Forum Forexroasted

or trade less and pay zero commission. revolutionary

documentation is everything in these disputes. screenshot your open orders before and after, note the exact migration time, and log any fill that behaved differently. firms move much faster on a clear evidenced complaint than on 'something felt off after the switch'. make it impossible to wave away.

serious question for those making real money from prop firms. how are you handling the tax situation?

prop firm pays you in USD via wise/bank transfer. legally its often classified as 'income from contractor services' which is different from capital gains from your own trading. tax treatment varies wildly by country.

not asking for legal advice, asking what people actually do. self-employed registration? company structure? just declaring as misc income? curious what works.

the hidden-correlation trap is the whole issue. two trend-following systems on correlated pairs will draw down together exactly when you hoped one would cover the other. real diversification needs different logic, ideally one that profits in conditions the other struggles in, like a trend system paired with a mean-reversion one. if both win and lose at the same times, youve added work and risk concentration disguised as diversification.

a compact mtf table works well. i keep one tiny panel showing 1h, 4h and daily rsi as numbers. takes a sliver of space and gives the cross-timeframe context without burying the candles. cleaner than three full oscillator windows.

beyond the obvious profit target and max drawdown, props bury rules that quietly fail accounts: trailing drawdown that follows your peak, consistency rules, minimum trading days, news-trading bans. id rather learn these from other peoples scars than my own. which buried rule caught you out, and how should a newcomer read the fine print to spot them?

leaving a broker because they made it harder to blow up faster. peak trader behavior

+1. partial-lock approach is mathematically better than pure trail to BE for most strategies. you give up some R from runners going further but you protect a substantial portion of what you'd captured. less psychological regret too.

hit my profit, requested a payout, and it was denied citing a consistency-type rule i honestly didnt know existed. im upset but also trying to be fair, maybe it was buried in terms i skimmed. for those whove been here, is there any real recourse when a payout is denied on a rule, or is it just a hard lesson in reading the fine print?

the pain-you-can-tolerate framing is perfect. both styles work, but each has a characteristic discomfort, and you trade the one whose discomfort you can sit with. if a long string of small losses waiting for a trend drives you to abandon ship, trend following will beat you regardless of its edge. if watching a small loss turn into a big one because you wont cut breaks you, mean reversion will. know your breaking point, choose the style that doesnt hit it.

traded only eurusd for my first year. knew the way it moved during london open, knew where the major weekly levels were, knew how it responded to dollar news. that depth of familiarity with one instrument was worth more than surface knowledge of 10. added gbpusd in year two once i had that foundation.

for learning - free tier covers everything you need (just one chart at a time, limited indicators). premium becomes worth it when you actively trade multiple instruments and need multiple charts open simultaneously. dont pay until you actually find limits of the free tier.

the mental reframe that worked for me: calculate your exact drawdown buffer in dollars. if the account has a 10% max drawdown and it's $50k, you can lose $5000 before you're in trouble. then calculate how many trades at your normal risk (say $150 per trade) you'd need to have all go wrong before hitting that. usually it's 30+ trades. that buffer suddenly looks manageable instead of abstract.

switched from hedging to netting after about 6 months. the clarity of having one position per symbol is significantly better for understanding your actual market exposure at a glance. in hedging mode with multiple positions open you can have offsetting trades that net to almost no exposure but still show large notional values and pay double commission. netting makes your book cleaner.

down 8% after year one, honest about it, learned enough to write this coherently - that's a better outcome than most. the traders who blow up in year one and quit or the ones who get lucky and think they figured it out both leave without the real foundation. you have losses and lessons, which is the actual curriculum.

fill quality over spread is the whole graduation. at size you also start feeling the difference between true ecn routing and an internal b-book that handled your small orders invisibly but balks at a real one. the broker that felt identical to others at micro lots reveals its real nature when the order is big enough to matter to them.

some brokers and tools publish what percentage of retail traders are long versus short, and the popular idea is to fade the crowd because retail is usually wrong. ive been tempted to use it but i suspect its not that simple. does fading retail positioning actually work, and if so under what conditions, or is wrong-way retail a myth thats been oversold?

its just a designated person at the broker who knows your account and handles your requests. instead of writing to general support and getting a different rep each time, you email or call your RM. they remember your context. mostly useful for active or large traders. for normal retail traders standard support is fine.

+1. their normal-hours execution is competitive but the news widening hurts active traders specifically. if you trade news or session opens (when liquidity transitions matter), octafx is a worse choice than pure ECN brokers. for non-news intraday trading on calm market days, theyre fine.