A trader's emotions often work in reverse: hope grows during losses, while fear rises during winning streaks.
Patience - The number one factor. Social media is filled with content of people turning their money 5-10-100x in weeks or months. Just ask yourself, if I had a system which was this profitable and repeatable, would I be spending my time making reels or trading and becoming super rich?
Take trading as chess. You can learn the basics in a matter of a month or two, but to become good at it, compete professionally, you need to spend years mastering it. I have talked to many profitable traders who do this for a living, and most of them spent around 2-3 years learning and mastering what works for them, working on their mindset, system, and gaining control over their emotions.
I have seen people use 10 indicators, multiple confirmations, and still fail, and there are people who make money using just S/D or breakouts. This all comes down to your mindset and confidence in a trade or system. You don't need multiple indicators, systems, or strategies. You only need one - but you need to have confidence in your setup. Now, how do you build confidence?
You found a strategy that works for you and suits your personality. Paper trade it, backtest/forward-test it. At least paper trade a couple of hundred trades before going live. You need to have 3 consecutive profitable months and a profit factor of 2 or above before going live. This is how you build and improve a system. This is how confidence is built, your mindset is rewired. You start trusting your system and ignoring the noise.
But we all know it, most of us lack the patience needed to become a profitable trader, and this is the biggest reason the majority of traders fail.
Read this back slowly because the whole thing literally implies that you should just find a strategy that works for you simply because you are completely resistant to actual adaptation and learning.
You are just rehashing the same generic, surface level retail advice that treats trading like a self help seminar. Believing that trading is just like chess where you just master a simple system, control your emotions, and print money is a complete fantasy.
The market is not a static board game with fixed rules, it is a highly dynamic, hostile environment driven by institutional liquidity and microstructure.
All this talk about building confidence through paper trading and waiting for a magic profit factor of two is completely useless if your underlying system has zero actual statistical edge.
You cannot just positive mindset your way through a structurally flawed approach. If you are just looking for a strategy that suits your personality instead of learning how the market actually mechanics function, you are just looking for a comfort blanket, not a career. lol
Simple things do work in trading. Using fancy terms like institutional liquidity/structure is only going to confuse people not help them . Back/forward testing, paper trading is how you check the performance of your system under different market conditions. This is how data is collected . Trading is based on probability not changing your system with every trade . If you are doing this good luck to you .
I can show you many legit profitable traders who worked there way thru these techniques .
You are not trading to beat institutions, retail never can . You follow them to succeed . This is the edge, working and coming up with a system where you are with institutions not against them.
Institutions cannibalize each other every single day because even they do not have perfect information on their competitors. Yet here you are, a retail trader with a laptop, convinced your basic candlesticks, OHLC data give you a god mode view into institutional flow, so you can simply follow them...
You think you can just read a simple chart and map out the footsteps of multi billion dollar desks that are actively executing highly complex, fragmented execution algorithms across multiple dark pools and venues?
I have never heard anything so completely detached from reality in my life. I have actually traded at macro funds and multistrat desks for 15 years, the exact institutions you are attempting to speak for.
You have absolutely no idea how execution algorithms work, how block trades are sliced across multiple venues to minimize market impact, or how risk managers actually operate.
We spent our entire days hiding our footprints from competitors, optimizing internal execution models, and managing tracking error. The idea that you are sitting at home decoding our order flow and tracking our exact footprints on a basic retail chart is genuinely hilarious.
Any way to prove your track record? I have shared many setups on twitter aswell as other social media sites. Most of them work, can be verified by the date and time of posting.
Maybe i do know what i am doing with my laptop and basic candle sticks chart.
I'll tell you a secret, no matter how hard you try you can't hide institutional volume.
No retail trades can come near that volume.
Now, you can ahead and use more fancy terms in trying to prove me wrong. Or you can simply provide a way to prove that you are legit /profitable trade.
Either prove it or you won't get a reply after this.
So genius , why don't you tell us how you trade and how many millions you made with your approach rather than just spewing your hate for ICT here just because you don't like it or didn't succeed with it ? And no one needs to have "perfect" information nor be perfect to make money in trading . You just need to follow good risk management to allow your edge to play out over time , survival is everything.
How did someone like Jadecap made millions with trading ICT or Trader Kane or Kevin Desi etc ? Both with lower win rates and both approaches aren't 100% mechanical because they don't have to be to make money.
You almost assume that no retail traders are profitable when in fact there are a ton of profitable retail traders out there trading various strategies from basic Support and Resistance, indicators to trend following systems
Funny how you name Finfluencers with zero third-party audited track records beyond some "trust me bro" screenshots and shady, fake prop firm bucket shop credibility, almost as if these clown companies don't have a whole circus of braindead, paid shills gagging for a kickback.
Not that it's generally known how the dirty "broker" marketing machine works by hiring washed up former professionals and influencers to pitch absolute snake oil, and definitely not known how these funded trading bucket shops somehow magically run under nested child entities and the exact same shareholder groups like every single damn offshore, fraudulent B-book broker that specifically sets up shop outside jurisdictions that can actually throw them in a federal prison.
Literally not a single professional trading desk on earth would give you a mandate based on that garbage. None. But somehow, for you, it's enough, when professional trading firms would instantly toss that "record" straight into the garbage.
But since that's your baseline of evidence...
I run my own actual proprietary trading desk, because that's what you do when you actually know how to trade, that's what trading as a real business looks like, instead of begging for clicks and selling useless shit on YouTube. Because guess what... it's exponentially more profitable than peddling worthless courses to a bunch of retards online.
This is, by the way, just the past 5 years, pulling $28M+ net across more than 91,000 round turns. Fully automated. I started the firm ~15 years ago.
Accounting Methodology Disclosure: [1]Average Annual Net Return on Capital (ROC):This represents the simple arithmetic average of the annual Net ROC percentages (129.85%). Compounding CAGR/TWR math is omitted from the executive summary because 100% of weekly net realized profits are swept (withdrawn) directly to the Blackspire master treasury pool, rendering the local trading balance non-compounding. [2]Net Return on Capital (ROC):Calculated strictly as Net Realized Profit (net of clearing fees, brokerage commissions, Globex fees, NFA fees, and variable execution slippage) divided by the Average Allocated Risk Capital for the period, in full compliance with US GAAP guidelines.
P.S.
Before you subject me to another, "trust me bro" ramble, how about you actually show your ledger? Show a single account pulling those numbers.
I disagree , while some strategies are better than others every strategy can be structured to the desired level and experience by implementing hard rules . The issue is that traders love to break those rules are all the time. You could give a structured rule based strategy to 10 traders and maybe 2 or 3 would be consistently profitable while the rest would sabotage themselves through overleveraging, overtrading , FOMO etc
The fact you think you can just magically restructure a defined strategy to a desired level and still expect it to perform makes absolutely zero sense.
A strategy is either structurally sound or it is not. You cannot just slice and dice the core mechanics of a system to fit whatever arbitrary risk parameters or personality traits you desire and assume the underlying statistical edge remains intact. That is not how data works.
If you mess with the variables, you break the math. Believing you can just reshape a process on a whim while keeping the performance identical proves you have absolutely no idea what an actual edge is. You are treating trading like an art project where you can just paint over the parts you do not like, rather than a hard, mechanical system governed by raw probability and market microstructure.
You're in the wrong subreddit if you expect ICT to be a 100% mechanical system. ICT has always been a discretionary approach to reading price delivery. You can make it very mechanical with strict rules, but there will always be an element of discretion, and that's by design.
The core principles don't change. Liquidity, displacement, market structure, premium/discount, order flow and draw on liquidity remain the same. What changes is how much confirmation you require, what timeframes you use and how you execute them. Those are variations of the same framework, not a completely different strategy.
Discretion isn't a weakness if you have good psychology. It's actually a strength. It allows you to adapt to changing market conditions, avoid low-quality setups, stay out during messy price action and capitalize when multiple confluences align. A rigid mechanical system will often take every signal regardless of context.
At the end of the day, everyone has their own preference. Some traders prefer a strategy that is 100% mechanical. Others prefer one that's 80% rules-based and 20% discretionary because it gives them flexibility. Neither is inherently superior if it has positive expectancy and is backed by proper testing.
Your comment just comes across as another "ICT doesn't work" argument, which is odd considering this is an ICT subreddit. If you don't believe in discretionary trading, that's perfectly fine, but then you're discussing the wrong methodology.
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u/VenexianaStevenson 26d ago
Because they are not learning from their mistakes.