Forum Forexroasted

the honest answer is that for a 500 dollar account, your position sizing and discipline will decide your outcome a hundred times more than the execution model. a reputable market maker isnt sitting there picking on your micro lots. the ecn-or-die crowd online overstates it massively for small retail. it matters more as size and frequency grow.

brokers don't generally monitor cross-account hedging for retail clients. it's not prohibited unless your agreement says so. where it matters is wash trade rules in some jurisdictions for tax - a simultaneous long/short on the same pair across accounts can be treated as no economic position and disallowed as a loss for tax purposes in some countries. tax issue, not broker issue.

i went full time in 2020 and never looked back. but i had: 2 years savings, a profitable system with verified track record, and partner income covering essentials. the warnings here are correct for MOST people. for the right person with the right setup it works great. honest self-assessment is key.

for years broker choice was simple: regulated, decent spreads, done. now that position sizes have grown, the things that never mattered are suddenly biting, partial fills, liquidity at certain hours, how the broker handles a large market order. for those trading real size, what criteria moved up your list that beginners never think about?

ran a swing EA on a home pc for two years with zero issues after i fixed the windows update behaviour and put the pc on a small ups for power blips. moved to a vps only when i added an intraday strategy that genuinely couldnt tolerate downtime. let the strategys time sensitivity decide, not the marketing.

ive been roughly breakeven for a few months. nothings broken exactly, the edge still seems there, but the equity curve has gone sideways and the boredom and self-doubt are dangerous. the temptation to tear up a working system out of impatience is strong. for those whove been around, how do you survive a long flat stretch without sabotaging yourself?

start with a fixed template you fill for every trade so its consistent and reviewable, not freeform rambling. mine is: setup name, why i entered in one line, entry, stop, target, risk in percent, emotional state, and after close, result and one lesson. the consistency is what lets you spot patterns later. a diary of paragraphs tells you nothing, structured fields you can scan across fifty trades tell you everything.

the troll makes a genuinely useful correction, the goal isnt originality, its understanding and trust. its completely fine if your developed strategy turns out to be a known edge, what matters is that you arrived at it through your own observation and testing, so you understand why it works and when it wont. you can absolutely start from a known strategy and make it yours by testing it yourself and learning its behaviour deeply. understood-and-borrowed beats original-and-mysterious. the work is the understanding, not the novelty.

the honest answer is there is no free lunch here that isnt fragile. tv alerts can fire a webhook, you catch the webhook with a small bridge script that talks to the mt5 python api or a local EA listening on a socket. it works but you now maintain a webhook endpoint, a bridge and an EA. when one link breaks at 2am you find out the hard way.

partly fair but not fully. ive seen a prop whose challenge feed had visibly worse slippage on news than any real broker id used, which absolutely affected stop-based strategies, not excuses. the discipline is to separate 'the feed is genuinely poor' from 'i lost and want a culprit'. both exist and only execution data tells them apart.

low vol regimes punish breakout strategies and reward mean reversion. either adapt the strategy or just sit out fx and trade indices/commodities where vol is more interesting right now. dont force eurusd.

thats too pessimistic. firms with proper risk management and reserves can handle bad months without stiffing traders. the firms that fail are undercapitalized or running ponzi-like business models. due diligence still works for separating those from the legit ones.

tested 4 post-MFF firms over 2024-2025. survivors with consistent payouts in my experience: alphacapital, fundednext, blueguardian. firms that became unreliable or vanished: 2 i wont name to avoid drama but they had glowing 2024 reviews and quiet 2025.

traded cmc since 2020. yes its more expensive than ic markets or pepperstone. you pay for: actual segregation under fca rules, deep liquidity that holds during stress events (saw this in march 2020 covid panic), credit-like terms for high net worth clients. for serious size its worth the premium. for small accounts its not.

the eval drawdown isnt artificially tight, its standard. you cant complain about a 5% max DD during evaluation while wanting to use it for swing trading - those just dont fit. either go intraday during eval or pick a firm with swing-friendly DD rules.

echo above. fxpro cysec is a known quantity, execution is consistent, withdrawal speed is 2-3 business days reliably. the 2024 changes were corporate not operational. as long as the team running execution stays in place i think theyre fine.