@Satyam_Sagar , thank you for pointing out 
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Risk management is completely upto us. What is a good stop can be tested. You will have a range of good options. Sometimes atr stops are good sometimes % based ones. etc etc. Pick one and stay consistent.
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One needs to have a reasonable idea on your past max dd. Note that there is a large risk of underestimating it, as we can optimize rules and curve fit it to make DD look smaller. We dont have that many severe DD events, so just tweaking rules to over optimize it can happen without knowing but it may not hold in future. This is esp true if trade count is low. Atleast one should expect future DD to be higher - say 2x. Future is anyway unknown and things can happen.
For example -
For my main system running for 5+ years, my actual DD stayed around my estimate overshooting it only slightly.
A system i made recently immediately gave 1.5x what i thought. Maybe i got unlucky or i over optimized it a bit, maybe both. It recovered but now i have to reduce its risk and have a relook at the rules… -
Having an estimate of past max dd, we can size positions so that max past DD is under some % of capital. And ideally with 2x of this target max dd should be not too uncomfortable and should not break us.
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stop-loss discipline - If you have tested your system thoroughly and understand that its a long term game, then this problem just goes away. I am instead afraid that my trades wont match my backtest. Dont do shit. Its tougher for discretionary systems - i have no inputs for that as that did not work well for me and it was too stressful.
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managing trades under volatile conditions - You can use volatility based stops and test other things if needed, but generally i dont explicitly change system behavior due to volatility. Sometimes you get shaken out due to up down moves, Sometimes you get large moves in your favour
Risk / DD can be limited by sizing things lower. Returns will also reduce. I prefer to keep it under 15% at single system level. And with multiple systems it generally is under 10% but could go more in future.
Also trading multiple uncorrelated systems is the holy grail for managing this.
Consistency is not in my control. I have had drawdown periods upto 6-8 months many times at single system level. Nothing i can do about it, i don’t sell options. Even well established well known traders like Andrea Unger has had flat years.
So that’s the game and uncertainty is a huge part of it. We have no guarantee and need to evolve systems as needed.
Best to try and keep adding systems to diversify and dont risk too much.
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Hi Aishwa,
While I appreciate your drive to do well in intraday trading, I’d suggest asking yourself a thought experiment that might give you clarity.
- Why do you truly want to succeed in intraday trading? Is it purely for more money, or because it gives you something challenging and engaging enough to feel like a mission in life?
From what I’ve seen in my limited experience, many people are drawn to trading because it feels like having something of their own—like a business or an entrepreneurial venture. It gives them that “kick.” But here’s the key question: if, 20 years from now, you looked back and your trading journey ended with a negative PnL, would you regret the time you spent on it? Or would you still be glad you gave it your all?
Now ask yourself the same question for something you truly love—say, hiking. If, 20 years from now, you had spent months or years hiking, would you regret it or would you deeply appreciate the experiences, regardless of the financial outcome?
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I actually asked myself something similar a few days ago, and that’s when I realized I still want to learn more. I’m investing for my future, but I also genuinely enjoy this — the challenge, the thrill, and the constant push to do my best.
The money I lost recently was from one silly mistake — trying to recover an auction penalty — but I accept it fully and, honestly, I don’t regret it. It was a lesson I needed to experience for myself. (but currently its a bit stressful since I accepted my mistake)
Even if, years from now, my trading journey ends with a negative PnL, I know I’d still value the experiences, the skills I’ve gained, and the discipline it has taught me. For me, it’s not just about the money — it’s about the personal growth and the satisfaction of giving my all to something I enjoy. I don’t want anything from trading as in you know, because my primary profession is good I still like it to the best. However, I also love this 9-10 am thrill. After 20 years I don’t want to regret that I lost or ran away from this while I could have tried to learn in better way…
PS: The journey will not be in negative atleast that much I know, because year back when I started with 0 experience and now I see the improvement…
Here I really wanted to understand peoples perspectives as there are people who have been trading from years … and its a great thing I did…
I met good people, got really good advices and lots of support.
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Trading in the Zone
Best Loser Wins
Please read these books for starters. It will change the way you see the market.
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For intraday trading, one book I suggest is “Secrets of a Pivot Boss” by Franklin O. Ochoa.
I also would like to put emphasis on asking questions to your self !
What exactly you are expecting from market?
Are your expectations on return are in line with "typical " expectations (typically 12-15% /year return is considered as good return) ? If no, try to recalibrate to typical return.
What type of trading style are you good at ? Long term, Short term or day trading ?
Then stick to one you are good at OR cultivate needed mindset for required trading style by reading books.
Good luck.
YV
I’ve never read any replies here. Its kind of long and i don’t have time to read everything. I am a Covid batch trader. I spent nearly 8000+ hours of reading charts. Consider yourself lucky if u have come across this reply. Reading books for controlling your mind wont help. You have to jump into trading and punch that trade with SL . This is how you learn in real time. Books wont teach you risk management. Now I have 5.5 years of exp. I have faced all these challenges as a beginner.
One thing that I learned is that you have to master positional trading and it will ultimately lead you to success in swing trading and then in intraday.
Why I am saying this? Because, there is always a step by step approach to achieve mastery. Intraday trading is the most toughest to execute and as a beginner its not a mystery that you lost 12 lakhs. Actually If you continued despite a 12 lakh loss, you shoul’ve crossed silver jubilee amount by now. Thank you for controlling the 1 month crorepati mindset. Its normal. Take it easy. Imagine a LKG student attending 10th Public examinations. This is what you have done. Dude, get back to reality.
Most imp prerequisite:
- Higher High / Higher Low in uptrend
- Lower High / Lower Low in downtrend
3.OG technical patterns
4.Importance of key moving averages & volume - Keeping a watchlist of stocks to trade so that you wont be distracted.
What you need as a prerequisite:
- Find which stage the stock is trading right now. I don’t care about the timeframe. It can be Daily or weekly. If you don’t know what Stage Analysis was, Kindly refer Stan Weinstein’s Stage Analysis. or else you can buy this book & read (Secrets for profiting in bull & bear markets by Stan Weinstein). You will never regret spending your time & money on this book. Its beginner friendly.
- Try to find the OG technical patterns in any stock. The best patterns include (Cup & Handle, Rectangular range, Head & Shoulders, High Tight Flag, Volatility Contraction pattern, Rounded Bottom, Double/Triple Bottom)
- You dont need any fancy indicators. Observe Price & Volume relationships.
- Always be careful of big range red candles in any timeframe. Opening and mid range of this candles acts as a resistance.
5.Always be grateful for big range green candles in any timeframe. Opening and mid range of this candles acts as a support.
For positional trading:
- Get back to weekly charts. Have these three simple moving averages (10,21,30) . Find how OG technical patterns are formed. Read the price behaviour around these moving averages along with volume.
- 30sma is the most imp. 10sma can be used for momentum positional trading.
- Know what is a good pullback and a bad pullback.
For Swing trading:
- Get back to daily charts. Have these three simple moving averages (10,21,50) . Find how OG technical patterns are formed. Read the price behaviour around these moving averages along with volume.
- 50sma is the most imp. 10sma can be used for momentum swing trading.
- Know what is a good pullback and a bad pullback.
For any type of trades:
- Support & Resistance Horizontal lines play imp role.
- 10sma in weekly is equal to 50sma in daily
- For shorter timeframe less than daily, 50sma is the most imp in deciding trends.
How to pick the best stocks for swing/positional trading?
Well you can refer the below screeners.
1.You have to analyse it on weekly basis. After friday market close. Only select stocks which are breaking out or forming a pattern which is about to breakout. Ignore the stocks in stage 4. (Refer stage analysis). Create a below screener in chartink.
Criteria: current week volume is the highest volume in last 26 weeks.
2.You have to analyse it on daily basis. After friday market close. Only select stocks which are breaking out or forming a pattern which is about to breakout. Ignore the stocks in stage 4. (Refer stage analysis) Create a below screener in chartink.
Criteria: current day volume is the highest volume in last 50 days.
point 4 is truly badass… hope to get there someday
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I lost a similar amount last year and did a carry forward of the losses last year with ITR3. This year have done 3 times more loss so far and wiped the funds which I didn’t want to speculate with just in the hope of recovering the losses. So careful of wishful thinking and stop while you can. The money can buy you a nice car or a vacation home.
Things I tried: reduced pledge margin (leverage), try no trade days, try to trail stop losses to learn, trade only in select hours as 1 pm onwards the operator / big sharks / brokers proprietary desks are out to eat away all the gains and cause losses. I suspect the odds of data leakage across brokers are low but brokers might be tracking your trade positions and out bidding your trades as they know your margin (risk appetite / max positions). Anything over 10L position size with Zerodha seems to trigger the kill mode where you will lose money 90 or 95 times out of 100 (my case) by broker desk or someone with access to your info placing contra trades and blocking exits.
Tips that might work:
- Trade smaller
- Don’t try to win big aka over 1 percent of your margin in a trade.
- Set losses in system preferably or in excel outside and have the discipline to take the stop loss. This step is where I am struggling and losing all the money earned. The recovery does happen but you are in prayer mode (gambling) instead of trading with clear minimum targets and max loss per trade.
- Trade only in stocks with high volume (liquidity)
- The Indian Government earns a lot of money via STT, Stamp Duty, GST and in case you make profits via STCG on intraday gains and carry forward of losses is only for 4 years. Understand the charges are high and against you, so trade in stocks with lower price points as brokerage and charges will be less. The stance to not adjust intraday (speculative) losses against any other income means the money you lost will be extremely difficult to recover. Suggestion: Go small and when you invest for swing / long term and if you see intraday profit - take it and keep recovering the 12 L loss. You will need to make 15L or more to recover the 12L due to high charges in India
- Keep refining your entry point and exit points (take profit)
- Strive to identify stocks which give higher Risk to Reward Ratios (1:3) or more. I am still striving and am just looking at some money to come in rather than trading now due to the past high losses.
- Don’t quit your job to go full time into this as you need to continue the cash flow and investing.
- Reality check & greed: The claim of 80-85 percent intraday traders lose money seems to be lower and it seems only 1 percent make money outside of proprietary trading desk users / high speed algo traders. Still the chance of make your monthly salary in 1-2 good days is difficult to resist - the 5x leverage lures you into playing big (greed). Greed is good sounds too good but ultimately the reality is that you ended up as a s…ker and lost your hard earned money to gambling.
- Take fewer trades and try setting time limits - if trade doesn’t go in your direction by 30 mins or till a specific time - quit or reduce position size where the win/loss becomes insignificant.
A lot of the above points may or may not make sense to you. These are my observations and I have moved from a initially successful swing / investor to a primarily intraday trader in overall red.
Learn from the mistakes of others (like me) and save your capital 
Indian markets are truly rigged. Your need for vengeance is more than justified. However, they use that revenge to drain you. If you can stop reacting(taking trades) after being wronged, you’ve won more than half the battle: you’d either be losing little or even be in profit, if you manage this one thing.
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Not true.
Most people dont have anything that actually works and then they develop all sorts of superstitions on what may or may not work due to recency bias / memory of loss etc. And yeah costs are high, so you need decent enough average trade profit to overcome it. And live results are worse than backtest so need to overcome that too, assuming backtest isnt faulty.
Brokers are not tracking your stops, Zerodha isnt anyway. I send a few thousand trades every year and have no problem.
Don’t try to make money back from the market. Persistence for many years might be needed to learn to trade and you will lose in those years ( so keep size small) and there is no guarantee of success.
For most people, best choice is to stop trading, focus on your career and do long term investing instead with some kind of allocation plan between different assets ( Equity/debt/gold?, not cryptos and the like) held for long term.
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And some people claim to call it not true till they experience it or are a part of the same syndicate. There is no way to prove either ways. You might be in the small group of retail traders who is profitable (the 1 percent club) or part of the algo brokers / hni / hft groups who make the money that retail traders like me lose due to poor judgement in sizing and risk management.
I just called out what I have experienced multiple times over and what I believe is the case. It is just a warning to learn and not lose more money and to stay in the small zone till the OP is better experienced to scale. Not repeat the same mistakes I made and come to their own conclusions.
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You can believe what you want, my own experience as a retail trader says otherwise and almost all of my orders are lot larger than that amount. And I send stop orders to exchange too. Brokers are regulated, and we are small traders.
Its more likely the work of mental biases to believe in such things as the reason you lost instead of accepting your own mistakes fully.
Even when i was sending orders much smaller than current size, i had this doubt whether market moved just because of my order size and took my stop. But i had backtests, I was profitable, and they helped keep me sane until things worked out.
I am trading actively since 2019 and had struggled through the learning phase for more than 5 years before that.
That and lack of edge. Markets dont give easy feedback. Things work in probabilistic way and uncertainty is a big part of everything. Perhaps not for option sellers dunno, they seem to have very smooth curves ( not saying you should do that, most people will lose money there too)
yes, dont waste money when you are still learning. keep account small and dont try to recover money.
Markets are not easy.
Whales don’t need to track every trader or every broker. Just 1 or 2 brokers or a few traders would act as a representative sample and their SL orders would give a huge pattern of exactly where the majority of SL are located. There are also many points of potential tracking other than brokers: the exchanges themselves, third party libraries used by brokers… like tradingview would be getting aggregate of all orders/alerts across multiple brokers, ad providers, internet providers, sms providers, email providers, browser addons and anywhere else in the order chain. They can also test and see to see where the liquidity is using techniques to put in orders and remove them, etc…
If you act like everyone else, put SL at the exact place as everyone else, any whale could eat you.
Also, there is no way Indian brokers are as regulated as global counterparts and even if they are, our entire system is corrupt to the core. If zerodha indeed doesn’t sell our positions, they’re most likely the exception rather than the rule.
Indian brokers are probably more regulated, but i am no expert. Ask Nithin.
There are no dark pools and the like here for example. SEBI has made things a lot stricter ever since we had those frauds at karvy i think. My own perception is that i am more comfortable with Z vs foreign brokers. Perhaps IB is ok.
Anyway, my own experience with Zerodha and Fyers has been fine.
As i said, people like to blame others instead of accepting their own mistakes.
And - we are small traders relatively. If these tings happen it will for much large orders, from mutual funds and the like. 10L is tiny, pretty crazy to think that brokers will target your orders like that. But you do you.
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If making a profit or loss is completely random, the overall loss percentage of traders should converge to 50%. But the reality is it’s 90-93% clearly pointing that it’s not random. Now you can blame self(the trader) or someone outside. I agree that at least part of the blame is on the trader. But are you saying NIFTY is not manipulated at all, no whales get insider information and what Jane street did/is doing is completely legal??
I did read some reading with Nithin’s posts,
And specifically
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He’s addressing the general overall contra trading. His position is: overall option buying results in loss and option selling in profit …taxes/ transaction costs involved … therefore profit is less, if a broker takes contra positions. He really doesn’t “specific patterns” raised in the previous post. Like, in a specific share, if I wanted to know the stops, as a broker, that’s a valuable mine of information. Even if we consider the overall contra trading, that’s provably false. Even after transaction costs of loss makers(~50%), you’d still be in profit.
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None of this matters, if you can sell the data to interested parties. You don’t need the actual orders, just the data
Again, corruption rules here, any rules can be skirted.
Indian markets are well regulated, but US markets have much more liquidity at depth. That’s the whole story.
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If one has an edge, it isnt. You get a tilt which makes you the money.
Randomness implies one cannot make more the drift over large number of trades. Then why trade at all. I wouldnt.
Why should it be 50%? If people do wrong stuff, they pay for it. Not everyone is behaving the same way and most let emotions get over them - believing in conspiracy theories instead of actually bothering to test the data.
Even if you take random entries in random markets, your win rate is around 50% only if you take profits at 1:1. People dont do that. And there is friction - brokerages, slippages and taxes.
So without edge 100% should be losing money over large number of trades.
Anyway, i don’t care. Manipulation or not, money can be made.
If Nifty is not working, look at another instrument. Test data, outcome of all manipulations is visible in data.
Good luck.
What’s manipulation in your opinion?
DIIs and retailers buying because they have cash?
Nifty not moving as per your analysis?
Who really manipulates it?
How much money is required to move 1 percent in Nifty?