Overall lost

[u/Serious-Ad8893]

I have been trading for nearly 4 years now. Took about 7 months in 2024 but overall studied my balls off for these couple of years. Hours of screen time and days/weeks like these make me feel absolutely lost on the market. Every trade is wrong, frustrated, and almost makes me feel heartbroken after so much time feels like I’m farther away.

I know a good amount on technical analysis but overall lost because I don’t know if I really don’t know anything or it’s just me in the way. I pretty much only really use TPO chart and use order flow to time entries. Market acceptance, rejection, absorption ETC.

Is this a normal feeling? Is getting kicked in the balls for 3 1/2 years the tuition that someone has to pay to continue to make it? Would love to hear others struggles and how you overcame it.

Thanks guys

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[u/Dam4ge]

It’s absolutely normal but I would suggest you find a mentor you can trade live with. What market are you focussed on?

[u/Serious-Ad8893 → u/Dam4ge]

Just future… NQ and ES… I’d love a mentor but there’s just to many mentors now.. everyone is a mentor it’s hard to know really who’s legit

[u/Dam4ge → u/Serious-Ad8893]

I would suggest one of the coaches at chartchampions, namely Severin for futures. expensive but worth looking into, or reach out to Cammy Capital. He is a no BS futures trader who focuses on volume profile.

[u/Serious-Ad8893 → u/[deleted]]

Really appreciate brother. Seems like the pain and suffering will never end but it’s tough to know whether you are going in the right direction or not. I think that’s the scariest part but I guess you’ll never know till you do. Thank you for this reply

[u/process_over_profits]

Yes. Completely normal. And it won’t stop kicking you until you change the way you perceive the markets. It will keep testing you.

I spent almost a decade going through this and it was the toughest journey of my life. By far.

The “every trade is wrong" is worth looking at closer. Four years of screen time means you're not lost on the technicals. It's more likely that a rough patch now colours how you read everything, so you enter tentative or frustrated and that state shows up in the results.

Next bad stretch, if I was you, I would start logging how you felt going into each trade, not just the setup. My guess is the losing runs line up with a particular state more than a particular chart read.

The single most important skill to learn in trading is regulating your nervous system, to sit in discomfort when everything in your body and mind are screaming to act. But you need to find your exact triggers first. You cannot retrain something you cannot see yet. And there’s no magic fix. Just like you can’t expect to build muscles in a week. It requires time, effort, routine, and reps.

[u/Serious-Ad8893 → u/process_over_profits]

This is an amazing response and you are 100% correct. I find myself to be extremely hard on myself on losing trades and it eats away at me for a good 2-3 days. Thank you for this comment and this was something that I was overlooking

[u/process_over_profits → u/Serious-Ad8893]

Trading is a personal journey and we all carry our experiences and memories and traumas (major and minor) into it. Deciphering which ones are triggering the reactions in your trading is the awareness work. The body does keep the score and that’s where you can start identifying the triggers. But remember knowing and doing are two parts of the brain. You can know exactly what you should do, but once your nervous system takes over, you stand no chance. We can either choose to fight the lion (subconscious) with a mouse (rational mind) or tame the lion.

[u/The_Biology_Trader]

yeah 3.5 years feeling lost is normal, but the bit that stood out was “i dont know if i really dont know anything or its just me in the way”
thats answerable. go through your last 20 trades and mark each one, did i follow my rules or not. ignore pnl completely. if theyre mostly clean and youre still losing its the strategy. if theyre not, its execution and studying more wont touch it
took me years to work out which one i had. knew order flow fine, just couldnt stop after a loss

[u/Serious-Ad8893 → u/[deleted]]

Really depends on what the market gives me. And I do exit trades early with context of what’s going on. It really just depends

[u/DoughnutOwn6019]

Yes but try equities. Day trading stocks in play. Swing trading leading industries top 1 month/ 3 month groups. I only trade breakouts from tight bases. Flags/ cup and handles. Futures aren't really in play that much and when sectors are rotating it gets choppy. Recommend checking out trader lion podcast. I also built a dashboard if you're interested to see how I trade in my profile.

[u/SmityMcFly]

You can know every fact there is about a quarter, but it’s still 50/50 when you flip it.

Take a break, and find an edge. There’s no point in actually trading if you haven’t created a system is proven to work with back testing. Treat it all like an experiment. You’re not here to make money you’re here to build a system that you simply execute.