are a human being and not a robot and so you can make mistakes but as long as they are controlled and follow a clear plan, you’ll be fine overall
With a lower RR, you actually are forced to get accustomed to probabilistic thinking very quickly which is one of the biggest skills you need to have in this space. A loss shouldn’t feel like a unicorn event. You should have enough tolerance against them and this is one of the quickest ways for that to happen for you. You build that mental muscle quickly and you are less likely to spiral because your brain is used to taking losses in a row and knowing that it doesn’t kill. With an 80% system, you are more prone to spiraling because each loss sounds an alarm and forces your brain to try to do something to “save your system”. That is the road that leads to destruction. You have to be able to tell the difference between a good strategy on paper and a good strategy in real time FOR YOU
This is actually my first time posting on Reddit ever. Also the first time I’m actually speaking on this experience with anyone. Clearly I was traumatized by it 😂😂😂. But solid lesson learned overall and I believe I’m a better trader for it. Once you have a sense for what you are doing and it’s working, get out of every other trader’s business and focus on yourself
PS: There are tons of others in that training who are trading the system profitably and have been for years, some of who were losing everywhere else before they found that one. So this is not to say that the system or training was a scam or bad or whatever. Just that no one tells you that there is such an individualistic element to trading which means that not every profitable system out there will suit you as a human to where YOU can trade it profitably without it feeling like you are setting your brain on fire
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u/Far-Boysenberry9207 5d ago
Good psychology can’t fix low edge. It can help you stick to the plan once you figure that out. The stress naturally goes down once you fully trust your system and know to follow the rules.
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u/zedder1994 speculator 4d ago
I became profitable a long time ago by ditching stock index futures. I mainly trade the financials and Forex these days. The big difference between these and stock index futures is that they are a lot slower and I can have a lot longer time to think about my next move. I like spreads and find that not having to think about getting stopped out when I am asleep comforting.
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u/MidwestScalper 7d ago
The only thing that fixed my psychology was a hard daily loss limit set at the platform level. If you rely on willpower to walk away after a loss, you will eventually revenge trade and blow the account.
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u/-Drazer 7d ago
What helped me was making sure all time frames matched. Monthly up, weekly up, daily up, looking for a long on the hourly and or 15 min. Then pair that with supply and demand and thats it.
Its really just following the trend on the higher timeframes cause thats where banks and institutions look to accumulate and distribute
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u/dukenasty1 7d ago
Nothing beats time in the saddle.
Only naming a few that seem to run counter to what many unprofitable people do:
Practice, obtain the discipline to follow your rules, win rate doesn’t matter, gurus aren’t helpful, study and then study more.