@tradercams If by liquidity you mean equal highs/lows or a DOL, hate to break it to you but they don't work. Orders there is no better than at a random price.
Before you argue, please test it yourself on years of data.
Day trading doesn't work. At least not the version that gets pushed on social media.
Look at my banner. Thousands of traders flipping coins with zero edge. After a year, take the top 1%. They look like they've cracked the market, so they start posting, selling courses, running mentorships. In reality they just got lucky. The other 99% never post anything.
The worst part is the main message that gets pushed: it takes years and years to finally crack it. Just keep believing. So you keep buying evals, keep trying, keep paying subscriptions. That sentence isn't there to help you. It's there to keep you paying.
And it gets you hooked. It's an addiction. A random win now and then feels like proof you know what you're doing, every loss makes you think you did something wrong, and the next setup always looks like the one. Once you're in, getting out is almost impossible.
And the concepts themselves are BS. With ICT you can open any chart and explain every move after the fact. Liquidity got swept, CISD/BOS, price ran to the draw. In hindsight it all looks obvious.
Live, it's the same trap. When you win a clean trade, it feels like the concepts worked perfectly. When you lose, you always find something to blame: you missed this, that wasn't aligned, the HTF wasn't confirmed...
"The concept is never the problem. It's always you."
So I tested it. LRLR with an HTF DOL sweep, LTF sweep, CISD/BOS/IFVG entry. Perfected the rules so it would take the exact trades I would take live. Some trades worked perfectly. Some went straight to SL. Overall it was a coin flip with zero predictive power.
The clean ones are the screenshots you see. The ones that failed completely never get posted. Same in every mentorship: the top students post their wins and payouts, the losing ones stay quiet (my banner again). And with all that subscription money, a mentor can buy enough evals that one of them is basically guaranteed to pay out.
And if you keep losing money, they tell you trading is 90% psychology. It's you vs you. It's not. It's 100% strategy, and it's not you vs you. On the other side are billion-dollar institutions doing everything they can to keep price as precise and efficient as possible. No amount of discipline fixes a strategy with no edge.
I'm an ex day trader. I got a few payouts myself, and I can't honestly say they were more than luck. Since then I've tested many, many other concepts and features. Not one of them gave me a reliable edge.
Test any of it over thousands of trades and you'll see the same thing. Zero predictive power.
You're not going to beat one of the most efficient, liquid markets on earth by drawing boxes and lines on a chart.
So what does work?
Trading less liquid, less efficient markets. Finding an edge there is astronomically easier. Or taking a systematic approach to prop firms and using their payoff structure to make a profit.
Both come from testing and math.
But don't get me wrong. Sponsorships, mentorship money, YouTube ad revenue, referral links for evals... those all pay very well.
Combine that with young people who believe they're going to change their life, and a system built to keep them hooked and paying for years, and you've got the perfect business...
I didn't just test one strategy. I tested the concepts themselves and compared their forward returns to random.
Some trades working perfectly proves nothing. A moving average shifted one standard deviation and adjusted by moon phase will nail a perfect bounce on some days too. Test it for years and it's noise.
By reliable edge I mean positive expectancy that holds out of sample, over a large number of trades, after costs.
Prop firm payouts don't prove edge either. With enough time and attempts, any strategy gets paid if you size it right. If ICT helps you build something that profits from props and isn't overfitted, go ahead. Just don't expect it to hold up with your own money live, on crypto or anywhere else.
And agreed, not everyone's a scammer. Most believe what they teach. Survivorship bias doesn't need anyone to lie.
@MoneyTradeEdge Right, this time itโs the patience. You lost before even starting by day trading. Prove me wrong if you can. ๐คฆ๐ป
Last post is full breakdown of my arguments