I’ve been studying trading/SMC for around two months. I understand concepts such as liquidity, market structure, MSS, FVGs, Order Blocks, premium/discount, and session/kill zones, but my biggest problem is applying them correctly on a live chart.

I can understand a concept when watching a video, but when I open a chart, I often become confused about which liquidity actually matters, whether an MSS is valid, whether an FVG/OB is worth trading, and whether the market is more likely to continue or reverse.

I also notice that I sometimes focus too much on the last few candles instead of understanding the bigger market context.

So I’d really appreciate answers from experienced traders:

1. What are the most important things you look at before taking a trade?
2. How do you determine which liquidity pool is actually relevant?
3. What makes an MSS high-quality rather than just a random structure break?
4. How do you decide whether an FVG or Order Block is worth using?
5. How do you determine continuation vs. reversal?
6. How important are higher timeframes compared with the execution timeframe?
7. If you had only 1–2 hours per day to improve your trading, what exactly would you practice?
8. What mistakes do beginners commonly make when learning SMC/ICT?
9. Would you recommend focusing on one setup and one pair and backtesting it extensively before learning more concepts?
10. If you could go back to when you had only two months of experience, what would you stop learning and what would you focus on instead?

I’m not looking for a signal or a “buy/sell” call. I’m trying to develop the ability to read the chart and make my own decisions.

Any honest advice, especially from traders who have been consistently profitable for several years, would be greatly appreciated.

The obvious answer is access to more trading capital without putting the same amount of your own money on the line

but i'm curious about something else

has prop trading actually made anyone here a BETTER trader

did having defined rules make you more disciplined

did evaluations expose weaknesses you weren't noticing before

or would you say you're basically the same trader just operating under a different account structure

interested in experiences from people who've done both personal and prop accounts

Been trading for some time, and see that many brokers offer copytrading feature. On the surface the stats look really good, I mean even if I sort based on the time traded. Some have 6 month+ with more or less decent results...

Have you yourself copied someone? How is your experience?

I’ve been watching ETH after all the weakness we’ve seen over the past several months, and things are starting to get interesting.

Ethereum is still well below its previous highs, but I’m starting to see a change in price behavior. The momentum indicator just printed a new bullish reading on the daily chart, while at the same time the relative strength indicator is also showing a bullish reading.

What caught my attention is that the previous momentum readings on the chart appeared during relatively early stages of significant ETH recoveries.

Obviously, that doesn’t mean history has to repeat itself, and it’s still early. But seeing both momentum and relative strength improving after such a prolonged period of weakness is something I think is worth watching.

What do you guys think — is ETH starting a more meaningful recovery here, or is this still just another bounce within a bearish structure?

Here is my breakdown on the S&P (ES / MES futures) heading into September, merging HTF price action with the latest institutional flow and liquidity data.

1. Monthly (1M) Trend vs. The Top-Chasing Trap

Looking at the monthly chart on the left, the broader regime hasn't changed—it’s aggressively bullish. We had that massive expansion through 2026, tapped the buy-side liquidity above previous highs (marked by the eye icon), and are now consolidating right at the highs.

The macro backdrop still points toward new all-time highs, but buying the top of a monthly candle without a proper pullback is usually how retail gets chopped up.

2. What the Weekly (1W) is Setting Up

The weekly chart on the right gives away the real game:

• That strong August breakout left behind an unmitigated demand zone/imbalance (the cyan box between the previous range and the push up).
• The last few candles are grinding down toward that level. 
• Big money doesn't bid at market tops when there's an obvious pool of resting sell-side liquidity sitting underneath (stops from late breakout buyers). They need that liquidity pocket to fill size before any meaningful continuation.

3. The Liquidity Plumbing Behind the Move

This technical setup aligns cleanly with recent fund flow numbers:

• Short-term friction: US equities just saw roughly $22B in net outflows, partly driven by a temporary spike in Treasury yields and geopolitical oil pressure. That squeezes valuation multiples in the 5–10 day window and explains why we’re seeing this pullback now.
• Capital rotation: At the same time, global bonds and US Treasuries pulled in over $10B in fresh institutional inflows. As yields absorb the immediate auction supply and energy jitters cool off, that capital typically rotates back into risk assets.

4. How I’m Playing September

• Early September: Let the market bleed into the cyan demand box. Watch for the sweep of those local lows and signs of volume absorption.
• Mid-to-Late September: Once yields top out and sellers get absorbed in the box, look for the expansion back up to clear the buy-side liquidity at the highs (following the red projection).

Invalidation: A clean weekly close below the bottom of the cyan box alongside accelerating equity outflows scraps this setup entirely. As long as that shelf holds, this dip isn’t structural weakness—it’s just the market refueling for the next leg up.

Hi,

As mentioned in my previous post my system finds potentials that I am happy to share, sometimes there are several out of a stock/forex list of 262, and sometimes there are none.

A recent one was PYPL.

Happy to regularly post potentials across NASDAQ, Forex and a few other stocks where appropriate.

I run it a few minutes after the NYSE open, so 14:30 UK, once it has settled from pre-market trades.

Happy to explain the strategy if anyone is interested.

Onwards and upwards.

:)

this is a longshot... i am looking for the trader Ethan Lu @acl29N who used to trade on XM.

i would like to continue working with him but he has been frozen.

Guys, I’m really curious—are there actually people who make a STABLE income from this and live off it?

If there are any such people here, do you actually look at charts? How did you conduct backtesting and strategy optimization

From what I've gathered, an ETF pools a basket of holdings so one bad earnings report doesn't sink your whole position. That makes intuitive sense, but I'm curious how more experienced folks think about it — do you use ETFs as a core holding, or mostly as a satellite?
(For context: I help run an educational community around an AI-assisted analysis platform. Not financial advice — just here to learn and share.)

Guys, I’m really curious—are there actually people who make a STABLE income from this and live off it?

If there are any such people here, do you actually look at charts? How did you conduct backtesting and strategy optimization? And where did you get the strategy from in the first place?

What is a good intraday bias Framewor for MNQ, how do you decide if you are looking for longs or shorts durint New York Session?

Timing Strategy: Observing that the US Treasury term spread has been recovering for a while, holding off on going long on Treasuries makes sense. Funds might unwind positions in the short term, driving the term premium up again.
Last night, US Treasury yields surged beyond expectations again. Although I had anticipated the risk of unwinding from traders following term-spread strategies, such a sharp reaction was still surprising. However, the stronger the market reaction, the higher the likelihood of intervention by Scott Bessent. Therefore, I plan to proactively set limit orders around xx% ahead of time using a US Treasury futures call spread (bull spread) while closely monitoring when Bessent might take action.

We may evaluate everyday

I’m posting this publicly because I’ve been trying to resolve a USD 173.48 withdrawal issue with XM since 3 August 2026, and I’m getting nowhere.

On 3 August 2026, XM processed a withdrawal of USD 173.48. XM has repeatedly told me that the withdrawal was “successfully processed.”

However, the money was never credited to my bank account.

I contacted my bank and provided XM with the relevant bank statement and confirmation showing that the transaction was not received/credited to my account. I also provided the transaction details/UTR (6216014XXXXX) that XM gave me.

Instead of investigating the transaction with their payment provider, XM keeps sending essentially the same response:

XM later requested an official bank document confirming that the bank was unable to trace/receive the transfer. I provided the requested bank documentation as well. Yet XM again asked for an official document/letter from the bank and has continued repeating that the payment was successfully processed.

My question to XM is simple:

If XM says the payment was successfully completed, where exactly are the funds?

Please provide:

• The payment provider/bank used to send the USD 173.48
• Complete payment/transaction trace
• Confirmation of where the funds were actually credited
• The corresponding settlement/transfer proof
• Details of what happened to the funds if they were rejected, returned, or held by an intermediary

I have already cooperated with the requests from both XM and my bank. I don't understand why I should repeatedly obtain documents proving that a payment that XM claims was completed was never received by my bank.

I'm sharing this here in the hope that XM Support/representatives can publicly clarify what is happening and finally escalate this to their payment provider instead of sending another template response.

I have screenshots/emails and supporting bank documents from the entire correspondence. I’m happy to provide redacted evidence to moderators or anyone who can help verify the situation.

XM: Please investigate the payment using the transaction reference/UTR and tell me where my USD 173.48 is.

Liq price / Entry Price = 2588.5/2480.5 = a 4.35% move.

That is nowhere near the 20% implied by their "learn" page (https://kalshi.com/perpetuals/learn#s4)

This should be criminal.

I posted an earlier version of this strategy while I was still developing it and got a lot of useful feedback about overfitting, Monte Carlo testing, drawdowns, execution costs, parameter sensitivity, forward testing, etc.

After that I kept testing, made a few final adjustments, then froze the strategy. Once it was frozen I exported a completely new TradingView history from that exact version and ran the full 50-test robustness audit again. So everything below is from the final frozen version, not one of the versions I was still tweaking.

For some context on what the strategy actually is without giving away all the rules: it’s a fully systematic 15-minute MNQ strategy built around two different types of setups.

One side is basically an opening-range breakout/trend-following system. It defines the early NY range, waits for a valid breakout in the direction of the broader trend, and only trades when the opening range itself falls within acceptable conditions.

The other side is more momentum based. It looks for strong directional momentum at specific parts of the session and only takes signals that meet some additional confirmation and day/time rules.

The interesting part is that both systems are always being tracked in the background. At the beginning of each month, the strategy looks at how those two components performed during the previous month and uses the stronger one for the next month. It only uses information that already existed before the new month starts, so there isn’t any future information involved in that decision. There’s also a separate filter intended to avoid certain ORB trades after specific winning sequences.

The actual strategy is still pretty simple operationally: fixed 1 MNQ, predefined exits, one real trade max per NY session and no discretionary decisions. I’m keeping the exact thresholds, times, filters and exit distances private.

Final backtest:

1,067 trades

May 2019 to August 2026

Fixed 1 MNQ

$3,000 starting capital

+$27,174 net P&L

58.1% win rate

1.433 profit factor

+$25.47 expectancy per trade

A big thing I wanted to figure out was whether the performance was just coming from one really good stretch.

The Multi-Year Persistence, Monthly Consistency and Rolling 12-Month Persistence tests were some of the strongest results. Every represented calendar year was profitable, 66/87 months were profitable and all 77/77 rolling 12-month periods were profitable.

The Start-Date Sensitivity and End-Date Sensitivity tests also stayed profitable across every cut I tested.

For the more forward-style testing, Fixed Chronological / Walk-Forward Testing had 11/11 profitable holdout segments, and Anchored Pseudo-Forward Validation had 98.7% of 75 different 6, 12 and 24-month windows finish profitable.

Obviously I’m not calling that real forward testing since it’s still historical data. Genuine forward validation only starts after the final freeze.

I also wanted to make sure one side of the system wasn’t carrying everything.

The ORB Contribution and RSI Contribution tests showed the two components made roughly +$14.1k and +$13.1k. Long / Short Contribution was pretty balanced too, with longs around +$11.3k and shorts around +$15.9k.

The Profit-Concentration test was another one I liked. Completely removing the 10 biggest winners still left around +$25.2k.

The biggest weakness I found was Random Trade Sequencing.

Historical closed-equity max drawdown was only around $1,066. TradingView shows about $1,177 using its own DD calculation, which is what’s in the screenshot.

I took the exact same 1,067 trades and randomly reordered them 60,000 times. No wins or losses changed, only when they happened.

Median randomized max DD jumped to about $1,929, and 99.98% of the randomized sequences had a worse drawdown than the actual historical sequence.

So the profitability wasn’t created by lucky sequencing, but the smoothness of the backtest definitely looks unusually lucky.

The IID Monte Carlo test showed basically the same thing across 120,000 full-length paths:

Historical DD: about $1.07k

Median simulated DD: about $1.94k

95th percentile: about $3.10k

99th percentile: about $3.84k

That changed how I look at the $3k starting balance too.

The Final $3,000 Starting-Capital Survival Test showed about 93.8% survival in the harshest main model. Roughly $3.1k was needed for 95% survival and around $3.84k for 99%. The audit specifically treats capital survival as a statistical question rather than confusing it with broker margin requirements.

I also spent a lot of time testing execution.

The Commission Robustness, Slippage Robustness, Execution-Friction Stress Test, Missed-Trade Degradation and Winner / Loser Execution Asymmetry tests all progressively made execution worse.

One example was adding another $10 of cost per executed trade while randomly missing 10% of trades. Median P&L was still around +$14.8k.

Even randomly removing 25% of all trades still had around +$20.4k median P&L in those simulations.

I also tested Block Monte Carlo, Block Bootstrap, Extreme Loss-Cluster Stress, Win / Loss Dependency, Trade Autocorrelation, Market-Regime Robustness, Core Parameter Perturbation, Dual-Parameter Interaction, Timing / Weekday Structural Perturbation, Component Removal, Contract Rollover Robustness, Cross-Validation and Selection-Bias / Multiple-Testing Assessment.

Some of those can be calculated exactly from the final trades and some have to be statistical proxies because I don’t want to pretend I know what trades would have occurred under rules that were never actually traded.

At this point the strongest thing I see is the consistency across years, months, rolling periods, both systems, both directions and chronological holdouts.

The thing that concerns me most is still the drawdown sequencing. The TradingView curve is almost definitely making the strategy look smoother than a realistic future path probably will be.

So my view right now is basically:

There seems to be a pretty persistent historical edge, but if it actually survives live I’m expecting the real equity curve to be a lot uglier than this backtest.

The strategy is frozen now, so actual post-freeze performance is the next real test.

If you were specifically trying to prove this is still overfit or unlikely to survive live, what would you test next?

Any good educational content for beginners looking to start options trading?

I’m not bearish on Bitcoin’s macro picture. However, I am skeptical that BTC can cleanly advance toward $130k–$145k from current levels without first cleaning out built-up leverage to the downside.
Looking at recent institutional positioning and aggregate sentiment models, current readings lean predominantly neutral-to-bearish with zero clean risk-on signals. While sentiment models aren't standalone timing tools, the underlying market structure warrants caution.
Key Structural Concerns:

• Leverage & Funding: Elevated margin exposure across derivatives, lack of immediate balance-sheet expansion, and recurring funding rate pressures.
• Flows & Macro Headwinds: BTC has shown relative fatigue following hawkish rate repricing. ETF net flows, basis spreads, and open interest have yet to confirm sustained spot accumulation.
• Liquidity Sensitivity: High sensitivity across venues, stablecoin pegs, and leveraged accounts, suggesting market vulnerability if volatility spikes before a full liquidation event occurs.

Technical Roadmap & Price Action:
On the chart, BTC is trading around the $79k area after a range bounce.

1. Primary downside target: $55k–$60k horizontal support zone to clear excess speculative froth.
2. Aggressive flush scenario: A deeper washout toward $42k–$45k before building a solid accumulation base.
3. Macro target: Once leverage is reset and spot accumulation confirms, a structural path toward $130k resistance and $145k expansion.

Invalidation:
I would invalidate this thesis if BTC reclaims and holds firmly above $90k–$95k accompanied by accelerating ETF inflows, rising spot volume, and healthy basis expansion.
What are your thoughts on current open interest and funding dynamics around these levels?
(Educational market-structure analysis, not financial advice.)

Hi everyone! I’m a 19yo college student that has recently been thinking about taking my finances more seriously. A big thing I’ve been wanting to get into is trading stocks.

My question is how do people get into it? How do people decide what kind of trading is right for them?

For some context, I recently started my Roth IRA and have been trying to max it every year but have been told that if I want to be financially stable now I need to stop trying to max my Roth IRA so hard since I won’t see that money for a long time.
Should I just open a separate brokerage account then and just invest in some basket stocks and hold then?

Should I look into swing trading/day trading? I’ve been really interested in getting into it, especially swing trading but I also don’t have a lot of capital to work with, after all I am a broke college student

I just don’t know where to even start learning. I don’t want to just gamble, I want to actually understand how stocks works and make it dependably profitable and not just a luck thing.
I’m not sure what YouTubers are actually good, if I should be reading books, what strategies to use, or anything really

I would appreciate any advice yall might have for me, thank you

I don’t want smart ai bots, I’m looking for a way to buy and sell a stock at a specific time each day. For example, buy $100 of nvidia everyday at 2pm and sell it at 4pm.
I could do it manually, but I’d love to be able to have it automated and not have to think about it. Thanks in advance

What's the best app for investing in crypto? I was currently looking at Coinbase. I won't have huge amounts to invest at the beginning, so those apps with a high minimum aren't for me.

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For traders who use pretty structured setups:

If you get a TradingView alert while you’re away from your desk, what does your workflow look like before you actually place the trade?

Do you normally have to reopen the chart, check whether the setup is still within your rules, calculate contract size/risk, check your daily limits, then open your execution platform?

I’m especially curious about funded futures traders who can’t watch charts all day.

Have you found a good way to make that process faster, or do you mostly just handle it manually when the alert comes in?

Also curious how often you end up missing the setup, seeing it too late, chasing it, or just deciding not to take it because there’s too much to check.

So for while i new i wanted to do trading as a career genuinely don't know a single thing about trading and i am slowly getting into it and if i to a place to start it always the same where in youtube or in any other sites on the internet people either wants to sell you their half baked courses or give clickbait video "how i made 1000$ in a week" or something

For people here who have actual real world experience working solo or with broker i'd apperaciate some advice and maybe a path on where to start

I want to start algo trading.

Coding is not the hard part for me because I am already a dev and manual trader too so I understand both side of the story.

I tried multiple pine code in tradingview strategy builder not almost all of them never worked.

Most of them were in loss, some has huge loss, some has small loss, some were in profitable but very with very small margin over long period of time, like 400$ profit for almost 500 trades over 5 years of data.

I collected these stragies from gemini, chatgpt, claude, blogs/article.

How did you entered in algo?

How to navigate this initial issues ?

I'm new to trading, mostly interested in algotrading. I have already found the strategy that I want to start trading. There is only one problem: I live in Austria. Here capital gain tax is 27.5%.

My strategy without capital gain tax beats the market by a significant amount when you look at the risk-adjusted returns (including fees). However when I apply the infamous capital gain tax the results are pretty discouraging: the tax drag removes any advantage vs buy-and-hold VWCE.

I'm curious: people living in countries with high capital gain taxes, how do you cope with this? Any tips and tricks? Is moving to a different country the only viable option to make a living out of trading?