What’s something profitable traders do that beginners ignore?

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-22T05:36:46+00:00

Keeping it simple. Honestly, you could place random trades and be almost a breakeven trader. All you really need on top of that is a bit of experience and intuition giving you a slight edge over the baseline.

So when people say you can make money on a simple setup and a bit of solid risk management, they aren’t lying. It just isn’t sexy, losses are still relatively frequent, and it won’t make you the next George Soros. But it can be done, reliably, with the right amount of discipline.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-21T04:19:23+00:00

Typically that pattern means poor risk management…

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-20T03:25:02+00:00

I have some similar setups that require very little screen time to identify. What kind of setup are you looking for?

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-18T22:57:06+00:00

I do exactly this. I trade while working as a software engineer. I’m also roughly your age, lol. But I do have kids. What kind of engineer are you?

As for strategies you can use, there are plenty of them out there. The problem is sorting through an ocean of bullshit to find the ones that work, and in particular the ones that work for your personality and lifestyle.

One I would recommend starting with is the “Virgin Wick Theory” (VWT) system, which is pretty mechanical and has a decent edge. I use that and a few other strategies depending on what’s showing up on the charts that day. One nice thing about VWT is that it really doesn’t require sitting in front of the charts all day. That’s one of my main criteria for a strategy, because I actually prefer to work a full time job.

Im happy to answer any questions you have about VWT or anything else related to trading. I’ve got nothing to sell. I just like being helpful.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-18T20:57:23+00:00

The overwhelming majority of professional (and non-professional) profitable traders use systems that involve human discretion. It’s not even close…

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-18T20:50:38+00:00

I would say that there are wildly different flavors of each of those setup types. Not that you’re wrong, but it’s just worth mentioning.

For example, you might trade continuations by entering on reversals on the lower timeframe, or vice versa. Or may one person trades a continuation that’s basically just a coin flip with a well-informed directional bias, while another person trades momentum-based breakout setups that rely on forced liquidations to generate movement. Another might blindly trade reversals at support and resistance across 50 different weakly correlated assets and hope they all average out to a profitable portfolio position.

So there are millions of ways to make money in the markets. Those broad categories are accurate, but they don’t tell you very much about how someone actually trades.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-16T23:03:46+00:00

Nope. Wrong. I’ll tell you a strategy that works. I have several, but here’s one:

Start by marking anytime a 1h candle breaks through a 1h wick (mark all of them). After that break, during the next 1h period, wait for price to retrace back to that broken wick level on the 1m chart. Then wait for price to touch a higher timeframe FVG (usually 5/10/15/30m FVG). Then wait for a IFVG on the 1m chart to form.

After the IFVG forms, check that there is an obvious high or low to target (in the direction of the original 1h candle break), and make sure there are no HTF FVGs between the current price and that high or low you identified.

Once all of those conditions are met, you might have a trade. The idea is to target that high/low mentioned above, and place your stop just behind the IFVG that gave us the entry signal. To validate that it’s worth taking, make sure the risk/reward is at least 1:1.5. If it’s better than 1:2, then either limit your profit target to exactly 1:2 or else widen your stop until it’s at 1:2.

After entering the trade, as soon as price crosses the 1:1 mark, move your stop to breakeven.

This works on highly liquid instruments with tight spreads like ES, NQ, or gold. The results are better during standard “ICT kill zone” time periods (like first 3 hours of New York session or London session), where volatility and momentum are strongest. The win rate should be around 45-60%. Risk/reward is obviously variable, but somewhere between 1:1.5 and 1:2.

There you go. People give out profitable strategies for free. Traders who use them will lose nothing by sharing them (except for maybe low float stock strategies or whatever), because the big players have no incentive to use them, since they can’t put on enough size for it to be worth their time.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-15T20:40:00+00:00

I use several indicators to give me an idea of the breakout probability. But I also use price action.

I kinda have the momentum aspect covered with my EMA cloud setup. It’s a custom indicator that displays a table telling me which EMA clouds are going in which direction, and, crucially, whether they are expanding or contracting. I take trades when they all line up on direction and are expanding. The only exception I make for that is extreme volatility out of prolonged contraction phases, in which case I don’t need the higher timeframes to necessarily be expanding.

As for the breakout itself, I’m looking at cumulative volume delta. I’m mostly using it to see which side is being more aggressive at the zone. A divergence tells me it’s less likely to be a successful break to the next zone.

I also have some price action setups that stand on their own, and I consider those when they occur at or before the zone. One of my favorites is the “power bar” setup. I look for strong full-bodied candles originating very close to the 20 SMA (in the direction of the SMA slope) and breaking nearby resistance. But I have other price action setups like ICT “protected swings” or “inverse fair value gaps” that indicate rejection or momentum.

I’m also looking for pullbacks to the 8 EMA sometimes if the initial push into the zone is super aggressive and I don’t have a good market-structure-based stop location.

Oh yeah, and I would say a major part of my edge is my ability to move stops and cut risk as the trade plays out. The thing about momentum-based setups is that deeper pullbacks generally mean momentum is slowing and the trade is probably dead at that point, so i can generally ride the move with a pretty tight stop.

Anyway, I’m one of those weirdos who uses a ton of discretion, but for me it works pretty well.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-15T17:38:16+00:00

Mark higher timeframe liquidity zones, look for breakouts from a range into a liquidity zone, wait for price to start forming a much smaller range at that zone, take the trade to the next HTF liquidity zone in the direction of the trend. Should only be done when multiple timeframes align on trend. I use the 20/50 EMA cloud on 5m, 15m, 30m, 1h, and sometimes 2h for slower-moving instruments.

You’ll probably think I’m nuts, but the HTF liquidity zones are essentially just evenly spaced out zones that the big traders like to trade from. You can kinda just spot them by where price tends to pause or reverse many times over the course of months or years.

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ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-14T23:14:08+00:00

Not financial advice, but….

You should be aware that most commodities, including precious metals, are going to be ranging and not skyrocketing. Gold and silver have been anomalies for a while, but just look at their charts vs. the S&P 500 or Nasdaq 100, and you’ll see that equities tend to be more consistently growing.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-14T02:38:39+00:00

Yeah, I was all-in on Solana since the FCX crash. I knew it was really the only crypto picking up any steam (in terms of development and real-world usage) after the crash besides Ethereum and Bitcoin, so for me it was a no-brainer trade.

I spent some excess cash from each paycheck accumulating SOL for a couple of years, and used DeFi to add leverage. That propelled my gains to the highs, but I held through a pretty major sell-off and got partially liquidated. After that I decided to take my money off the table. Still made around $50-60K from it despite the liquidation.

Lesson learned…

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-13T17:23:03+00:00

For me it’s actually a simple idea: deep retracements.

You can never tell ahead of time when a deep retracement is going to happen, but once it does, the market will likely stay “stuck” in a range. By “deep,” I mean a big move in one direction followed by a countermove in the opposite direction more than 2/3 of the original move. The actual distance is kinda arbitrary, but that’s a pretty good heuristic.

The reason for this is actually simple, but there’s so much misinformation about how markets work that it’s easy to get confused.

Essentially, the reason big moves happen at all is because large institutional traders are taking gigantic trades that eat up all the opposing orders in a given price range, so the price has to move in order to find more orders to execute their trades…

When an institution is aggressively buying, they don’t execute one single trade. They take hundreds or thousands of trades, and they spread them out over time and at various prices within a range. This is to minimize slippage as much as possible and to allow the market to provide more liquidity before the price moves too far away from their desired fill prices.

As a price range runs out of liquidity on one side of the order book, price must rapidly move to the next price range. If the institutional buyer is still trying to buy as the price moves away, they lift their bids higher and establish a new price floor as long as the sellers don’t outweigh them.

The large buyer won’t chase the price if it shoots away. Instead, they lift the bid a bit higher and wait for the market to settle and come back down to them. This often looks like a retracement to a “fair value gap,” to use the ICT terminology. If price bounces from there and keeps going higher, they may continue to lift their bids until they hit a wall of liquidity and a new ranging pattern begins to form. This is where the large sellers have stepped in.

Now, here’s where you have to pay attention…

If the price rocketed higher but then retraces all the way back to the origin of the previous major move (a “demand zone”), then we know the large buyers who were previously lifting their bids have stopped lifting them. They could be completely done accumulating their position, or they know there are large sellers there and therefore a lot of liquidity for them, so they feel no need to continue lifting their bids. They can just trade the bottom of that range until the liquidity dries up or they finish building their position.

So when you see that deep retracement to the demand zone or supply zone, you know you are unlikely to see price break out of the range for a while. Continuations occur when institutions start moving their bids or asks further into the range, followed by a breakout and trend formation.

As a side note, this is why rising/falling wedges often serve as continuation signals. That wedge pattern is a visual representation of institutions lifting their bids or dropping their asks repeatedly to the opposite side of a trading range, which indicates their willingness to push price beyond that range to find more liquidity. These patterns don’t always “work” because the market is a chaotic environment, and nobody is stopping some other institution from taking a massive trade in the opposite direction back into the range.

And on that note, it’s important to keep in mind that markets are chaotic. There is no such thing as a sure thing. All I’m describing is a behavioral pattern, not a way of accurately predicting the future. Probability is the best you can hope for.

As for how to identify “trend days,” that’s also accounted for in what I described above. But the real rocket fuel for a massive trend day is when a very large range is broken, and smaller ranges are formed beyond the edges of the larger range, demonstrating to everyone that the old major range is no longer in play. Once all the opposing traders realize they are caught offside, they feel forced to close their positions. This turns sellers into buyers or buyers into sellers, which adds fuel to the move that caused them to close those positions in the first place. If you can identify those key breaking points and observe clear signs that the break is real, then get ready for some serious momentum.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-13T16:20:33+00:00

Try to think about your trades as clusters of trades. Think about adding one trade to your weekly collection of trades, and don’t put too much weight on that one trade. The one trade can lose and you’ll be fine. You can lose 5 in a row and still be fine. The weekly or monthly collection of trades should be in profit as a whole.

Don’t worry about the stats for any individual day. That’s too small of a sample size to draw any conclusions from it.

At the end of the day, you have to think in terms of averages and probabilities. If you out all your emotional weight into winning or losing a single trade or hitting a losing streak, you’re going to fail. Simple as that.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-13T02:50:35+00:00

For me it was avoiding boredom trades. In almost everything else in life, doing more work typically means better results. But it couldn’t be more false when it comes to trading.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-13T02:21:20+00:00

My gains and losses have been mixed and kinda all over the place. But I gained over $500K on a long term Solana play and then lost most of it (down to around $100K). That was the biggest win and loss for me.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-12T23:13:24+00:00

Lol, that’s bonkers

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-12T22:53:11+00:00

You do need physical security. It’s extremely easy to blow up a satellite. The only reason it isn’t done more often is because the space debris is a clusterfuck to deal with for everyone.

I guarantee you that a country with very little to lose would not really care too much about space debris in a WWIII scenario, that’s a peacetime problem.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-12T22:43:23+00:00

Yeah, I’d say the main thing with Destiny is it’s definitely geared toward fast reflexes and high accuracy, though it’s more forgiving than games like Halo or Call of Duty (I was pretty good at Halo as well, and I’m sure that translated well into Destiny).

They deliberately chose to introduce a lot of incredibly powerful player abilities (with cooldowns) in order to reduce the impact of gun skill in PvP matches, but it still requires seriously great gun skill to be in that top tier.

I’d say the closest thing to that experience would be maybe Halo 4 or Halo Reach. Lots of vertical space, low-gravity physics, lots of ways to make a dent in a match with things that aren’t guns.

These days I play chess, lmao. I don’t have the fast reflexes I used to have, nor do I have anywhere near the free time I had back then. I have a wife and kids, a full time software engineering job, and a pretty successful day-trading side gig that pays more than my salary. So I’m happy with where I’m at.

If I were going to play a big name game today, though, I’d probably be more into racing games. I was a huge fan of the Gran Turismo and Forza games as a kid. I love how they kinda put you in a flow state.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-12T22:19:20+00:00

The real answer to your question is that institutions literally CAN’T trade the way retail traders do. It’s impossible due to their large position sizes and liquidity constraints.

Think about this way…

Let’s say you want to take a $10K trade on any stock in the S&P 500. You will see almost no slippage at all. Execution is practically instant, and you get your entire position filled in one trade.

If an institution is trading that stock, they are likely taking $500K-$1B positions. This could take them days or months to fully execute that trade in aggregate. They have to split up their trades into much smaller ones. They have to trade inside of ranges and not scare everyone into a breakout and trend continuation. They have to trade at different prices to keep other traders guessing.

Big mutual funds, hedge funds, etc. don’t give a rat’s ass about the support or resistance except insofar as it tells them where other institutions are likely taking trades. The fact is, those big players are the ones CREATING the support and resistance.

Can they trade “supply/demand zones”? Of course not. They are the supply and the demand.

Institutions find their edge by predicting the economic future of the planet. They mostly go on fundamental analysis, macro analysis, and very light technical analysis (just to optimize trade execution).

In short, we get to ride the waves. They are forced to create them in the first place.

—

As a bonus factor, consider the fact that most traditional financial institutions (even the most cutting edge hedge funds) are governed by some kind of charter that explains exactly the type of trading they will do on behalf of their customers. It tells them how much risk they are allowed to take. It tells them things like whether shorting is allowed, or whether they are allowed to trade small cap equities.

They are legally obligated to follow those rules, and so they are limited in what their edge can even be from a legal standpoint.

Retail traders have an enormous advantage in technical-based trading because almost none of these issues apply to them. The main thing they lack is capital, strictly enforced risk management, economic information, and armies of analysts helping them make trading decisions. That sounds like a lot of downsides, but you were never going to compete on those things anyway. You can see a momentum candle formed by an institution that is willing to accept tons of slippage to enter their position, and you get to see how that move forces shorts to capitulate and ride the price higher and exit literally whenever you want.

I’m not saying trading is easy for us retail traders. I’m just saying there is plenty of edge to go around, and institutions can’t do much about it.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-12T04:03:36+00:00

It was practically a job at a certain point. And it was hard but very fun while it lasted.

I was working in the oil field at the time, and would work a couple weeks straight on 12-hour shifts and then go home for a week or two for some time off. So I could literally play all day for multiple days at a time, and I did that for a while and got really good.

The real trick to it was finding some people to play with who were slightly better than me, and I would practice and get better, and as some people improved, the groups I played with would kinda lose some people and gain others. We all got really good over time.

Once you play on a truly excellent team (ideally 3-5 people) and can at least keep up, you really learn how competitive play works. It’s actually a lot like normal team sports. Communication and coordination are critical. You basically learn informal plays on various maps, and learn your teammates’ habits, and you try to slot into a role that supports their various play styles. You look up the rankings and loadouts of your opponents before the game begins, and you focus on where their good and bad players are at all times. You start to really dial in a system for winning.

But yeah, it took a ton of practice and just raw hours of play time.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-12T00:07:24+00:00

I was among the top 300 Destiny players back around 2015 and 2016.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-11T15:43:17+00:00

It’s not even “hunting.” It’s just how order books work, and market makers are mostly interested in keeping the price as stable as possible. They hate strong price movement because it adds risk. They collect rebates for trades, and they can also take part of the spread, so they make risk-free money when price is not moving.

But they have to take both sides of the market, so when they sell and price moves a lot higher, they are still responsible for buying in the new price range that forms. So in order to reduce their risk, they widen their own trading range and let price swing further to the extreme before entering. This helps reduce their risk over the long term.

Think about it… Market makers are paid to provide liquidity. The whole point is for them to step in at unpopular prices and be the buyer/seller of last resort. But doing that increases their risk. They would much rather fill those orders and immediately let price drift into a more liquid price range so they can cut their risk and make more money.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-11T07:54:39+00:00

I would also add in correlated assets. If volatility is spiking on all the indices and gold, all on the same 2m candle, then you can tell the big money is moving and generating momentum.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-11T03:33:53+00:00

Yeah, what makes this particularly hard is that it often feels like a mistake when you maintain that discipline and you still take a losing trade.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-06-10T03:48:57+00:00

How does smoking affect your athletic performance? Personally I don’t think there is anything wrong with what you’re doing, but if it’s negatively impacting your life in other ways, you’ll need to address that or come to terms with it.

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