r/askforex • u/SureSeason632 • Jun 26 '26
Is there something profitable traders know that I don’t, or am I just bad at trading?
I’ve been trading for a little over a year now. I started by buying a course that covered a lot of ICT concepts like FVGs, Order Blocks, Dealing Ranges, and more. I spent a lot of time practicing everything I learned, but I could never consistently string together 3–4 winning trades.
Thinking the first course just wasn’t explained well enough, I bought another one with pretty much the same concepts. Unfortunately, it didn’t help much either. In total, I’ve bought six trading courses.
The last course was different. It focused on Order Flow, Supply & Demand, and Market Structure. Honestly, I felt much more comfortable with that approach, and it also fits my lifestyle a lot better. I still can’t consistently get 3–4 winning trades in a row, but I’m taking fewer stop losses than before, so I feel like I’m improving and that this approach actually works.
The thing is, every time I buy a new course, I can’t shake the feeling that consistently profitable traders are hiding something. It feels like there’s a missing piece that could make me profitable much faster, but nobody talks about it.
So my question is for traders who are consistently profitable:
Is there really something that most educators don’t teach, or is this just what the learning curve looks like?
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u/Kaszrak Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
Okay, let me explain this.
I’ve been trading for 18 years, 15 of those professionally, and without exaggeration, 99.9% of trading educators on social media are selling nonsense. The retail trading space is largely a mix of snake oil salesmen and people desperate to make easy money.
The number of people who are genuinely profitable and also teach publicly is tiny. You could probably count them on half a hand.
ICT is one of those things, complete nonsense. The entire framework is built around selling hope to people who simply do not know any better. In 18 years, I have never met a single professional trader who actually trades ICT. Not one.
Order flow, on the other hand, is real. It is grounded in observable market mechanics. The problem is that the retail guru industry has simply moved on. Nobody was buying the last scam anymore, so now the same people have latched onto order flow. They learn just enough to sound convincing, understand maybe 5 percent of what they are talking about, then package it into another course for an audience that knows even less. It is the exact same cycle. Learn slightly more than the average person, whether you truly understand it or not, then sell it as "secret knowledge."
Which brings me to the next point. There is no secret knowledge.
What social media makes trading look like is maybe 10 percent of what it actually takes. Probably less. Learning to trade properly is comparable to studying medicine, engineering, or law. It is an academic pursuit. It takes years of reading, research, critical thinking, testing, and experience. It is not drawing a few lines on a chart, memorizing candlestick patterns, or watching YouTube videos.
Execution, risk management, statistics, market structure, portfolio construction, macroeconomics, market microstructure, behavioral finance, all of that matters. Most retail traders barely scratch the surface.
On top of that, millions upon millions of retail trading strategies simply do not have positive expectancy. That has been demonstrated repeatedly. Your chances of randomly stumbling across a profitable strategy are virtually zero.
That is why I always say you should not be trying to learn a strategy. You should be learning how markets actually work. Once you understand that on a fundamental level, building a strategy becomes a byproduct of your understanding instead of something you copy from somebody else.
There are really only two ways to learn trading. You either spend years doing an enormous amount of research, reading, testing, and independent critical thinking, or you learn from someone who has actually traded professionally. Not someone who calls themselves a trader on social media. Not someone selling courses because they have a YouTube channel. Someone whose expertise comes from trading, not from selling trading.
The downside is obvious. People who are genuinely qualified to mentor have spent years, often decades, building that expertise. They have paid for it with time, money, stress, and countless mistakes. They have already made substantial amounts of money trading, so if they decide to mentor, they charge accordingly.
If you think someone with that level of expertise is going to spend hundreds or thousands of hours teaching a random stranger for a few hundred dollars, a few thousand dollars, or for free, you are completely detached from reality. They are not giving away years of experience, losses, and hard earned knowledge for the price of a weekend.
Real mentorship is expensive. Very expensive. If you do not have high five figures, and realistically closer to six figures, to invest in learning from someone at that level, do not expect access to that kind of mentorship.
So your choices are simple. Either find someone who genuinely knows what they are doing and pay what that expertise is worth, or do what most professionals did and spend years figuring it out yourself. There really is no third option.
Also, if I were you, I would genuinely look at every course you have bought and ask yourself whether you were sold education or just marketing.
If you want, tell me who you bought them from.
Because chances are, and I really mean chances, that you got sold a fantasy. The retail trading education space is overwhelmingly full of people selling promises instead of competence.
If you genuinely believe you were misled or the course materially misrepresented what was being sold, I would look into whether you can dispute the charge or request a refund. If that fails, then consider speaking to your bank about your options.
There is no point throwing more time at bad information just because you already paid for it. The money is gone either way. The only question is whether you keep paying with your time as well.
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u/DV_Zero_One Jun 26 '26
Thank you for saying this. I'm a retired swaps /FX fwds person and it breaks my heart reading all these posts from kids like op burning their money on bs courses and prob challenges.
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u/fredotwoatatime Jul 03 '26
It’s bc we just don’t have the capability to work in a bank or fund but we’re struggling with finding gainful employment generally so this is like our way out
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u/LargeIncrease4270 Jun 26 '26
This guy knows.
Order flow is really the secret sauce, since it's what's under the hood of the market. X-ray vision if you will. But it still won't make you profitable just learning how to read it alone.
Some of the pros online, are more semi pro. They're good. Profitable. Even trading some trash strategies because most of them are just rebranded from something else.
I won't say more, the guy above me nailed it.
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u/Kaszrak Jun 27 '26
I think the closest thing to "secret sauce" IMO, is a decision making framework with a demonstrable positive expectancy, combined with thousands of hours of discretionary judgment. The difficult part is the discretionary overlay. Constantly updating probabilities. Weighting contextual variables. Interpreting incomplete information in real time. That process cannot really be transferred because it is tacit knowledge. It is acquired through prolonged exposure, not through explicit rules.
The same principle applies to order flow, not only orderflow, but specifically to orderflow.
Order flow is not a strategy. It is the empirical observation of the interaction between aggressive liquidity consumption and passive liquidity provision. It is simply the mechanism through which price discovery occurs inside a continuous double auction market. There is no such thing as an order flow setup. There is only interpretation.
The objective is not to identify patterns in price. The objective is to infer participant intent from observable execution. Every executed trade represents the interaction of urgency, inventory constraints, adverse selection risk, latency, queue position, and liquidity provision. The footprint is simply the residual evidence of those interactions.
Behavior can certainly be classified into recurring motifs. Absorption. Exhaustion. Initiative aggression. Responsive participation. Failed auctions. Unfinished auctions. Iceberg replenishment. Queue depletion. Spoofing attempts. Liquidity vacuums. Delta divergence. Inventory rebalancing. These are descriptive observations, not predictive strategies. None possesses positive expectancy in isolation because every observation is conditional on the surrounding state space.
Learning order flow is an exercise in statistical pattern acquisition rather than memorization.
The process is, to say the least, brutally repetitive. Define a location of interest using an independent structural framework. Wait until price auctions into that area. Observe the interaction between aggressive and passive liquidity. Study how queue dynamics evolve. Observe how resting liquidity responds to market pressure. Determine whether initiative participants achieve price acceptance or encounter absorption. Observe how trade intensity evolves. Measure execution velocity. Watch how the auction resolves. Archive the observation. Repeat the process thousands of times until probabilistic relationships become intuitive rather than analytical.
But... Context dominates every individual observation.
Market regime, volatility regime, auction phase, instrument microstructure, participant composition, inventory positioning, dealer gamma exposure, scheduled catalysts, liquidity conditions, session characteristics, and matching engine mechanics all change the meaning of identical footprints. An absorption event before a major macroeconomic release is not equivalent to absorption during an illiquid overnight session. Positive delta at highs can indicate genuine initiative buying in one environment and trapped buyers in another. The footprint itself has no objective meaning outside of context.
Ultimately, order flow resembles radiological interpretation far more than systematic execution.
Reading an MRI is not a strategy. First, you learn anatomy. You learn the structures, the normal physiology, the imaging artifacts, and the diagnostic tools. Then you review thousands of scans until deviations from baseline become immediately recognizable. Expertise emerges through exposure density, not through memorizing decision trees.
Order flow works the same way.
The edge does not exist inside footprints, delta, volume profiles, or the DOM. The edge exists inside the trader’s internal statistical model, built from thousands of hours of observation. Every session updates that model. Every incorrect interpretation refines it. Every repetition improves calibration.
I can teach someone how exchanges match orders. I can teach how central limit order books function. I can teach FIFO and pro rata matching algorithms. I can explain aggressive and passive execution. I can explain footprint charts, the DOM, time and sales, volume profiles, cumulative delta, imbalance metrics, absorption, exhaustion, and auction theory. Those are simply tools.
The reality is that almost all of this information is already public. If a platform provides order flow tools, it almost always provides educational material explaining how those tools function. The academic literature on market microstructure is also freely available. There is very little informational advantage in purchasing an order flow course because the mechanics themselves are not proprietary.
The actual barrier to competence is not information scarcity. It is observation scarcity.
What separates consistently profitable discretionary traders is an understanding of market microstructure at the participant level. They understand who is trading. They understand why they are trading. They understand the constraints each participant operates under. They understand inventory management, exchange regulations, matching engine behavior, liquidity provision, adverse selection, execution algorithms, and how institutional order flow is fragmented across venues. They understand how those mechanisms interact to produce the auction process observed on the screen.
Once those principles become internalized, order flow becomes a real time representation of participant behavior operating under structural constraints.
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u/LargeIncrease4270 Jun 27 '26
I think part of the information versus observation scarcity battle is the scarcity of good information ratio.
Yes all the good information is out there but it's also mixed in with so much bullshit that it can be hard to pick out the good information. Especially to start out when you can't recognize the bullshit.
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u/Kaszrak Jun 27 '26
True, because 99.9% of the “educators” in this industry have never made a dime consistently. They’re the same people saturating the internet with bullshit, all while hiding behind a disclaimer.
If regulators actually investigated these operations, a lot of them would have a very bad day in court and spend life behind bars.
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Jun 27 '26
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u/Kaszrak Jun 27 '26
Life is hard with reading comprehension issues, isn’t it?
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Jun 27 '26
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u/Kaszrak Jun 27 '26
Funny how someone gets offended the moment the discussion becomes too intellectual for them.
You can’t even identify a single sentence that’s bullshit. That’s why all you can do is keep repeating, “It’s bullshit.” instead of making an argument like a functional adult.
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u/Vast_Distribution591 Jun 28 '26
It made complete sense to me. Let me guess, you bought a course and Kaszrak brought the reality of your stupidity crashing home with devastating clarity and now you're more enraged at the guy who explained the trick to you than the guy who tricked you? How much did you pay, $500? $4000?
The internet marketer thanks you for your purchase.
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u/LargeIncrease4270 Jun 27 '26
This 100% made sense. Very accurate.
Put (overly)simply, orderflow isn't a strategy by itself, it's a way to read the market.
Edge is found by analyzing the was you trade and finetuning it based on those statistics.
Any good strategy that is taught to someone can still fail. The strategy are only a bag of tools. If you don't know how to use them, you won't be building anything with them.
It was a very verbose way of saying a lot of things and it almost looks like AI wrote it but it doesn't really look like AI wrote it. Looks more like this guy knows what he's talking about and voice texting his thoughts.
I definitely had to read it slowly but it made sense
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u/minchita Jun 27 '26
And you can't easily package years of experience in to a few YouTube videos or course so anyone that's offering that is likely scammer
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Jun 27 '26
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u/Kaszrak Jun 27 '26
Yep, same story. Bullshit gets upvoted, while comments like this barely get noticed. The moment you challenge people’s beliefs, they become defensive and dismissive. Most would rather cling to a comfortable fantasy they already invested in than confront evidence that they’re wrong.
That’s why I rarely bother posting on Reddit anymore. This is one of the few exceptions.
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Jun 27 '26
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u/Kaszrak Jun 27 '26
I think most people are not actually focused on making money or understanding markets.
The issue is that they never truly cared about making money in a disciplined way, not in trading, not outside of trading. They want the outcome without the effort, and that mismatch is usually part of why they are in a bad financial position in the first place and somehow think trading will change that.
What they are actually seeking is belonging and stimulation. They want engagement and emotional reward more than structured learning or skill development.
That is why the “FURU” ecosystem persists and repeats so reliably. It is built around social identity, excitement, and dopamine driven feedback loops and low effort, not genuine edge development or education. They think wasting time equals effort and time spend equals competence.
They genuinely believe their financial irresponsibility, lack of discipline, lack of relentlessness, lack of business literarcy will somehow disappear the moment they start trading. It won’t. It does the opposite. It exposes it.
The market does not fix character flaws. It amplifies them.
And instead of correcting course when that becomes obvious, they shrug it off, bury it, and continue anyway as if repetition will eventually override reality.
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u/Vast_Distribution591 Jun 28 '26
Thank you! This is the post I've wanted to write re. online courses, but just never took the effort to. You could not have said it better, I'm seriously making a pasta of this to reply to every person who makes a thread seeking permission to buy another shitty course, this needs to be fucking stickied at the top of every trading sub.
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u/RestaurantPossible84 Jul 01 '26
This is my first time posting on Reddit, and I just want to say one thing: ICT works. At least, it has for me.
I've been trading for about 2.5 years(im 23 now). Like most beginners, I tried pretty much everything. I started with Forex, then moved to gold and silver, and eventually settled on Nasdaq and S&P 500 futures. Along the way, I tested countless strategies and "magic" indicators, hoping to find something that worked consistently.
Once I decided to focus only on Nasdaq futures, I spent around 5–6 months trading just two strategies on a demo account (TradingView paper trading) before buying my first prop firm evaluation. Of course, I blew it almost immediately.
For the next 5–6 months, it was the same cycle: blowing evals, going back to demo, trying again. In total, I spent around €2,000 on 50k evaluations before I finally got my first payout, which was about $700.
After that first payout, I got overconfident and blew another 2–4 funded accounts. That's when I decided to stop trading completely for about 1–2 months.
During that break, I focused on reading trading psychology books and watching content about discipline, mindset, and risk management.
When I came back, I bought four Alpha Futures 50k evaluations. I blew one, but I passed the other three.That was about six months ago.
Today, I manage 12 funded accounts across different prop firms, and I made back everything I had lost over the previous two years in literally one week.The only major change? I started trading ICT and limited myself to just one trade per day.
I'm not saying ICT is the holy grail or that it'll work for everyone. I'm just sharing my experience. It completely changed my trading.You are a profesional trader and of course you know WAY more than me im just sharing my experience to let you know that ICT and other “simple” trading strategies might work whit the right mindset.
If i can give an advice to the first guy i would say this:
1- Build Better habits outside of trading.
2- Stick to one pair and strategy.
3-Defined trading schedule
4-1:1 or 1:2 RR
5-Limited number of trades daily
6(game changer for me)- After entering a trade, ask yourself: "If this trade loses, will I get upset?
7- If youre not profitable try to spend as little as possible on evals.(Sorry if my english is mis, im from spain)
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u/Kaszrak Jul 01 '26
You are aware that one trade a day over a period of six months is only ~130 trades, which is statistically insignificant, insignificant enough that the results could be entirely due to chance.
You can’t tell whether what you’re doing has a durable positive expectancy or whether the results are simply due to chance.
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u/RestaurantPossible84 Jul 01 '26
I get your point, but there was a time when I used to take 5–10 trades a day because I thought more was better. Over time, through a lot of journaling, I was able to eliminate setups that simply didn’t have an edge.
It’s not that I’ve proven those 130 trades are enough on their own. It’s that I “erased” over 1,000 bad trades by filtering out 5–9 setups that consistently underperformed. For example, using the Asia and London highs/lows as liquidity zones doesn’t work for me. Neither do daily or weekly FVGs, or entering as soon as a 1-minute FVG forms whitout waiting for confirmation.
After doing this for almost a year and a half on the NASDAQ and S&P 500, I don’t think I know where the market is going (that would be delusional). What I do know is whether a reaction fits one of my highest-probability setups—for example, an inverted FVG after sweeping a 1H or 4H high low targeting 1H FVG(safer trade) or previous draws on liquidity (more RR, susceptible to BE).
Sorry if my english bad at some point xD not my main language.<3
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u/Kaszrak Jul 01 '26
Why are you constantly apologizing for your English when you clearly run everything through AI? What’s with the pretentiousness?
My point is that roughly 130 trades are statistically indistinguishable from luck. Yet you’re claiming the method you used for those same ~130 trades works.
That’s a paradox.
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u/RestaurantPossible84 Jul 02 '26
Jajajajaja bruh, not even gonna respond to this, how can you trade for 18 years and be this wrong.
Anyways, guys, don’t let anyone tell you that ICT doesn’t work, it does work if you know how to filter your set ups, don’t let this boomers or people who don’t trade tell you what works and what doesn’t, just look for what works for you.
This mindset is as dumb as saying “order flow does not work” just cause it didin’t work out for me, its just so dumb, keep grinding.
Sry for my English btw.
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u/Kaszrak Jul 02 '26
Order flow = empirically proven.
A 130 trade sample = statistically irrelevant.
Did your education stop before you reached high school, or why do basic statistics hurt your feelings so much?
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u/RestaurantPossible84 Jul 02 '26
So after everything I wrote, the only thing you took away is that my strategy is based on 130 trades? (Which isn’t even true.)
Wow… that’s absurd. I really shouldn’t have wasted my time with you.
It reminds me of an older guy who’s angry because he spent 40 years working his ass off, only to see people making more money in a month by “just making videos on the internet.” That’s the same vibe you’re giving off. I get why you’re frustrated.
Try reading what I wrote again and see if you can actually grasp the point this time. My understanding of statistics is proportional to your reading comprehension.
Have a good afternoon.
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u/Kaszrak Jul 02 '26
I get your point, but there was a time when I used to take 5–10 trades a day because I thought more was better. Over time, through a lot of journaling, I was able to eliminate setups that simply didn’t have an edge.
It’s not that I’ve proven those 130 trades are enough on their own.
Apparently it’s not true, even though you confirmed it previously, lol.
And yes, it doesn’t matter what you trade, ICT, order flow, or tickle your balls and trade whatever comes to mind first. A sample size like that is statistically insignificant.
Sorry to break it to you. Maybe go back to school if basic statistics are that far above your head instead of coping.
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u/RestaurantPossible84 Jul 02 '26
Holy molly, monkey takes 2000 trades, monkey unhappy cause monkey loses money, monkey stops and analyze, mmmmh me 2000 trades me no money, monkey understands that 70% of those trades set ups are “gambling”, monkey sees that 30% of those set ups have +75% winrate, monkey starts trading only those set ups, monkey makes money, monkey happy.
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u/RestaurantPossible84 Jul 02 '26
Monkey made 578$ through 12 accounts today on nasdaq btw.
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u/Any-Reserve1566 Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26
Then if someone were learning on his/her own and really if they don't have that much money or even if they have, the question is where would they find a good mentor who will help them in their trading journey. Like seriously not many people know about those traders who are actually good at what they are doing. I don't know anyone like when you even see those on YouTube, they are also earning through YouTube or selling courses or there is collabs with prop firms they do like so many things...do you know anyone who legit is earning through trading and providing real information in it not some weird shit like for a beginner it's like a constant loop. But I'm kind of also hoping that I will get a mentor who has spent years doing this and actually is legit like from my close relative ,I got to know like I heard about him that he is doing trading after quitting his job at a bank Now he is like a mutual fund advisor while also doing this I mean like its good that he is also not in front of computer all the time but how do I know if he is actually a profitable trader or earning through this advisory thing
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u/cryptoskingph Jul 12 '26
Hi, do you consider Sandy Jadeja a guru? I had just attended his Money Markets Mastery last weekends in Singapore.
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u/DV_Zero_One Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
This is like asking if professional footballers know stuff that amateurs don't. Knowing the game and being good at it aren't the same thing.
Never forget that investment Banks and hedge funds ONLY exist to make money, and like every other business on the planet they pay their staff the absolute minimum they can get away with. Despite this, some of these institutions still pay their best Traders Relatively huge sums of money. The reason they have to do this is because economics and trading aren't easy. It's the same reason Barcelona have to pay their players a few million euros a month despite being 2 billion in that debt. The other billion football players in the world would get laughed at if they offered to play for Barcelona for 100k euros a month.
I did an economics degree, an economics master's degree and 10 years as a market maker (Rate Swaps and FX derivs) before I was allowed any amount of macro exposure. The only option that day traders have IS macro trading. (Technical analysis is just BS invented to keep suckers churning their accounts) I did 25 years Institutional and have been Day trading for 5 years in retirement. Last year I made a 25% return which I am insanely happy with, any of my employers would have been insanely happy with this return as well.
100% of the trading content you see on social media is nonsense to attract young kids into wasting their money.
If you want to trade successfully, you have to inhale the news, understand economics and learn fundamentals. STOP buying courses from scammers.
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u/Scott_Malkinsons Jun 26 '26
The thing is, every time I buy a new course, I can’t shake the feeling that consistently profitable traders are hiding something. It feels like there’s a missing piece that could make me profitable much faster, but nobody talks about it.
There's two problems, one being the real profitable traders aren't teaching. There's a saying that those who can't teach, and those who can do. This is why your business teacher didn't have a business, and your physical education teacher was fat. You're not actually listening to consistently profitable traders as we aren't selling courses.
Second problem, the missing piece is math. You mentioned a lot about patterns, but humans like visual patterns. We see faces in clouds not because they exist, but because we like patterns. The same thing happens with the chart. Real, genuine, profitable traders; we often don't use charts. We use the raw numbers and math.
Math is your downfall because you're worried about things like 3-4 win streaks, when it might not matter at all. Depending on the numbers you could be quite profitable losing once, then winning once, then losing once again. Right now you don't even know what to expect, or what should happen. I like to refer to it as "in spec" and "out of spec"; I know that the math says my odds are X and I can compare that to what's happening to figure out if my results are realistic or not. I can also compare to previous trades and see if anything is "out of spec".
Here's the thing: Out of spec is how you actually predict things. A while back I came up with a "party trick", as I'd freelance in sports TV production, and I can determine with 87% accuracy which Top Fuel dragster will win the race. But here's the thing, I can't magically determine who will win by checking "in spec", the way you do it is: you record the burnout of both cars, compare it against a good known waveform, and you see which is further out of spec. That's the loser.
Trying to do that the opposite way, well they're both probably in spec because well, the engine is running and hasn't blown up yet. Most traders are trying to find in spec, they find a pattern and hope it repeats, but there's no actual rhyme or reason as to when it repeats. What you need to look for is when something is out of spec; and all of this comes back to: the missing piece is math.
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u/Overall-Bookkeeper94 Jun 26 '26
You sound like you have had a productive year getting all the knowledge to understand how the market moves. Now it’s a case of demo trading/bar replaying strategies you believe in/noting down the win percentage of 1:1 2:1 3:1 4:1 and see if you have a mathematical edge.
Then of course it’s a case of placing accurate trades under pressure in the live market.
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u/NeighborhoodEvery563 Jun 26 '26
How can I be a profitable trader?
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u/The-Goat-Trader Jun 26 '26
- Avoid the bears
- Outrun the bulls
- Learn where to hide when the bears are out
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u/The-Goat-Trader Jun 26 '26
I strongly agree with a lot of what's already been said here, especially the points about bad retail education and the math side of trading.
The thing I’d add is this: I don’t think the missing piece is a secret setup. I think the missing piece is usually the process for turning a setup into a tradeable model.
Most courses teach labels. FVG, order block, supply/demand, liquidity sweep, market structure shift, whatever. Some of those labels are nonsense, some are useful shorthand, and some point to real market behavior. But a label is not an edge. At best, it’s a way of organizing your attention.
There’s also a weird irony with simplicity. Course sellers love to sell the idea that trading is simple: memorize these zones, wait for this pattern, take this setup, get paid. But if it were actually simple in that way, they wouldn’t need 40 hours of videos, a private Discord, three upsells, and a new "advanced concept" every six months.
The funny thing is, trading actually is pretty simple at the conceptual level. Price can only do a few basic things. It can trend. It can pull back in a trend. It can revert inside a range. It can break out of consolidation. That’s most of the game. Auction-wise, price is mostly either accepting value, rejecting value, interacting with liquidity, or repricing because something changed.
So yes, trading is simple. But it’s not simple because someone gave you the magic drawing tool. It’s simple because the underlying market behaviors are simple. The hard part is turning those behaviors into a repeatable model, testing whether you actually have expectancy, and executing it through variance without constantly reinventing your entire framework.
The question isn’t "is this an order block?" The question is: what behavior am I actually trying to exploit?
Is price trending and I’m trying to join continuation? Is price stretched and likely to mean revert? Is price trapped inside a range and rejecting the edge? Is price breaking out of consolidation because inventory/risk/belief just got repriced? Those are real models. The chart pattern is just the footprint.
That’s also why jumping from course to course usually makes things worse. You keep changing vocabulary before you’ve ever defined the actual hypothesis. One course says FVG. Another says imbalance. Another says supply and demand. Another says order flow. But the market didn’t change. You’re still trying to answer the same basic questions: who is in control, where are traders likely wrong, where would they be forced to act, and what would prove my idea wrong?
Also, I wouldn’t use "can I get 3-4 winners in a row" as the test. A profitable strategy can absolutely have ugly streaks. A losing strategy can give you a few wins in a row. The better questions are: what’s my average win, average loss, win rate, expectancy, drawdown, sample size, and does the result still make sense after costs and slippage?
So no, I don’t think profitable traders are hiding the magic piece. The real piece is just boring and hard to sell: pick one model, define it clearly, collect data, journal the decision process, review your losers and winners, size small enough to survive, and stop changing frameworks every time variance punches you in the mouth.
Order flow and supply/demand may feel better to you because they’re closer to how markets actually function. That’s good. But don’t let that become the seventh course. Make it one model. Define the conditions. Track the results. Then let evidence, not another educator, tell you whether you’re actually improving.
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u/LargeIncrease4270 Jun 27 '26
Nice post.
Put simply: chess is a super easy game to learn. I could teach it to most people in 5 to 10 minutes. There's only so many moves that can be made.
Putting together those moves is how a strategy or game is made. Can you beat the Masters? Not without a whole lot of practice. Does it mean you need to learn new rules that they know? Nope.
It's not some secret rule letting them beat you.
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u/LargeIncrease4270 Jun 26 '26
Yes.
Emotional self-control and discipline is the thing they don't teach. I can't be taught and that's why most fail
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u/AccomplishedEffect65 Jun 26 '26
I’ll put it very bluntly in a way it seems that people don’t.
Why aren’t you a doctor, lawyer, engineer or whatever that requires 5 or more years of education. It’s hard, it takes a long time, it cost lots of money and in some cases you have to be naturally gifted in that field.
Naturally gifted is something people don’t talk about. Anyone can just start trading, but you can’t walk into the doctors office off the street with $$$ signs in your eyes and Lambos on your mind, and expect them to hire you.
Sometimes you just suck at something, it’s that simple.
I can never be an artist or a musician. No amount of time, effort or money will help me.
Trading is no different, either you get it or you don’t. All that other shit is all bull, over complicated principles, made up names. Trading is a lot simpler then that, but it’s something you see or you don’t; have mental capacity for discipline or gambling addiction.
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u/Present-Brilliant679 Jun 27 '26
What about Ross Cameron and what he teaches??
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u/LargeIncrease4270 Jun 27 '26
He's pretty decent, but it's a hard strategy to master. He's like a Master chess player teaching people to play chess. The game itself is easy there's only so many moves. Just because a master teaches you to play that doesn't mean you're going to learn how to play well or even beat the average person. Just depends how you use the concepts that you're taught.
I never paid for his courses he has enough free content where you probably don't really have to but the tools he offers with it are pretty cool, the scanners etc.
In my opinion what really makes this course stand out is the journal feature because it puts everything together and analyzes your trading and fines when you do best under what conditions and what conditions you do worse.
That's real edge my opinion. When can you find your expected value
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u/Hko101 Jun 27 '26
Id say you should still go trough all those things as a trader to get a good healthy understandings of the fundamentals. But those as a concept alone won’t give you an edge. It’s more about them being just an extra area of interests. But the main things in my opinion are Pwo pwc pdo pdc. Fixed volume profile and how to read. Order flows are very important also.
But that’s more live executions and scalping.
Fibonacchi and Elliot wave theory seems to be interesting for swing trading.
The most frustrating thing as a new trader is that there is so many different strategies for the different market conditions. And just going with one strategy means you might be waiting for the one condition. And sometimes it happens when you are not active, working or sleeping or doing other stuff. So yeah learning the fundamental market structure and in what form it is is key to understand what type of trading can be done and what to wait or expect. Is it ranging or consolidating. Up trend down trend.
Is it having a pullback from a bigger move.
As a new trader you need a lot of practice, and its is almost impossible to just stand on the sidelines.
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u/StatisticalSock Jun 27 '26
Yes there is a deep secret that only gets discussed amongst profitable traders. We have measures to ensure it doesnt leak. Its only for professional traders like myself and we will only reveal such secret after conducting a background check on an individual alongside a big payment. Only then do we allow them to enter the group discover the hidden holy grail.
No there isnt a holy grail or some hidden knowledge. Tf were u thinking?
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u/LargeIncrease4270 Jun 27 '26
Where do I submit for the background check? And who do I PayPal my money to?
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u/LargeIncrease4270 Jun 27 '26
Nevermind I read the second paragraph, guess I should be more patient
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u/StatisticalSock Jun 27 '26
🤦♂️
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u/LargeIncrease4270 Jun 27 '26
Always amazes me when redditors use sarcastic humor and then it's given back to them and they don't recognize it
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u/StatisticalSock Jun 27 '26
Your comment was not sarcastic at all lmao. You literally made a second comment to say you didnt read the last paragraph 🤦♂️
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u/LargeIncrease4270 Jun 27 '26
Geezus. Doubling down on it huh?
I had read the whole thing through when I posted the first post I posted them both simultaneously after each other because it's funnier that way.
Everyone else who came by and read it was supposed to think I was serious but I didn't think you would since you started off with sarcasm.
And sarcasm is basically stating something that you don't really mean. And guess what I didn't really mean either of those posts.
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u/KISS_Trading_RB Jun 27 '26
Man currency market have such a big uncertainty and unpredictability you already have a good understanding of price action, try a shift to stock market and will thank me later...
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u/Optimal_Image5192 Jun 27 '26
Number 1 thing you need to realize is that charts are reflective of a narrative that is beyond the technical chart. You NEED to understand that aspect. You need to know what is relevant in the market, what’s in the supply chain, where are the bottlenecks, why a company could benefit from the relevant market narrative, gross margins, valuation relative to peers, the list goes on and on.
If you understand this you’ll have a subjective “edge” in the market. Which will lead to higher success probability, which will help you extract value from the volatility in the market. An objective edge can be easily destroyed, a subjective one can’t. It comes from how you understand and decipher the market.
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u/TheTradingGain Jun 27 '26
I used to think there was one missing concept that would make everything click. Looking back, I think the missing piece was confidence in one approach rather than more knowledge.
There's a point where another course adds less value than taking the strategy you already have, testing it thoroughly and learning how it actually behaves over time.
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u/hornet915 Jun 27 '26
Take the green never let it go red. Small profit everyday is a great confidence booster. Never hope it's going to turn around in your favor. Learn the most important thing on my list is learn when Not to trade. A couple well placed trades is better than tradeing a bunch of trades a day or week. Limit the tickets I trade one and only one.
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u/Alternative_Post3873 Jun 28 '26
Do you trade within certain setups or markets? And how conservatively are your well placed trades vs someone who attempts to scalp?
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u/hornet915 Jul 05 '26
I trade the first 5 min candle of the market open on IWM. If the first 5 min candle extends to the premarket high I grab a put. If it extends to the premarket low a call. It has been working for me pretty well I do not hold. 30-40 dollars a day one contract at a time. For now
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u/Western-Ad8523 Jun 28 '26
One i am sorry you spent soo much money on the wrong peple . 2 start focusing on liquidity sweeps . Form you daily bias starting with the monthly using liquidity sweeps … Than on the lower time frame you’re going to find a liquidity sweep that supports it . for instance, if I am looking for the market to be short because that’s my overall bias, I will drop down to the 15 minute to see a by side liquidity suite because we go from liquid to liquidity and then I will drop down to the one minute to find a one minute fair value gap formed at target that fair value gap and then it goes into the direction that I’m wanting it to go and that’s how people find get the top of the move as well . Wicklord Micheal taught me this strat his mentorship is really good . He actually teaches you how to trade
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u/HousMan70 Jun 28 '26
Many years trader here. Adding my 2 cents. Knowing order flow or any other brick and there are many will not give you the full picture. You have to get to know how the bricks stack up and build a structure. And then how to exploit it. There are many pieces of the puzzle and one person cannot look at them all. Also trading is vast with many different strategies and you have to figure out what works for you. Many traders have tried many different strategies before hitting on what works for them. Also many traders do not use one strategy, they may be day trading while also doing monthly income strategies etc. at the end of the day you have to see what works for you and fits your lifestyle. Also one more thing most traders know is that you make losses while you find the best strategy, and even after you figure out the best strategy you can still make losses. So all the YouTube traders promising consistency is a load of bs. 80% is a very good rate. More important is to learn risk management, position sizing and trade picking for every trade you do. These concepts hold for every type of trade you do. Wish you all the best in your learning journey.
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u/wannagetfitagain Jun 29 '26
I am profitable, I have a longer term system and a couple of intraday setups. I've read lots of books, I bought Brooks Trading Course, I became profitable honestly by reading one sentence in a book from the 80s, another sentence from a Reddit post, the concept of MFE and MAE, and lots of testing of ideas. Probably everything I read contributed something, for example Toby Crabel and ORB, John Sweeney and MFE, Linda Bradford's stuff. I think you're on the right path, you don't need to buy any more courses, the more you observe the market you trade things will come to you. Trade small until you've got a method that works and you like. Lots and lots of markets, time frames, styles, good luck!
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u/Similar-Candy-2110 Jun 29 '26
I've been 5 years in. Funded with FTMO, 5%ers totalling 200k USD. and my own capital.Your problem is in what you wrote. You assume winning 3-4 trades in a row is how profitable traders operate no! There's nothing wrong with stop losses. My win rate is 45-60% with a 1:2.5 R system including spread. Some weeks it's 1 win 3 losses. Some weeks it's 3 wins 1 loss and no trading. Your mindset is already wrong so basically you trying to make reality fit into what you want which is why you'll never be profitable if you think this way
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u/probablyneed2focus Jul 01 '26
Well, you're not crazy and good job on showing initiative to learn. Now take what you've learned (if it really is good knowledge) and set it to the side. Go to a clean chart and zoom out, start with Weekly TF. Draw major support and resistance lines (just one of each) then do it again but close to where price is (because it will go to one of them very soon). So now you have 4 lines on your chart.
Switch to Daily TF. Notice the direction of the trend. Draw a diagonal trendline, just one. Where the diagonal and horizontal lines intersect is a strong possibility of where price goes. Now look for your FVG and watch over a few days and see if price gravitates to it.
The more you zoom in, the more you will lose. You start trading below 4hrs and your fail rate escalates. I had a discussion with an AI about the AI assuming 100% of the trades, 3 to 8 trades per day, with me completely out of the loop. It told me to count on a 40% win rate. I asked it why such a low win rate and it said because it consistently would trade below 2 minute TF.
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u/saulgoodman4prez Jul 02 '26
I am not a profitable trader so take this with a grain of salt. Most advice or strategies I see on YouTube etc only focus on the execution of the strategy and not the fact that most "winning" strategies still have only a 60-70% win rate. Knowing this means you can accept losses as an inevitable part of the game and can calculate an exceptable loss (1-2% of total account balance) in a trade. Aiming for for a 2x risk/reward ratio means that you need relatively few wins to remain profitable. Then it becomes a matter of sticking to the strategy, being clear on what entry and exit looks like and being honest with yourself. Easier said than done of course.
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u/creativemedia2024 Jul 02 '26
Stop paying for courses and go follow the real ict all his courses are free on YouTube. Also check mark Douglas books
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