Clear chart· Clear head· Better decisions

I test a lot of systems against historical data, and most of the time the goal is finding an edge to trade. Every so often, the more useful thing that falls out is a measurement instead of a strategy, and this year handed me one that says more about the market itself than any strategy could: breakouts on GER40 and Nasdaq have been failing at a higher rate than at any point in the data I’ve got. ...

This one’s going out two days later than planned, picking up mid-week instead of at the start of it. Last week ended with records: the S&P 500 broke 7,800 on Thursday, the DAX brushed its own all-time high on Friday, and the Nasdaq Composite put in its best single session in weeks. The two sessions since have undone a good part of that. Long-dated Treasury yields have spiked to levels not seen since 2007, oil has jumped as US-Iran talks over the Strait of Hormuz broke down, and all three indices have now fallen for two straight days. Today’s FOMC minutes and a wave of retail earnings, several of them out this morning, are what decide whether that continues. ...

Last week gave the desks something to talk about. The DAX, Dow, and Nasdaq all closed near records on Friday, each riding its own version of the same story: an earnings season stronger than expected, and a labour market soft enough to put rate cuts back on the table. This week hands the wheel to a different driver. With earnings thinning out, US inflation data takes over as the thing that moves price. ...

The DAX open never behaves the same way twice, and that’s the first thing you have to make peace with. Some mornings it gaps, spikes, reverses, or chops sideways for an hour before it commits to a direction, other mornings it barely moves at all, as though it hasn’t had its coffee yet, and every so often it’s clean from the first bar. There’s no way to know in advance which version you’re getting, and that uncertainty is usually my cue to stay out. There are always exceptions, but the safer approach is almost always to sit on your hands and let the move come to you. ...

The Brokers compare tool started with nine brokers, mostly ECN-style firms built around the MT4/MT5/cTrader/TradingView stack that suits an EA or algo trader. A fresh round of research turned up five more candidates, and two of them earned a spot: Exness and IG. The other three, HFM, AvaTrade, and XM, didn’t, and I want to explain both calls rather than just drop two new rows into the table and move on. ...

Each platform is built for a different job. MT4 has the deepest EA and indicator ecosystem, MT5 adds more built-in tooling on top of that, cTrader is built around ECN-style execution, and TradingView is the strongest charting layer of the four, and if you ever want to trade the same instruments as real futures rather than CFDs, NinjaTrader and Sierra Chart are where that road leads. Which one you end up on usually comes down to what you’re already running and what you’re trying to do, more than which interface you happen to prefer. ...

Found a good piece to pass on: Naivety Assumes Continuance: What Five Years of Crypto Cycles Taught Me the Hard Way, a confessional rundown of what went wrong holding crypto through the 2026 cycle. The core idea applies well beyond crypto: you can learn a regime and mistake it for a law. The 2015–2021 near-zero-rate, easy-liquidity years made “buy the dip” and “HODL everything” reliably work, not because those were universal truths, but because that specific regime rewarded them. The author carried those rules into a liquidity-driven cycle instead of a halving-driven one, and got punished for it: Bitcoin still halved from $126k to $64k in 2026 despite crypto-friendly policy (a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, the GENIUS Act, ETF approvals). Regulatory tailwinds lost to macro headwinds, tighter liquidity beat better rules. ...

Here is another example of a trade using the strategy from Buy the dips, sell the rallies — almost the same setup, but the result could have been better. The entry was fine. The problem was the exit: no target, and an emotional decision to get out early. The trade — M1 entry M1 — price rejection at Day Open with Inside Bar (IB), Acceleration Correction visible in eWaves, 3.20R exit ...

I trade the London Session on GER40 and I’m normally done after an hour and a half — although there are plenty of times when the action comes later in the day. I choose to limit my time in the market. The process starts with a weekly review of the higher time frames — D1 and H1 — but my main interest is M15 for direction and target, and M1 for entry. I’ll try to align the trade with Elliott waves, but this post is focused on the trade setup itself. ...

Part of an ongoing trader interview series — the same set of questions put to different traders, covering background, psychology, strategy, and lessons learned. Originally published on Traders Questions. I’ve been trading for around 4 years now. Mostly DAX from Frankfurt/London Open, occasionally NASD, EURUSD, GBPUSD, USDJPY. About me Brit, living in South Africa since 2009. Past work in electronics and IT. What was your journey that led you into trading? ...