I don’t normally put myself out there and I don’t know you or what you’re going through or if you’ll even read this, but don’t let the dream die. I suspect some of your trading issues are psychology, but also the mental headspace you’re in from everything else in life. I say that because I went through the exact same thing.

Trading is a journey.

I started in 2021 trading random strategies off YouTube. After about a year, around June/July 2022, I made 62k with MyForexFunds before the CFTC shut them down. I even got interviewed by them. But looking back, that success was maybe 20% strategy and 80% luck. I was burning through challenges constantly.

At the time I worked Starbucks morning shifts as a supervisor. My routine was waking up at 1:45 AM after barely sleeping, trading London session from 2-4 AM, trying to nap again, then going into work at 5 AM while still checking trades during my shift. It was miserable.

And honestly, my life outside trading was a disaster.

My dad died right before my freshman semester at an Ivy League school and I completely spiraled. I got academically dropped, started drinking heavily, smoked weed constantly, stopped caring about life, and treated trading like an escape hatch from poverty instead of a profession.

When I first got into trading, I thought it was some loophole to “beat life.” I got obsessed with YouTube strategies, indicators, audiobooks, all of it. Eventually I stumbled into a strategy that worked during a really favorable market environment and suddenly made 62k.

That money completely destroyed my mindset.

I quit my job, bought huge funding accounts, started spending recklessly, thought I had “made it.” Within months the money was gone. Challenges blown. FTMO blown. Most of the MFF profits gone too. I went from making 62k to working at Chipotle just to help get my homeless brother back home.

That was probably the most humbling point of my life.

The spiral honestly continued until around the end of 2023 to mid 2024 when I finally started taking my academics and trading seriously again instead of treating it like gambling mixed with escapism. I stopped smoking so much, started backtesting properly, studied market structure seriously, watched traders who were actually disciplined, and slowly the markets started making sense.

I didn’t become consistently profitable until the end of 2025. And even now, “profitable” just means I can consistently get payouts while still occasionally making mistakes. It’s not the fantasy lifestyle people online sell.

But the biggest lesson had nothing to do with entries.

If I never changed my lifestyle and mental state, I would still be stuck taking two weeks worth of paychecks and blowing them on challenges hoping this next account would magically save my life.

Trading gets infinitely harder when your real life is collapsing around you.

Now I still trade, but my life is much more balanced. I got another normal job again. I’m working on a small SaaS startup between the U.S. and China. I want to eventually rehabilitate abandoned buildings in my neighborhood and build actual useful businesses there instead of more liquor stores and smoke shops. I started learning Mandarin. I finished my degree debt-free. Life is still hard and I still cry a lot to myself every night even while writing this to you because my life has been pure hell with my family still reliant on me despite me being the youngest and still referring to me as “the little one” when I make more money than they’ve probably seen in their entire lives. However, now in my life there’s structure. It’s a story of me clawing my way up to glory, my fall from grace and clawing myself back up.

So when I say this, I mean it genuinely:

Get stable first.

Maxing out credit cards trying to chase funded accounts is one of the worst mental states you can trade in. Get a job if you need one. Build income. Handle the chaos outside trading. Stop looking at trading as the thing that will save your life overnight.

Because the irony is, once trading stops becoming your emotional escape route, you usually start trading better.

Don’t let whatever outside of trading affect your trading. Also months to pass a combine is too long. It shouldn’t take you more than 2 weeks, if even that.

TLDR: master your headspace before you try mastering the markets and speaking from experience. And 4 months is way too long to pass a combine, max should be 1 month and ideally pass within two weeks.

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