Trading a hundred pairs. (Kidding, I only traded eurusd)

When I look back at my trading performance over the past three months, I see both a significant win and valuable lessons learned. My systematic approach generated a 165% return in just 90 days, but the real story is more nuanced than that headline suggests.

Building the Edge: Months of Preparation

Before I risked a single dollar of live capital, I spent months developing and testing my edge using FX Replay. This wasn’t casual backtesting. This was deliberate, focused practice aimed at understanding exactly what worked and what didn’t.

During those months of simulated trading, I discovered critical insights about my performance:

• Which setups actually had an edge and which ones just felt good psychologically
• My strengths and weaknesses as a trader (what I executed well versus where I consistently struggled)
• The specific days and trading sessions where I performed best (this alone was game-changing)
• Which losing setups to eliminate entirely from my playbook

Trading is a performance-based sport, no different from basketball or chess. You wouldn’t step onto a professional court without countless hours of practice, and the same applies here. Edge isn’t something you stumble into. It’s something you build, test, and refine relentlessly.

By the time I went live, I wasn’t guessing. I had a proven system with documented results and a deep understanding of when I had an advantage and when I didn’t.

The System That Worked

The foundation of my success came down to a disciplined trading system built on clear entry and exit rules, proper risk management, and consistent execution. For the first several weeks, everything clicked. I was following my plan religiously, staying detached from individual trades, and letting the probabilities play out.

At one point, I was actually up 200%. The system was working exactly as designed.

And here’s the thing: I’m not just saying this with some screenshots or selective trade history. My entire trading performance is live and public through a strategy manager account that anyone can view and copy. Full transparency. Every trade, every win, every loss. It’s all there.

Where I Went Wrong

But then emotions crept in.

As my account grew, so did my confidence (and unfortunately, my emotional involvement). I started overtrading, taking setups that didn’t fully meet my criteria simply because I was riding high on recent wins. Each profitable trade made me feel invincible, and each loss made me want to immediately “get it back.”

This emotional trading cost me. What should have been a 200% performance gradually eroded to 165% as I deviated from the very system that had generated those gains in the first place.

The scary part? All of this is documented in real time on my strategy manager account. You can literally see where discipline broke down and emotions took over. It’s humbling, but it’s also real.

The Lessons Learned

Preparation is everything. Those months with FX Replay weren’t wasted time. They were the foundation of everything that worked. Without that edge, none of this would have been possible.

Stick to the system, especially when winning. Success can be just as dangerous as failure when it comes to emotional discipline. The moment you start feeling like you can’t lose is precisely when you need to tighten your adherence to your rules.

Overtrading kills performance. More trades don’t equal more profit. Quality setups that meet your exact criteria will always outperform quantity.

Know your optimal performance windows. Trading outside the sessions and days where I historically performed best was a mistake. Edge isn’t constant. It appears in specific conditions.

Protect your gains. Once you’ve built significant profits, your priority should shift slightly toward preservation. I didn’t need to chase every opportunity. My system had already proven it worked.

Public accountability matters. Trading on a copyable strategy manager account added a layer of responsibility I didn’t expect. Knowing others could see (and copy) my trades made the mistakes sting even more.

The Evolution: Automating My Edge

Here’s the reality: achieving those results took a massive amount of time and mental energy. I was glued to the charts during my optimal trading sessions, constantly monitoring setups, managing positions, and fighting off emotional impulses.

It wasn’t sustainable.

That’s when I started diving deep into AI and n8n automations. The goal was simple: outsource and delegate my trading executions (and potentially even setup spotting) without losing the edge I’d worked so hard to build.

Lucky for me, I already had a background in algorithmic trading and MQL coding, so everything started coming together fast. I wasn’t just learning automation. I was applying years of trading knowledge to build something that actually understood how I trade.

The result? I published a trading assistant that actually gets it. I can literally tell it something like “buy EU now with 1% risk and a 15 pip stoploss with a 3R TP” and it knows exactly what to do. [link to it here]

No more sitting at the screen all day. No more emotional decisions in the heat of the moment. Just clear communication with an assistant that executes my edge without the human baggage.

This is where trading is headed for me. The system works, but now the system can run itself.

Moving Forward

Despite my mistakes, 165% in 90 days is still a strong result that validates the core system. The difference between 165% and 200% wasn’t the system failing. It was me failing to follow it consistently.

And honestly? That’s exactly why automation makes sense. Remove the emotional trader (me) from the equation during execution, and suddenly that 200% performance becomes repeatable.

I’m still refining the automation, still testing, still improving. But the foundation is there. The edge is there. Now it’s just about letting the machines do what they do best: execute without emotion.

The strategy manager account will keep showing the results in real time. The good, the bad, and everything in between. That’s the deal when you trade publicly.

---

“Fortune favors the bold — only those willing to take real risks ever find real rewards.” – The Zurich Axioms

---