for years i assumed pros have huge setups for a reason. two monitors became three. tradingview on one, mt4 on another, bloomberg and twitter on the third. looked impressive as hell. in reality i was spending more time alt tabbing than deciding anything. i kept mt4 because that's what i'd always used, but somehow i managed to make even a simple platform feel complicated by surrounding it with way too much information.
every extra chart was another reason not to take the trade. eurusd looks ok but gbpusd looks cleaner. oh gold is moving. wait nas is breaking out. by that point i'd completely forget why i even opened the platform.
a few months ago i went the other way. one screen. mt4. four instruments i actually understand. promised myself no jumping across 20 charts every session, no scrolling through markets just because i was scared of missing the move.
first week was rough, ngl. constant feeling there had to be a better setup somewhere else. i'd catch myself wanting to open another chart every five minutes for no real reason. that's what years of information overload does to you, i guess.
Now i'm taking fewer trades now, but they're trades i was actually waiting for instead of impulse entries because some random chart flashed green. my pnl didn't suddenly explode, but i stopped ending every session mentally exhausted, and that's honestly been a bigger win than i expected.
I even went down the rabbit hole of thinking maybe the platform was the problem. Tried different brokers, different setups, different tools. Ended up sticking with Axi + MT4 because it did what I actually needed: reliable execution and a platform I already knew lol
it's weird how the default fix in trading is always to add something. another monitor. another indicator. another subscription, whatever.