I started trading at 17 at got it at 22, and am almost 24 now and am just now reaching the point where I can consider going full time. That’s 5 years of consistent work towards it before ever going live with significant capital or taking any prop firm challenges, and then 2 years of doing it part time while working a job.

So, in total 7 years!

I saw your post earlier and you’re pretty much exactly like how I was during my first three years. I was pretty doubtful as to whether this thing is even possible and had lots of self doubt (over 99% fail to make a living after all, so like wtf am I even doing?)

My best advice is to tune out all the noise and follow the steps below

Step 1: Research

Learn about TA and research charts to learn how price moves. Whether this is done by reading orderflow, candlesticks, etc etc is up to you to experiment with and decide on.

The best source I found to get started was the free Art and Science of Trading course on Marketlife (you just gotta create an account, and then you gain access to all of it for free).

The goal of this step is to settle on a simple, easy to execute ruleset that exploits an edge in the market. Don’t get distracted and focus on other things like trading psychology gurus, youtubers/instagram traders, etc.

The gist of the TA portion of the marketlife course + my own chart research is this. There are 4 main types of trades:

Breakout trades: support/resistance breaks and forms a new trend.

• Exploits mean reversion traders who got stuck trying to trade an S/R bounce.

• Good guide here: https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/become-a-pattern-recognition-machine-an-obsession-with-boxes-5b730ab0999c

Trend continuation trades: buys the dip (pullback) in uptrends, shorts them in downtrends.

• Exploits trend termination traders who got stuck fading a trend that was still going strong.

• Another guide here: https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/pattern-recognition-part-ii-how-to-buy-the-dip-trends-and-pullbacks-91d0ec0bd9e8

Trend termination trades: fades a trend after strong evidence of exhaustion and countertrend strength.

• Exploits overly aggressive/overly hopeful trend continuation traders who got stuck trading with a trend that is ending or already over.

• Good post on these trades here: https://adamhgrimes.com/selective-intraday-trades-a-deep-dive-into-the-snap-pullback/

Mean reversion trades: fades the edges of a range until price gets back towards the middle of the range.

• Exploits overly aggressive/overly hopeful breakout traders who try to play low-probability breakouts that fail more often than they play out.

• Example playbook here: https://imgur.com/a/S4eR526

Create a ruleset to enter and exit at least one of these types of trades, leaving nothing up to guesswork. Test it for at least 100 trades across various market conditions on past data to verify it has an edge.

I only focus on trend termination trades for my day trading for example, but there’s no reason why you can’t focus elsewhere or do multiple types of trades. Do what works best for you, but don’t feel pressured to have a way to play them all. All you need is 1 good type of trade, 1 good setup.

Without a ruleset to exploit an edge, no amount of anything else will help you turn a profit. Once you got something good that works on historical data with a profit factor above 1.1 (indicating a significant edge), move on to the next step.

Step 2: Forward Testing

Test your ruleset on a demo account (fake money) to see if you can still turn a profit and follow your rules. The goal of this step is to eliminate any errors in executing your strategy.

Journal your strategy and log whether each trade:

• Followed your rules, and lost (no bad decisions here)

• Followed your rules, and won (no bad decisions here)

• Broke your rules, and lost (this is a mistake that made you lose the trade)

• Broke your rules, and won (this is a mistake that got lucky and gave you a win)

If the trade was a mistake, comment on what it was (chased entry, entered too early, forgot to set position size correctly, etc.). If it was not a mistake, don’t comment on it.

Every 25 trades, go through your mistakes and work on the most common one for the next 25 trades. Keep doing this until you get 100 trades in a row without any mistakes.

This will be fucking hell to be honest, and you’ll have every temptation to jump to a new strategy, significantly change your existing one, go live, or buy prop firm evals. But remain patient and keep trading on demo. Know that over time you will eliminate more and more mistakes, bringing you closer to consistent profitability.

Don’t go live with real money yet. If you can’t even turn a profit on demo, going live/getting prop firm challenges at this point is just setting money on fire. Don’t take career-ending losses at this stage to ensure you can make it through to the end.

Do this until you get a large enough sample size (100+ trades) that has a profit factor above 1.1.

Step 3: Going Live!

Now, open a live account with a small but somewhat significant sum of money that you can still afford to lose. The goal of this step is to find out if you can handle the mental (and P/L) upswings and downswings of trading a profitable strategy.

Here’s a post that guides you through an experiment which shows how bad those losing streaks can get: https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/how-to-find-out-if-your-losing-streak-is-normal-or-not-e0b65f93a765

The goal of this step is to get you to the point where experiencing the worst losing streaks ever, the best winning streaks ever, and everything in between feels all the same — boring. Here’s how to best do that:

Continue journaling mistakes like before:

• Followed your rules, and lost (no bad decisions here)

• Followed your rules, and won (no bad decisions here)

• Broke your rules, and lost (this is a mistake that made you lose the trade)

• Broke your rules, and won (this is a mistake that got lucky and gave you a win)

But now track these three stats for every trade as well:

• Were you calm (0) or worked up (2)?

• Were you focused (0) or distracted (2)?

• Were you planned (0) or reactive (2) when taking the trade?

Average those three stats together, and it’ll give you a number between 0–2. Let’s call it your emotional temperature. The higher this is, the more you need to keep working on trading psychology (the marketlife course gives ideas on how to do this).

Keep taking trades on this account until your average emotional temperature scores is <0.2 for 100 trades in a row. Your profit factor must also remain above 1.1 at the end of this to verify that you are repeating your edge well too.

Step 4: Scaling Up

The previous tests have done a few very important things: given you a profitable ruleset to execute, proven that you can actually execute it without making mistakes, and can stay out of its way by remaining emotionally stable.

Now the only thing left to do is scale up! You can do this in many ways, but the two most accessible are to:

• Deposit a large sum of money into a good broker and trade there.

• Go to a prop firm and pass an eval there, and use the funds you make to buy more evals and copy your trades to there.

I vastly prefer the prop firm option for starting out since it’ll scale much, much faster. But, you need to size yourself correctly to make the probability of hitting the max loss limit close to 0%. Here’s how to do that:

1. Go to this risk of ruin calculator: https://www.myfxbook.com/forex-calculators/risk-of-ruin-calculator

2. Input your trading strategy’s winrate, avg win, avg loss.

3. Put in 1% risk for the “risk per trade” setting to start off with.

4. Set the loss level to your prop firm’s loss limit.

5. Set the number of trades to 5,000.

6. Adjust the “risk per trade” setting until “risk of drawdown” is between 0–2%. That’ll ensure that there is a <2% chance of you blowing your account due to normal downswings.

7. Have a predefined amount of money set aside each month/quarter/year (whatever works for you) to spend on prop firm challenges so you don’t go on tilt and blow account after account after account.

Step 5: Paying Yourself

Have some plan in place as to what to do with your trading profits. Don’t let this slip between the cracks.

My monthly profit goal is $6k, so at the end of every month, I withdraw $6k of my profits and then 50% of anything over $6k.

• If there are no profits, I do nothing.

• If there’s only $3k of profits for the month, I only withdraw that amount.

• If there’s $15k of profits, I withdraw $10.5k ($6k + 50% of the remaining $9k).

Of those monthly profits:

• 30% get set aside for taxes (overestimate this).

• 60% gets used for living expenses (essentially my “salary”), and any leftover goes into long term investments.

• 10% goes straight to long term investments.

Every 6 months, increase the base amount of your trading account by 15% (essentially giving you a 30% yearly raise).

You can also incorporate yourself as a company and get special tax status for being a trader (depending on where you live), but I’d advise seeing an accountant for setting that up and seeing if that’s the best option.

There’s many ways to do this, but that’s how I planned to do it. Just have something down that leaves nothing up to guesswork and allows you to manage your hard earned money well.

You can save up to 100% on a Tradingview subscription with my refer-a-friend link. When you get there, click on the Tradingview icon on the top-left of the page to get to the free plan if that’s what you want.