The knowledge base for prop firm traders
Price action, psychology and process — written for traders passing challenges and keeping funded accounts, and wired into the tools that measure whether it's working.
Technical
Top-Down Analysis: Decide the Story Before You Hunt the Entry
Most losing trades are good entries inside the wrong story. A repeatable weekly-to-intraday reading order fixes that.
7 min read
Entry Models: Confirmation vs Direct — Pick One and Let It Breathe
Every entry technique is a trade-off between price and certainty. Knowing which side of that trade-off you're on matters more than the technique itself.
7 min read
Liquidity as Target: Take Profit Where the Orders Actually Rest
Price doesn't travel toward round numbers or your hoped-for R. It travels toward resting orders. Target those, and your winners stop dying ten pips early.
7 min read
How to Backtest Honestly: Replay, Sample Size, and the Lies You Tell Yourself
A backtest is only worth what its honesty cost you. Mechanical rules, bar-by-bar replay, and a big enough sample turn a hunch into a testable claim.
8 min read
Position Sizing: The Only Lever You Fully Control
You don't control whether the next trade wins. You control exactly how much it costs when it doesn't — and on a prop account, that one lever decides everything.
7 min read
Trading Gaps: Magnets, Inversions, and Why Context Still Rules
A gap is the market admitting it skipped a conversation. Sometimes price comes back to finish it, sometimes the gap becomes the floor — the difference is the story around it.
7 min read
Psychology
Closing Trades Too Early: The Leak That Hides Inside Your Winners
It never shows up in the loss column, so it survives for years. Here's how to measure the cost of cutting winners and retrain the exit.
6 min read
Revenge Trading: The Loss Isn't the Problem — The Next Ten Minutes Are
One loss rarely breaks an account. The unplanned trade taken to win it back is how one loss becomes four — and a blown challenge.
6 min read
Overtrading: When More Trades Is the Strategy Leaking
Your edge lives in a handful of setups per week. Every trade beyond them is paid for with spread, fees and focus — and it compounds against you.
6 min read
Fear of Execution: You Saw the Setup. You Didn't Click. Here's Why
Hesitation isn't a discipline problem — it's a signal that something upstream is wrong: the size, the unprocessed losses, or what the trade means to you.
6 min read
FOMO Entries: The Move You're Chasing Has Already Paid Someone Else
Watching price run without you hurts more than losing. That's exactly why the entry it provokes has the worst risk-reward you'll take all week.
6 min read
Probabilistic Thinking: One Trade Tells You Nothing
A valid setup that lost was a good trade. A random punt that won was a mistake. Until those two sentences feel true, every result will lie to you.
7 min read
Building Confidence: It's Evidence, Not a Feeling
Real trading confidence can't be affirmed into existence. It's assembled from two files: a backtested sample and a forward record of following your own rules.
6 min read
Handling Streaks: Both Kinds Are Trying to Change Your Size
Five wins whisper 'you've figured it out'. Five losses whisper 'you never had it'. Both are the same statistical illusion — and both end careers through the size dial.
6 min read
Prop & Routine
Choosing a Prop Firm by Your Statistics, Not Their Marketing
Discounts and payout screenshots are noise. Four numbers from your own trading decide which firm's rules you can actually survive.
8 min read
A Trading Plan You'll Actually Follow: 15 Minutes, Written Before the Open
Plans fail because they're strategy documents. A working daily plan is a short contract about behavior, written while you're still objective.
6 min read
The Daily Loss Limit Is a Cliff, Not a Budget
Treating the firm's daily limit as money you're allowed to lose is how accounts die. The traders who survive build their own stop well inside it.
7 min read
Passing a Challenge Is a Pacing Problem, Not a Trading Problem
An 8% target over 30 days is 2% a week — a pace your normal trading already produces. Challenges are failed by traders trying to pass them faster than that.
7 min read
Funded Is a Different Game: Stop Passing, Start Earning
Most funded accounts die in month one — not to worse trading, but to the passing mindset surviving into a game that no longer has a finish line.
7 min read
News
View all →Economic events — measured, not guessed
Every recurring release that matters, with post-release volatility measured against an ordinary hour on real price history — and the news-trading policy of 29 prop firms, read off their own pages.