Travis

[Kitt @ICT_Concepts]

To be a trader.
"A man becomes honorable when suffering gives him every excuse to fall, and he still chooses to stand."

- Seneca

[Sheetal Rijhwani @RijhwaniSheetal]

Signs Trading Has Given You More Than Money:

1. You've learned to stay calm when things don't go your way.

2. You've accepted that effort and results don't always arrive together.

3. You've become comfortable admitting you're wrong.

4. You've stopped needing other people to believe in your decisions.

5. You've learned that patience is harder than hard work.

6. You've survived losses you once thought would break you.

7. You've learned to start again after bad days.

8. You've become less attached to outcomes and more attached to process.

9. You've learned that nobody is coming to save your account.

10. You've realized freedom comes with responsibility.

[EliteOptionsTrader @EliteOptions2]

Trading is NOT for weak minded people.

You sacrifice years nobody sees.

You fight your own demons every morning.

You lose money, sleep, and confidence.

But you show up anyway.

That's why the ones who make it live a life most people only dream of.

[The Honest Trader @TheH0n3stTrader]

- years of failure.
- years of poor sleep.
- years of debt.
- years of losing money.
- years of being mocked.
- years of stress.
- years of social isolation.
- years of watching charts for 10 hours a day.

And they still call you ''lucky''.

[The Inner Circle Trader @I_Am_The_ICT]

I have learned in this life, the more people try to talk you out of doing it, the more they try to explain how it can't happen like you envisioned it... the more you need to dig your heels in and remove their influence over you.

Everyone else retired broke, or still works.

Remember this.

[The Inner Circle Trader @I_Am_The_ICT]

34 years ago, from today...

I was working 6 days a week. My net pay, per week, was less than $300.00. I was single, recently divorced and no children.

I was sick of the rat race, being broke, tired of being tired of it all.

Then Trading walked back into the chat...

[The Inner Circle Trader @I_Am_The_ICT]

Livestreaming...

https://t.co/k3M0yB58nN

[Justin Banks @RealJGBanks]

Chose the freedom of trading.

Because we weren’t meant to work 9-5 at a job we hate for 50 years.

[Justin Banks @RealJGBanks]

I almost quit trading.

Couldn’t make $1,000
Blew multiple accounts

Now

$100k weeks

Debt free
House paid off
Cars paid off

One risk changed everything.

[The Honest Trader @TheH0n3stTrader]

I met some dude on a plane to Dubai.

He sat next to me.

No suit.
No watch.

He looked BROKE.

Then..

He asked what I did.

“Day trading”, I said.

He smiled.
Not impressed.

“How’s that working?”

“Up and down, you know how it is..”

He nodded.

“I made 18% per year for 22 years”, he said.
“Never traded a single day.”

I leaned forward.

“No stress”, he continued.
“No screens all day.”
“Just patience.”

I laughed.
“Sounds boring.”

“It is”, he said.
“That’s why it works.”

He pulled out his phone.

Showed me a chart.

Slow growth.
Then faster.
Then unstoppable.

“Compounding”, he said.
“Not adrenaline.”

“You’re gambling”, he added.
“Call it what it is.”

Silence.

“Quit trading”, he said.
“Start owning.”

I looked at my phone.
Charts.
Noise.
Chaos.

Then back at him.
Calm.
Certain.
Rich.

Made me think for a second.

But then I realized I made 150% last year on my personal account.

I will never quit trading.

I like stress.
I like chaos.
I like adrenaline.

Nothing will, ever make me give up on it.

[Andrew NFX @andrew_nfx]

Met a guy at a prop firm meetup who had done $340,000 in payouts in 18 months.

Trading only 45 minutes a day.

I asked him how.

'London open. One trade. Done.'

He wasn't running some complex system.

He had one setup he'd backtested obsessively across 3 years of price data.

A simple liquidity sweep at a key level in the first 30 minutes of London open.

If it appeared - he took it. 1% risk. 1:1 or 1:2 target depending on structure.

If it didn't appear within the first 45 minutes - he closed the laptop and got on with his day.

Some days that meant no trade at all.

I asked him what his monthly trade count looked like.

'Somewhere between 12 and 18 trades a month. Never more than that.'

His win rate over 18 months: 71%.

Average RR: 1.3.

He had scaled to $2.4M in combined prop firm capital across multiple accounts.

At 2-3% a month on that - you do the math.

He told me the hardest part wasn't finding the setup.

It was doing nothing on the days it didn't show up.

'I used to feel guilty closing the laptop. Like I was being lazy. Now I realise that closing the laptop IS the trade on those days.'

Most traders think volume is effort.

This guy figured out that restraint is the skill.

12-18 high quality trades a month. 71% win rate. $340k in payouts.

You don't need to be at the screen all day.

[The Inner Circle Trader @I_Am_The_ICT]

When you learn from me and find your model... just walk away in silence. Nobody cares that you stopped watching my lectures, when you secretly still do.

Sell your memberships, build you communities and market yourself on your own steam.

Sincerely. :)

[The Inner Circle Trader @I_Am_The_ICT]

Stop me if you seen this one...

Their timeline shows posts repping a particular model. They show profits, withdrawals and trades with it.

I teach new things, outside of that model.

Now, you see "ICT confuses people, changes terms, changes rules..." "Come join my community".

This is classic bottomfishing. It is weak marketing, despiration at best.

If you have something that works, let others find theirs. They don't need your help. Everyone building a free community will eventually be paid access only.

Stay solo... your trading is just that... one person gig.

[Andrew NFX @andrew_nfx]

A guy reached out to me last month.

He'd been trading for 4 years.

Blew over $30,000 of his own money.

Failed 40+ prop challenges.

Still wasn't profitable.

I asked to see his trading journal.

He sent me an Excel file with 2,700+ trades logged.

At first I was impressed.

Most traders don't even track 50 trades properly.

Then I opened it.

And immediately saw the problem.

Every single column was about the trade setup.

"Resistance level"
"Supply zone confirmed"
"Fibonacci confluence"
"Momentum shift"

But there was ZERO data on his actual execution.

No column for:
How he felt before entering.

Whether he hesitated.

If he moved his stop loss.

If he closed early out of fear.

His journal was just a record of what the market did.

Not what HE did.

I told him:

"You're tracking the wrong thing."

He got defensive.

"What do you mean? I have everything logged. Entry, exit, RR, outcome."

Yeah.

But none of that tells you why you keep losing.

So I had him add 3 new columns:

1. Emotional state before trade (calm / anxious / revenge mode / bored)
2. Did I follow my rules 100%? (yes / no)
3. If no, what did I change and why?

He tracked 60 trades with this new system.

Here's what he found:

21 of those trades were rule breaks.

Mostly:

Entering when anxious.

Moving stop loss during the trade.

Closing early because he "felt" like price would reverse.

Out of the 39 trades where he followed his rules perfectly?

He won 20.

51% win rate.

+21R profit.

The strategy wasn't broken.

His discipline was.

And he never would've seen it if he only tracked market data.

Six months later, he sent me a screenshot.

First funded payout.

$8,400.

Same strategy.

Just better execution tracking.

If your journal doesn't include how YOU behaved during the trade…

It's not a trading journal.

It's just a market diary.

[Yumi🌸 @samuraipips358]

Trading starts to go well once you stop thinking of losses as tuition.

In this industry, the phrase “losses are tuition” is popular.
But if you keep treating losses as learning material forever, you will not do well.

Why?
Because you can lose even when you take the right action, and you can win even when you take the wrong action.
At that point, if you continue treating losses as something bad, something to be avoided, you will never achieve consistency.
So what matters?

Whether it was the right action or not.

I wrote a moment ago that even the right action can lead to either a win or a loss.
What matters is whether it was the right action.
“Learn” from that perspective.

What defines the right action is found in the testing you did in advance.
You have repeated a sequence of actions and already know that the sum of the wins and losses produced there comes out positive.
In that case, the right action is to keep repeating that behavior.

In trading, losses are unavoidable.
You have to build the structure on the premise that losses will occur from the very beginning.

Of course, at the early stage, learning from losses matters.
At the same time, learning from wins matters too.
But individual outcomes do not carry meaning.
They have to be considered statistically.

Still, the phrase “think of losses as tuition” already carries the nuance that real money is being lost.
In other words, it means putting money on behavior that has not yet been tested, and then trying to learn something from that single outcome.
That is why I do not like that phrase.

I am not trying to deny learning itself.
What I am saying is wrong is the meaning hidden behind that phrase, which is “put money on it without testing it, and if you lose that money, then something must be wrong, so learn from that one outcome.”

By the time you are live trading, you should already have finished learning the answer behind that loss.
At that stage, the only thing you should be learning is whether you were able to follow the rules.

If you break the rules and still win, then you need to reflect on and learn even from that winning trade.

Winning or losing does not determine whether something was right or wrong.

What truly matters is understanding what is essential.
What you should be looking at is not wins and losses.
It is whether profit remains when you keep repeating consistent behavior and allow wins and losses to occur naturally.

That is exactly why building the structure in advance, then testing, practicing, and maintaining consistency afterward, all matter so much.

If you do not yet have a system with a tested edge
→ https://t.co/tXIFR0jr2T

[Yumi🌸 @samuraipips358]

A solid understanding of risk reward may dramatically change your trading.

It is risk reward that allows you to be profitable even with a 40% win rate.
Conversely, it is also risk reward that causes you to lose capital even with a 70% win rate.

What you should be testing is whether that consistent behavior carries positive expectancy, and in reality the degree to which the chart is involved is not actually that high.
Of course the chart matters too, but even more important is the risk reward embedded in your behavior.

Yet many traders become so fixated on winning the trade in front of them that they over sanctify chart analysis.
As a result, they end up with mistaken ways of thinking, such as saying there is no point because the same chart will never appear again, or that predicting the future is impossible.

No.

The reason you are not making money is the balance between risk reward and win rate.
Not the chart.
That is precisely why you lose capital on any chart.

You do not cut losses.
You hate seeing your preset stop get hit, so you widen it even further.
The moment you have a small profit, you take it quickly because you do not want to give it back.
When you lose, you increase position size.
And so on.

Every one of these behaviors is poor risk reward behavior.
In other words, “on any chart,” these behaviors will cause you to lose capital.

Since some people misunderstand this, let me be clear.
This is not an argument that a 1:1 risk reward is bad.
Even with a 1:1 risk reward, there is no problem if your win rate is 55% or higher.

The point here is this.
Is the risk reward of your consistent behavior actually sound?
Test those statistics.
Once you do, you will stop complaining that the chart was the problem or that the market changed.

Because whether you grow your capital or lose it comes down to the risk reward of your behavior, and “whatever the chart may be,” your result becomes inevitable.

[KT @ktran55]

Didn’t want to post this, but here it goes.

Think I’m going call it here.

Taking a serious break from trading and social media…

I love trading, and I have a passion for it.

However, these past few months, trading has been less enjoyable and actually stressful.

I’m a pretty chill guy, and I don’t get stressed, but am definitely stressed out from trading recently.

It’s affecting me mentally and emotionally.

It’s getting to the point where trading dictate my mood for the day, and my family sees it. They don’t deserve to see me in a crap mode, because I traded like crap.

I’ve been trading options for 4-5 years, and futures for 1.5 years.

For the first time in those five years, last year was profitable and I was so ecstatic about it. Imagine being unprofitable, and then turning profitable. Best feeling yet.

But, I think it’s time for a break to do some damage control, and to reset myself.

Never really took a break at all cause I was hungry all the time.

But now I’m probably going take a few weeks, or even months, or hell maybe longer whenever I’m ready.

My ultimate goal for trading was to financial provide for my family and actually spend more time with my family, but blowing accounts recently has not really done really financial good for me.

I guess that’s the reality of trading in a drought right?

Shit, I don’t want to even post this post to be honest.

It’s embarrassing to say the least. But I’m being honest and vulnerable to ya’ll.

It’s just the other side of trading reality that no one really talks about.

Never proclaimed to be a trading guru, or anything like that.

Just simply a random guy, trying bring some extra bread on the side.

Anyways…

Writing this made me tear up a little bit, cause I know I have it in me, but it’s not clicking.

So therefore, I will take a much needed break.

Going just grind it out with nursing, and pay off some of these expenses I’ve occurred.

I guess the good thing about taking a break is less time I’m on my phone watching charts. And more time spending with my toddler and newborn.

Sorry for the vent, but maybe I’ll look back at this post in a year or maybe years and see how far I’ve come.

Anyways, love yall, and hope you guys kills it.

This is not forever, just temporary.

Peace out.

[Travis @TravisRoyAn1]

@patrickwieland @I_Am_The_ICT Day trade like @I_Am_The_ICT

[Travis @TravisRoyAn1]

@TheMattDiamond Can’t beat nice weather and golf! Best combo for R&R