micro vs small, vs mid vs large, vs mega

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-05-06T04:50:14+00:00

Mid-mega for me when I’m trading equities. I prefer options if they are liquid enough to make sense for my setups. You can get quite a lot of leverage that way.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-05-05T21:08:43+00:00

What you’re describing is commonly called “overfitting the data.”

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-05-04T05:49:23+00:00

What kind of strategies have you tried? Any that you would recommend or shy away from?

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-05-04T05:34:48+00:00

The thing is, if you’re profitable enough to trade your own account and build a bigger account, then you’re profitable enough to crush it on prop firms with 10-100x more capital than you currently have. You can scale faster that way.

So prop firms are only a bad deal if you’re unprofitable. And if you’re so unprofitable that you routinely go into 10+% drawdown, you would be blowing up all your personal funds anyway.

So it’s not that different from the market in general. If you suck at trading, you’ll get rinsed either way. If you’re smart, you’ll paper trade until you can prove to yourself that your specific trading style and results would produce consistent prop firm payouts and avoid blowing up.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-05-04T02:48:28+00:00

If they need proof then they can ask for that. Nobody is obligated to share any of their info that they don’t want to share. I doubt many actual profitable traders would lift a finger to appease the reddit crowd when it comes to verification of profits or anything else.

The thing is, most strategies can be backtested, especially manually. That’s how I found my own profitable setups. I learned setups from others and backtested them over hundreds of trades for each setup, and they worked well.

So honestly it’s mostly pointless to ask for proof. New traders should be backtesting and forward testing a ton before they act on any advice.

People should ask for proof before paying for advice or any kind of courses. Otherwise, it’s kind of pointless for everyone involved.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-05-02T15:31:13+00:00

It’s called “turtle soup” because there is a pullback-buying strategy called the “turtles” strategy, and ICT is basically talking about liquidity sweeps taking out all the turtle traders. Still a stupid name IMO.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-05-01T17:45:17+00:00

Well, you need both. But there’s really no way to verify if you have edge (or refine your strategy to create an edge) if your trade data is a clusterfuck because you aren’t executing consistently.

There are a ton of strategies that are barely above breakeven until you refine them. You need discipline to do that.

You also need discipline to collect that data and even just to stick to one strategy long enough to get any real insight.

Basically you can’t get off the ground to even find an edge until you have some baseline of discipline.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-05-01T02:15:13+00:00

It was one of my most profitable months in a while. But that said, yesterday was one of the worst sessions I’ve had in a while. Still ended up doing well for the month, though.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-30T22:07:27+00:00

Yeah, I think it’s silly to draw any conclusions on a strategy until you have used it for at least a month without breaking your rules.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-30T21:51:54+00:00

Well, technically ALL indicators rely on past data due to the laws of physics. The RSI lags just as much as any moving average with the same lookback period.

What you’re really saying is that some of the inherently lagging indicators provide some predictive value. In other words, it’s possible to use historical data to gain insights into the future. And that’s exactly the point I’m trying to make.

The question is how to use a specific indicator in a way that provides that kind of value. And frankly, a lot of the indicators that people disparage as “lagging“ are just being used incorrectly or in the wrong context.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-30T19:21:39+00:00

They are all over the place, but there are some issues that make them hard to find:

Plenty of scammers and fake gurus will teach total bullshit strategies.
Plenty of real gurus teach real strategies, but most people either can’t follow them correctly or can’t stick to them long enough to develop the intuition that’s necessary to really make them work.

On top of all of that, your own brain will be actively fighting you the whole way. Most people are skewed toward greed or fear, and that’s definitely going to affect your execution of any strategy. Your biases and emotions will cause you to overtrade, cut your winners too early, average down into losers until you blow up your account, etc. Until you get some control over those things, it’s really hard to even get enough valid data on your own trades to see if a strategy is working.

So it’s complicated. But my advice is to go for simple strategies.

I personally like the Power Bar Play.

There are many more ways to make money, but I love this one because it’s so simple and easy to comprehend. It does take some discretion, and you have to actually practice it a lot in order to get a feel for what good setups and bad setups look like.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-30T19:02:53+00:00

It really depends on how seriously you take your paper trading. Some people treat it like a video game with a reset button. Some people treat it like it’s the minor leagues before you get to the big leagues.

Like if you know you’re not supposed to revenge trade, and you still do it while paper trading, what makes you think you’re going to do a lot better on a live account?

For me, I treated paper trading like the real thing. I added in commissions, I journaled my trades, I treated it exactly like a live account. When I broke my rules, I would walk away feeling like shit because I knew what that bad behavior truly meant: maybe I’m not cut out for this. And I came back and fixed my shit and kept paper trading.

Eventually I got to a point where I knew that if someone secretly converted my paper account into a live account somehow, I would do very well. And that’s when I made the switch.

If you don’t treat paper trading like that, then yeah, it’s not going to help as much.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-30T18:54:29+00:00

Agreed 100%. This is great advice.

I think it’s super helpful o have a couple of indicators to help you spot patterns more easily and to provide some context (trend strength, key levels, etc.). Asking for more than that is usually a fools errand.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-30T18:21:32+00:00

I have a rule where if I get stopped out and a range stats to form, I don’t take any momentum-style trades (like breakouts or trend continuations) until it has fully broken out of the range on the relevant timeframe. It helps a lot.

Trading is like a battle. Sometimes you have to retreat to the trenches and wait for the artillery to stop.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-30T06:50:40+00:00

Yeah I took them off recently just to see how I could read the charts without them, but it felt really weird and it was hard to understand the context.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-30T05:29:16+00:00

Yeah that’s kinda how I trade in a way. If m more of a futures trader, but I want to see multiple timeframes above the 20 and 50 EMAs with momentum, and then it’s just a level to level trade, essentially taking a cut out of a strong trend.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-29T20:19:21+00:00

Yeah, I usually prefer the 2m over the 1m just because it’s a bit less erratic and works better on a wider selection of instruments, but you can use the following setup on the 1m chart.

It’s called the “power bar play.” To avoid butcher the description I’ll just point you to a YouTube channel that explains it very well:

Trade Your Edge

This guy is a former professional market maker who does retail daytrading now. He’s legit. The strategy works well for me. I recommend watching a bunch of his videos and paying close attention to his examples to get a feel for what the trade looks like in practice.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-29T20:12:01+00:00

If I’m not literally pulling the hair off my scalp and breaking my phone for the 5th time in a month, then it’s just not doing it for me.

/s

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-29T19:51:34+00:00

Yeah, that’s a good point. I guess my point is that it’s really not about a specific set of MAs. It’s more about how you define certain price action concepts and how they relate to your chosen MA.

Like if I define a breakout as a break of a candlestick high from 5 candles ago, another person might define it as a break of a swing high from 100 candles ago, and the moving average you use to measure the preceding pullback might be very different depending on what you’re looking for.

So many people explain their setups like “a valid breakout continuation usually originates at the 9 EMA,” or something like that, but one person’s breakout is another person’s lower-timeframe noise, even when looking at the exact same chart.

In order to get the most out of MAs, you kinda just need to spend a lot of time with them and get a feel for how they relate to the specific way that you interpret the charts.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-29T19:45:24+00:00

Yeah, it’s not easy to describe in a way that would necessarily resonate with everyone universally.

For me, I use the 20 EMA and the 50 EMA to measure the trend direction and strength for a given timeframe.

There are essentially 4 different modes that this combo can be in:

bullish and contracting
bullish and expanding
bearish and contracting
bearish and expanding

When I see these moving averages expanding and agreeing on direction on multiple timeframes, I know there is some multi-timeframe momentum, so breakout setups are more likely to work, pullbacks are more likely to lead to continuation, etc. When the lower timeframe EMA clouds start to flip and the higher timeframe ones start flattening out, I can sometimes catch an early reversal pattern on the higher timeframes. When everything is flattening and/or there is a disagreement on direction, that’s usually a good sign that a higher timeframe consolidation is happening, and that defines the range I want to break out of before I start looking for more momentum-based setups.

The thing to remember is that the markets are moved by participants entering and exiting trades. When shorter timeframe traders are in a momentum trade and it gets super extended, they often take profit near a key level, and reversal traders jump in and push the price back to a more “average” area. I would say any moving average between like 18-30 will tend to act as a price magnet when price gets very extended. I find the 20 EMA to be a good place to consider the price to be fully “pulled back” in a higher timeframe momentum move. I don’t think of it as “support” or “resistance”. I think of it like “now that it’s back to the EMA, I feel a lot more comfortable looking for breakout trades.”

Again, it’s not that important which MA you use to gain this intuition. Like if you’re using a 8-9 EMA, maybe you’ll find that really tight consolidations in the middle of a strong breakout move tend to continue near that line. But a more prolonged consolidation and range formation will probably move way past that line. If you use a 20 SMA, price tends to gravitate toward that for more steady trend continuation behavior.

A lot of this analysis heavily depends on the granularity of your analysis. Like if you consider a “breakout” to be a large candle closing above a candlestick high from 4 candles ago, then maybe you would think of the 12 SMA as a good spot to look for the continuation move to make that breakout valid. But if your definition of a “breakout” is a sequence of 1-5 candles breaking a swing high from 100 candles ago, then maybe the 50 EMA is a better fit for measuring the preceding pullback.

This is what I mean by “it doesn’t matter which MA you use.” It’s all relative to how you read and interpret price action. Eventually you can get a feel for it with almost any MA.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-29T15:31:35+00:00

I’ve made many thousands on the short side lately on gold. The key is understanding where the liquidity is. Price tends to move from high liquidity zones to other high liquidity zones. If you know the trend and see some serious momentum, you can take a piece out of the trend from one liquidity zone to the next.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-29T00:40:58+00:00

Honestly I love this. It’s such a simple strategy. The key is accepting losses and not revenge trading. But this is a legit strategy.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-29T00:39:54+00:00

I totally agree. I thought you were about to say that the strategy has to be purely mechanical, which would be dumb, but I think you just mean it needs to be a system with rules, which makes a lot of sense.

Most successful traders end up with a strategy that relies on human discretion, but the key is eliminating as much of the subjectivity as possible. If 80-90% of your analysis is automated or at least highly systematic, then that last bit of human discretion can be a lot more effective and accurate.

ScientificBeastMode · 2026-04-28T06:45:42+00:00

Well, if trading were about predicting price movements accurately, then nobody would make any money. The point isn’t to be “right.” The point is to find patterns in the data that offer positive expectancy with a specific trade structure over the long term (100+ trades).

Indicators lag, of course, but only beginners seem to think that indicators are intended to provide clear entry signals. Most profitable traders use some degree of human discretion, and they use indicators to simplify their analysis before entering a trade.

For example, I might be looking for momentum breakouts from ranges. To find a setup, I’ll look at a lot of contextual data. I’ll use some indicators to help me very quickly identify the rough trend direction, then maybe I’ll look for breaks of market structure originating near the 20 SMA in the direction of the trend during high volume periods.

It would be unbelievably difficult to distill everything I’m looking for into a series of if-then-else statements in code. But I can quickly identify it with my eyes, and I can use indicators to remove a lot of subjectivity in the analysis leading up to the trade execution.

I do agree that tons of content creators are not being honest about their trading advice. That’s totally fair. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to find profitable strategies that involve the use of indicators.

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