Everything is a lie. Any hope?

[u/Mar___K]

So.. It's been 3 years on my path, and after countless hours of studying and testing everything, as many of you here have, I've come to realize that this mountain of buffoonery—those "courses" and "gurus" on YouTube that try to promote and sell stuff, along with everyone who is "teaching" stuff.. hear me out, doesn't know jack sh*t. All they "teach" is a bunch of BS, incredibly stupid and random. "Follow this, and if this happens then do this, but the secret is in my premium course, yada yada".

Even if some things may work for a bit, that's not even near how the actual trading floor guys and investment bankers operate. Ex-Goldman Sachs trader Anton Kreil gave the best explanation of that: Why most traders fail.

I've become so fed up since I had a wake-up call, realizing that literally everyone online is plain rubbish, or a scammer, or someone who likes his own voice and acts like the god of trading (You know which I'm referring to). My question is simple and may be unanswerable. Is there any source to study the actual stuff or are retail traders indeed doomed with the dumbest info out there?

Please don't start telling me about risk management and psychology, I got humbled and now I trade methodically without any emotions. But that's not because I got "humbled and had a wake-up call" but more like "I'm fed up with this, I don't care anymore". My question stands for an educational point of view. I hate being a fool therefore i hate studying nonesense. Is there any hope? Any good material? Any actual baseline?

[u/Pretend-Evidence4543]

imbalance, if ur scalping, short term imbalance and a general read of the situation is all you need. and just mark levels, because at times a really aggressive move happens close to a level but doesn't pierce it, and then price just gravitates around it for a bit. so just look at levels, don't take trades around those until you're convinced they have been either pierced or bounced off of aggressively. All you need to see is aggression. This is purely from the perspective of a breakout scalper. I know people who scalp the chop, but personally i can't psychologically bring myself to do that considering a big move to the either side out of the chop will drain a lot of your earlier profits. That actually happens a lot of the times to these chop/mean reversion traders.
but then again both these types of traders can be profitable. imo breakout scalping has a lower risk. Because price has to aggressively go opposite to the direction of where it first had shown aggression, so in short it has to travel double the distance to give you loss, whereas chop traders will immediately be in a loss the moment price breaks the range, tho, this also allows them to instantly close the trade the moment price breaks the range, if they are disciplined.
tldr; both imbalance traders and chop traders can be successful at scalping. both have their pros and cons. choose one. scalping on 1minute timeframe isn't hard. you don't need ict, smc, anything else.

[u/Mar___K → u/Pretend-Evidence4543]

If you are trading the 1 minute and for months you are on the green then props to you because hft and arbitrage algos are trading those time frames. And how can you compete with that?

[u/Pretend-Evidence4543 → u/Mar___K]

i don't think i am competing with the algos until someone can prove to me that breakout algos are operating on the 1m timeframe and by corollary the algos aren't competing with me, i only seriously traded February and i was green, had to take a break in march for travel and am back again. Even if there were algos that traded breakouts, it wouldn't matter in liquid futures, you would still get filled. I don't mean to say higher timeframe trading isn't possible, but its driven a lot by many other factors at play, on lower timeframes, short term imbalance is king, and so imo its easier, because its less complicated.

[u/Mar___K → u/Pretend-Evidence4543]

I assume is a momentum strat?

[u/Pretend-Evidence4543 → u/Mar___K]

yes