Forum Forexroasted

news periods have widened spreads, increased slippage, and extreme volatility. firms restrict to prevent: 1) accounts blowing up during news events, 2) traders gaming wider spreads against firm liquidity, 3) gambling-style binary 'news trades'. legitimate news strategies get caught in the same rules but firms prefer over-restriction to having to assess case by case.

the patterns-as-behaviour framing is the right one. they describe what participants are doing, which is genuinely informative, but theyre not a mechanical buy-here signal with a high win rate. the only way to escape your confirmation-bias worry is to define a pattern precisely and actually count every occurrence, winners and losers, over a real sample. without that count youre just remembering the photogenic ones and feeling like they work.

+1 strongly. the financial stress of trading-as-only-income is brutal. budget for 18+ months. and have a 'return to work' plan documented so you dont feel trapped if it doesnt go well.

its the hardest part and not fully objective, but there are concrete tells. if your system exploits, say, a volatility breakout pattern, check whether that pattern is still occurring and simply not paying, versus the pattern no longer forming at all because volatility regime changed. setups occurring but failing leans bad luck or normal drawdown. setups no longer occurring, or the conditions that created them structurally gone, leans real mechanism change. look at whether the opportunity still exists, not just whether its currently profitable.

seconded. home fibre is great for bandwidth but terrible for the consistent low latency mt5 needs. the terminal holds a persistent connection and any micro-interruption forces a reconnect. vps solves it for like 5-10 bucks a month.