My "trading" jouney

[Brayopinchez]

You might have noticed that the word trading is in quotes. I will explain that , but first a little about me. I've been a lurker on the app for close to 3 years now ,often only looking through this app when I am about to go broke but have never found anything that was worth putting time into or that would pay as fast as I would have wanted .So you might guess why I am back.

Anyway I’ve been trading on and off for two years, though it’s been more gambling than anything. My only real flex is risk management; I’ve never blown an account. On one account with 200+ trades, my max drawdown was only -3.6%. That said, I’ve never had a payout. I suck at this, and I’m fine admitting it.

I’ve accepted that the learning curve in this game is brutal without a mentor. My plan now is to stop trying to be the "idea guy" and just leverage traders who have already put in the years.

The problem is that real, profitable traders usually don't sell signals. The guys who do are almost always scammers running one-way Discord groups with zero infrastructure for risk management or auto-trading. You’re just a number in a chat where only the admins can talk—we all know why.

So, here’s my workaround: I’m building software to scrape trades directly from YouTube livestreams of actual pros.

Where I’m at:

• The Pipeline: I’ve finished the infra to grab frames from a live YouTube feed and pull trade data from the images. Currently, it's all traditional code (no ML/AI yet).
• The Next Step: I need to run this against past livestream videos to stress-test the accuracy. I'm also considering training a model on the collected data to make the image recognition more robust.

The Major Obstacle:The ~25s stream lag. I ran a simulation assuming random market movement and not so surprisingly, the "bad" entries caused by the delay were balanced out by "better" entries where the price moved back toward me. I’m not totally sold that this is a viable long-term strategy, so I need to run more tests against real historical data to see if that balance holds up.

I’ll be updating this thread as I go with whatever progress or weird bugs I run into.

 

[jaerehan]

Respect for the honesty—that already puts you ahead of most “traders.” What you’ve written doesn’t sound like delusion; it sounds like someone who finally stopped chasing edge fantasies and started engineering one.
Your risk management stats alone tell me you understand survival, which is rare. Scraping real traders instead of buying signals is actually a smart reframing, but the stream delay is the real boss fight here.
The right move is exactly what you said: brutal backtesting on real sessions, not assumptions. Even if this doesn’t become a money printer, the process itself will teach you more about market structure, latency, and execution than 99% of Discord traders ever learn.
Solid start—keep posting updates. Good Luck for your journey

 

[kweiss]

At -3.6% drawdown with 200+ trades, that is good!

It sounds like you are using a prop firm with tight regulations hence why you cannot make money as you need to risk more than what the prop allows.

I would trade my own money in this case. Even if it is 100. If you can make 2-3% a month and compound it, you can double your account in those 2 years with just 3% a month compounding.

What are you trading, btw?

If you need data from real live succeful traders, give me a shout out. I have a lot of data collected (historical trades, account balances, etc.)

 

[Brayopinchez]

The Major Obstacle:The ~25s stream lag. I ran a simulation assuming random market movement and not so surprisingly, the "bad" entries caused by the delay were balanced out by "better" entries where the price moved back toward me. I’m not totally sold that this is a viable long-term strategy, so I need to run more tests against real historical data to see if that balance holds up.

I just ran the same tests using real data on simulated trades, and it turns out the 25s lag doesn’t actually kill the edge (I used 1 minute for this test). The price difference is small enough that it hasn’t really changed the overall outcome.

lag impact on wins:

lag impact on losses:

lag impact on random combinations with 55% win rate:

lag impact on random combinations with 33% win rate:

lag impact on random combinations with 26% win rate:
View attachment 503285

 

[Brayopinchez]

At -3.6% drawdown with 200+ trades, that is good!

My trading style generally relied on a lot of hedging, which kept the losses small. But hedging is a double-edged sword for beginners; I ended up hedging my good trades too, so the profits never really amounted to much.

What are you trading, btw?

At the moment I am trading futures, because that's what my "mentor" trades. But back then I used to trade a mixture of indices and fx.

If you need data from real live succeful traders, give me a shout out. I have a lot of data collected (historical trades, account balances, etc.)

Yes ,that would be really helpful. I've just ran another simulation ,but I still do not trust the data 100% since its simulated too only with real data this time.

 

[Brayopinchez]

Respect for the honesty—that already puts you ahead of most “traders.” What you’ve written doesn’t sound like delusion; it sounds like someone who finally stopped chasing edge fantasies and started engineering one.
Your risk management stats alone tell me you understand survival, which is rare. Scraping real traders instead of buying signals is actually a smart reframing, but the stream delay is the real boss fight here.
The right move is exactly what you said: brutal backtesting on real sessions, not assumptions. Even if this doesn’t become a money printer, the process itself will teach you more about market structure, latency, and execution than 99% of Discord traders ever learn.
Solid start—keep posting updates. Good Luck for your journey

thanks man

 

[FriendlyFace]

was really interesting to read hope for more updates and good luck with it

 

[CarefulWord]

that's incredible, good luck with it

 

[Brayopinchez]

Tested this against real data , no bueno. The 1 min overhead actually has a huge effect on the returns , especially when following day trades.