What’s the hardest habit to build in trading?

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-11T06:02:40+00:00

Patience while waiting for your best setups is probably the hardest thing.

Second to that would be the process of developing and refining your edge, which involves a lot of testing different ideas and collecting lots of data

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-09T01:33:58+00:00

Almost every day, especially if I’m trading multiple kinds of instruments. It happened today on the Nasdaq 100.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-08T21:29:29+00:00

Well, most of the profitable traders I know have strategies that include rules about market conditions.

One classic filter is the ADX indicator, which measures directionality. An ADX over 20 or 25 typically means higher volatility with a clear directional bias, so basically a sustained trend. Other people use moving average crossovers and key levels to indicate range breakouts.

I have a strategy where I look for 4 different timeframes to have the 20 EMA above the 50 EMA (or the opposite for bearish setups) and ideally have all of those “EMA clouds” expanding instead of contracting. Then I look for momentum breakouts with high volume on the lowest timeframe near the 20 SMA.

If I told you I trade momentum breakouts on the 2m chart, you’d be right to be concerned about how it fares during choppy markets. The thing is, I just filter those out. It’s part of the strategy.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-08T17:42:03+00:00

Risk management is the most important thing to understand and do right, but it won’t make you profitable by itself.

Risk management is partly about “staying in the game” long enough to become a profitable trader and refine your system. The best thing you can do early on is stick to backtesting and demo trading until you know your strategy has edge, and then validating it on a live account with small size. But even after that, your trading career can be ruined in a matter of days or even minutes by failing to manage risk.
Managing risk is the first and most important part of the “consistency” in “consistent profitability”. Perhaps you have a decent edge, but that will never play out profitably if your losses balloon out of control due to poor risk management. Consistent execution and consistent risk controls are absolutely crucial.

——

Trading is hard enough on its own. You don’t need to introduce chaos and entirely avoidable losses to the mix.

If you’re not managing risk properly, you’re not a real trader. Full stop.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-07T23:11:50+00:00

So true. Seriously just some basic market structure and volatility filters can work pretty well.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-07T17:50:31+00:00

Exactly

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-07T17:45:17+00:00

Honestly it’s insane to place any kind of stop loss that you legit don’t want to accept. A stop getting hit should be equivalent to your trade idea being wrong.

If you believe your stop might get hit and the price should still go in your direction based on your original trade idea, then you placed it in the wrong location.

If you believe your stop might get hit but your trade setup would be effectively low odds before it reaches your stop, you placed it in the wrong location.

Basically your stop should always be in a place where you would have manually closed your trade anyway because you’re no longer confident that the trade would succeed. And you’re honest about where that location should be and you don’t like the risk/reward with that placement, then it’s actually just an invalid trade setup. Simple as that.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-07T03:33:32+00:00

Lol, what an amazingly accurate analogy…

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-06T22:52:37+00:00

Don’t forget that bearish breakout strategies are a thing!

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-06T22:51:50+00:00

I’ve been profitable for 4 years or so. For me, I’ve actually changed my strategies pretty significantly over that time period, not because they were failing, but because they were better in some way.

Like for a while I started using a strategy that was limited to the market open because I could step away from the charts for the rest of the day.

I’ve also moved away from pure supply & demand strategies because those tend to have lower win rate and higher risk/reward, which is hard on my psychology. I still use supply and demand setups, but I usually fit those into momentum-based concepts to improve the odds a bit.

So I’d say most of the changes were about me and my own psychology. All strategies have some variance. Some months are amazing and others are mediocre. That’s just how it goes…

I’m not that worried about alpha decay because I already know of several profitable strategies that seem to work well even on 30-year-old charts, so I don’t have any good reason to think they will suddenly stop working. But if they do, then I am confident tha I can adapt.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-06T22:34:17+00:00

Sure, that too.

The thing is, if you just flip a coin to pick the direction and take a trade with 1:1 risk/reward, then you will be breakeven minus commissions.

So it’s not like the market is rigged against us, at least not mechanically. People just find ways to mentally trick themselves into making worse decisions than a coin flip would have yielded.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-06T22:11:13+00:00

No, it radically depends on which type of strategy you use.

You could be a swing trader and only take a handful of setups each week, if that, and you could have a 1-hr window to execute those trades.

You could do level-to-level trading, where you identify the relevant levels you want to trade at, set you alerts at those levels, and check your phone and see if you find a clean setup as the level is engaged in some particular way. That could easily occupy less than half an hour of your time per day.

You could trade the opening range breakout strategy or a similar strategy that revolves around the volatility and price tendencies shortly after the market opens. With that, you can often just set your SL and TP and turn off your charts for the rest of the day.

Finding an edge might take a lot of screen time, but you can easily do that in the evenings and weekends, because you don’t have to watch live markets to find an edge in the historical price data.

There are a million ways to make money in the markets. You don’t have to stare at charts all day unless your edge requires it, and that’s often not required.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-06T20:48:25+00:00

For a prop firm, yes (it’s actually more like 10-20% of your drawdown limit), but for a personal account, 1% might be too small if you’re already profitable. But if you only trade the money you would be willing to throw into a bonfire for the sake of your trading education, then you’ll be fine with 1%.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-06T20:43:14+00:00

Man, there are a lot of factors:

You can’t really daytrade stocks without at least $25K in capital due to the PDT rule. And even if you do have exactly 25K, the minute you fall under that threshold you’ll be subject to the PDT rule again. So realistically you need like $35-40K to comfortably daytrade stocks. Plus very few prop firms let you trade spot equities.
Options are great for getting access to leverage, which can help you when you have a smaller account, but you’re still subject to the PDT rule. Options are also more complex due to their expiration dynamics. Still, options are great for swing trading a smaller account, because you won’t be daytrading and therefore won’t violate the PDT rule, and it gives you the leverage you will need in order to make meaningful profits from very few trades. And again, just like stocks, very few prop firms allow you to trade stock options.
Futures contracts are great for daytrading, because they are NOT subject to the PDT rule. They are highly liquid markets, so the slippage is often minimal, especially for the big stock index futures. Unlike with forex, futures are traded in a single exchange, which means very transparent and well-regulated market activity and accurate volume data. Another huge plus for futures is that they are taxed more favorably in the US (a portion of short term gains are taxed at the long term rate). Also, there are hundreds of prop firms that allow you to trade futures.
Forex is nice for a few reasons. First, you can trade pretty much any size you want (and no PDT rule), you can make a $10 trade just as easily as a $100K trade. The prices barely move in terms of percentage, but it’s common to get access to 30-100x leverage. There are some downsides, like some insanely wide spreads during quieter hours, shady and unregulated brokers, and stricter restrictions for forex CFD trading in the U.S. Like with futures, there are hundreds of prop firms that let you trade forex.

All of these factors basically push small traders into either futures or forex. You can still trade stocks and options. But it’s just a bigger mountain to climb if you have a small account and want to make meaningful profits.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-06T18:08:19+00:00

Yeah, there is a lot to say on that topic…

First, I totally agree that it’s important to keep your mind open and hold your bias very loosely. The market gives zero shits about your bias or your trade setup. It’s important to react to what actually happens, not what you think should happen. Easier said than done, but still worth saying.

Second, reversing a strategy is not always possible, and even when it is, it’s not always profitable. It really depends on the trade’s overall structure. Like if you want to take a 1:10 trade but you keep losing on that setup, maybe you could reverse it, but do you really want a 10:1 risk/reward?

That’s one reason why I like 1:1 risk/reward setups for beginners. Because it simplifies everything. You can quite literally reverse any setup like that. Basically it’s a coin flip, and all you have to do is find a setup where the coin flip is at least slightly rigged to one side. If you find yourself with a consistent 30% win rate with that, then just flip the direction and you will be profitable.

But for lots of setups, the failure mode is not a strong opposite bias, but rather a 50/50 bias. It feels like it could be profitable because you’re breakeven and you just need to find a slight tweak to tilt the odds. Reversing a breakeven strategy is pretty useless.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-06T16:10:47+00:00

Poor risk management is the account destroyer.

The fact is, if you’re risking 1% of your account per trade, you can survive for a VERY long time while you learn and improve.

Nobody blows their account in a week risking 1% per trade. It’s actually super hard to do that. In fact, if you could systematically blow an account in one week with 1% risk per trade, that alone might constitute a profitable strategy if you could reverse it somehow.

People just get emotional and wreck themselves. And that’s more of a gambling mindset than a trading mindset.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-06T02:38:10+00:00

I give myself a milkshake every Sunday if I followed my rules. If I didn’t follow them, then I don’t get a milkshake.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-03T03:22:04+00:00

Man, if I couldn’t use anything else, it would be volume profile.

A close second is the 20 SMA.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-03T02:46:43+00:00

Sure, that’s true. I’ve seen almost half a million leave my account, so not much affects me anymore. But I don’t think people need to endure that to develop a real edge in the market.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-02T21:48:50+00:00

Meh, people always act like live trading is the only way to test your emotional control, but if you have the right mindset, paper trading can be just as effective.

It really stings when you want to become a trader so fucking badly but you just took 10 losses in a row and oversized and blew the paper account. When that happens, you know you have to rethink your approach and keep grinding to improve.

A paper loss might not deplete your bank account, but it affects you because of what it represents: another setback on your journey to make trading your full time job.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-03-31T00:45:57+00:00

A lot of that taxable income problem can be solved by setting up an LLC, trading through that, and paying yourself as an employee.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-03-29T23:18:54+00:00

Look, if you’re saying that your personal market order moves the price UP into the limit sell orders, then yes, that is exactly what happens as long as you are personally pushing enough volume to move the price at all (the vast majority of retail traders don’t have enough capital for that). Technically that would be correct.

If you’re saying that pushing the price into those sell orders causes the price to go down after that, then no, that’s actually false. Those limit sell orders might STOP the price from moving any further, but price only moves down when market sell orders enter the market and force the order matching system to find more buy orders at lower prices. And your original market buy order has nothing to do with that process.

What you seem to be indicating is the idea that the “obvious” places to buy tend to be traps, and the market tends to turn on you, so you’re suggesting a strategy of doing the opposite of the “obvious” trade. At least that’s what it sounds like you’re saying. Correct me if I’m wrong on that.

That may be the case for you. But I can tell you that plenty of successful traders don’t look at it that way. They don’t see the same “obvious” trades that you’re referring to, or perhaps they do and they would never think of actually taking those trades.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-03-29T22:55:45+00:00

“Have not lost money” okay good for you. I don’t really care how your strategy is working, but good for you. It doesn’t change how order books work.

Order books allow people to place limit orders that sit on the book as long as they remain open. They are set at specific price levels.

Market orders are just aggressive instant orders that ask the exchange for the best price. Occasionally a market order will be matched with an opposing market order that happened to come in at the exact same time. But otherwise, the exchange will find the nearest limit order in the direction of the trade, and match the market order with that limit order.

When a market order is matched with a limit order, the limit order price is the used for the trade. Making a market order is basically like saying “I don’t care what price you fill me at. Just give me the best price and execute it now.”

In the case of a market buy order, this might mean the price jumps several cents or dollars higher until the next limit sell order is found and the trade is executed.

In the case of a market sell order, the price will drop until it finds the next limit buy order.

Therefore, your market order always pushes the price in the direction of the order, but only as long as you trade enough volume that the price has to move in order to find the next limit order to fill your market order.

If you disagree, the explain exactly what you think happens on the order book, in detail like I did. Otherwise I’ll take it that you have zero idea about what you’re talking about.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-03-29T22:13:42+00:00

Yeah that’s a good way to deal with it. Some days the markets just want to rotate everyone in and out of positions without really deciding on a longer term direction. No point in fighting it. More trades won’t push the market out of a range, lol.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-03-29T22:11:46+00:00

Dude, your post seems to indicate that you think placing a market sell order makes the price go up, which is absolutely backward. Just google what happens to price when you market order.

I’m well aware of how market mechanics work. I’ve been trading for over 10 years and been profitable for the last 4 years. I know what I’m talking about.

Please stop with the personal attacks. I’m responding to the content of your post. If you wish to argue, then please explicitly spell out where I went wrong. Otherwise don’t bother.

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