~/day-one
UPDATED AUG 2026
HIMACHAL PRADESH · FREE TO JOIN

You didn't find trading.
It found you.

A reel. A guy in front of a car that isn't his. A laptop on a beach and a number on the screen that doesn't look real. Or it was 2020, everyone was stuck at home, and half the people you knew suddenly had a broker app open.

Nobody's first chart was their own idea. It arrived in a feed, between two other videos, and it looked easy.

Mine arrived the same way — and then it got worse. I paid a guru for a strategy that was never going to work. The money was the smallest part of it. It cost me my mental health for a while, and it cost me years I don't get back.

This is the room I needed then, and couldn't find anywhere near me. It's free, and it stays free.

Join free.
Ask anything.

  • Any level, no stupid questions
  • Prop firms and risk in plain English
  • People a few steps ahead of you

No signals · No copy trading · No promises

What’s insideFREE

What a prop firm actually is

and how it differs from your own money

Two-step, one-step, instant funding, futures — the models explained with real numbers on a $50,000 account.

Why accounts really breach

it is almost never the chart

The three things that end most evaluations, and how I size trades so one bad session can't finish me.

Why you need your own strategy

and why nobody will hand you theirs

It took me a year and a half. Here's why that time isn't wasted and why signals are a dead end.

FREE TO JOIN · NOTHING SOLD · EVER

01Who it’s for

Four people. Same room.

Most trading groups quietly sort people by how much they've made. This one doesn't, because the person two years ahead of you and the person who opened their first chart last week both learn faster in the same conversation.

You haven't started yet

You've watched the videos. You don't know what a lot size is, and every explanation assumes you already do. Ask here — most of us were exactly that person recently enough to remember how it felt.

You trade your own money

You've been risking your own savings and either you've never looked at prop firms, or you assumed they were all a scam. Some are. The model itself isn't, and it's worth understanding before you risk another rupee of your own.

You keep failing evaluations

You've bought challenges. You've breached them. You can't tell whether the problem is your strategy or something else. It's usually something else — and usually a rule you didn't read closely.

You're already funded

You're holding someone else's capital and you know exactly how fast it can go. Stay for the accountability — and because explaining what you know to someone earlier than you is the quickest way to find the holes in it.

02Prop firms vs your own money

Whose money are you actually risking?

This is the decision most people never make deliberately. They just trade whatever account they happen to have. The two are completely different games, and the honest version has drawbacks on both sides.

Your own capital

What's good: no rules but yours, no profit split, no time pressure, and nobody can close the account except you. Every rupee of profit is yours.

WHAT'S HARDYour size is capped by your savings, and losses are permanent. To trade meaningful size you need meaningful money already sitting there — which for most people starting out is the whole problem.

A prop firm account

What's good: the capital is theirs. A few thousand rupees of evaluation fee gets you access to size that would otherwise take years to accumulate, and a breach costs you the fee rather than your savings.

WHAT'S HARDYou trade inside their rules, you split the profit, and the fees add up fast if you keep resetting. Buying challenge after challenge is its own way of losing real money slowly.

Put ₹47,000 on the table and look at both options. That's roughly $500. Trade it as your own capital and you have a $500 account — at 1% risk that's five dollars a trade, and a good month changes nothing about your life. Spend the same $500 on evaluations instead and it buys you about five $10,000 challenges. That's $50,000 of trading capital for the same money, where 1% risk is a hundred dollars a trade.

Same ₹47,000. A hundred times the buying power. That is the entire appeal of prop firms, and it is real.

Now the other half, which nobody posts about. Fail all five and the ₹47,000 is gone and you own nothing. Trade your own $500 badly and you probably still have $300 and an account that's alive. The prop route is faster and it is also more final — which is exactly why the risk rules further down this page exist.

Neither one is free money. Your own account risks your capital; a prop account risks your fees and your time. The reason most people here end up on prop capital is simply that a blown $50,000 evaluation costs a few thousand rupees, and a blown $50,000 personal account costs $50,000.

The account models, on a $50,000 account

Every firm packages these slightly differently and the exact percentages move. These are the shapes you'll actually meet, with the maths worked so the numbers mean something.

ModelHow it worksOn $50,000
Two step Phase 1, then Phase 2, then funded. Lower targets spread over two stages, usually the most forgiving drawdown.The most common and generally the easiest to pass. Phase 1 target ~8% = $4,000
Phase 2 target ~5% = $2,500
Daily loss ~5% = $2,500
Max loss ~10% = $5,000
One step A single phase, then funded. Faster, but the firm compensates with a tighter drawdown — often trailing rather than static.Fewer days of exposure, less room for error. Target ~10% = $5,000
Daily loss ~4–5% = $2,000–2,500
Max loss often ~6% = $3,000
and frequently trailing
Instant funding No evaluation. You pay considerably more and start on a funded account immediately, with stricter rules and usually a worse split until you hit milestones.You're buying the skipped step, not skipping the risk. Higher upfront fee
Tighter max loss, often 4–6%
Lower initial profit split
Payout gates come sooner
Futures — EOD drawdown Your loss limit is recalculated once, on the closing balance each day. It does not move while you're in a trade.The kinder of the two futures models. Max drawdown ~$2,000
Close +$800 today, floor rises $800
Intraday swings don't touch it
Futures — intraday trailing The limit follows your highest unrealised equity, tick by tick. Being up and giving it back moves the floor against you permanently.Where most futures accounts actually die. Max drawdown ~$2,000
Spike +$900 mid-trade and the floor moves up $900 — even if you close flat

The one that catches people is intraday trailing. On an EOD account, going $900 up and closing flat costs you nothing. On an intraday trailing account, that same round trip permanently raises the level you must stay above. Traders who learn on one and switch to the other keep a mental buffer that stopped existing hours ago — and find out at the exact moment it costs them the account. Always confirm which model you're on before your first trade.

03Build your own strategy

Nobody profitable is going to give you theirs.

This is the part people don't want to hear, so it's worth saying early. A strategy that genuinely makes money is not something anyone hands out to strangers on Telegram. It stays in a locker. The people posting entries all day are earning from the posting, not from the entries.

And even if somebody did hand you a working strategy, you couldn't trade it. You'd take the first three signals, hit two losses, decide it's broken, and skip the fourth — which would have been the winner. Conviction can't be transferred. You only get it by watching a method work and fail in front of you, repeatedly, until you know what a normal losing run looks like.

It took me about a year and a half of grinding before I had something that was mine and that I actually trusted. That sounds like a long time. It is a long time. It's also considerably shorter than the alternative, which is years of paying different people for entries and never once building the thing that makes you independent of them.

1 — Backtest it

Go back through historical charts and take the setup honestly, including the ones you'd rather forget. You're not looking for a strategy that always wins. You're looking for one whose losing runs you can survive.

2 — Forward test it

Demo or minimum size, in live conditions, for long enough to hit a bad stretch. Backtesting tells you if the edge exists. Forward testing tells you whether you can actually execute it when money is moving.

3 — Then, and only then

Once it's proven on your own data, take it to a funded account. Not before. An evaluation is a test of a strategy you already trust, not the place to go looking for one.

Working on your own strategy right now?

Join Day One →
04Why accounts breach

Three reasons. None of them are the chart.

Every blown account I've had, and every one I've watched somebody else have, comes back to one of these. They get progressively harder to fix, and almost everybody moves through them in order.

01 — NO FILTER

Taking a trade on every candle

The chart moves, you feel like you should be doing something, so you're in. Then out. Then in again the other way. There's no setup being waited for because there's no setup defined — you're just reacting to the last thing price did.

THE FIXWrite down what your entry actually is, on paper, before the session. If a candle doesn't match it, it isn't a trade — it's boredom.

02 — NO STRATEGY

You don't have one, and you know it

You've got indicators on the chart and a vague sense of what looks good, but you couldn't write your rules on a card and hand it to somebody else. That isn't a strategy, it's a feeling — and feelings size positions badly.

THE FIXOne setup. Backtested. Written down. Everything else off the chart until that one is boring to trade.

03 — EMOTION OVER PLAN

You have a strategy and you break it anyway

This is the expensive one. You know your entry. You watch price approach the level — and you get in early, halfway there, because it looks like it's leaving without you. Now your stop is in a place your plan never sanctioned. It hits, and the annoying part is your level was correct.

THE FIXEntering early is not eagerness, it's an unplanned trade with a worse stop. If you missed it, you missed it. The setup comes back — the account doesn't.

Which one are you?

Most people reading this know immediately, and it's usually the third. The first two are solved with work. The third is solved with structure — a rule you decide when calm and can't renegotiate when you're not.

THE NEXT SECTIONIs exactly that structure — how I size, when I stop, and what happens after a loss.
Example alertsILLUSTRATIVE

ACTIVITY09:41

14 trades opened in 40 minutes. No setup matched your plan.

PLAN11:07

No written entry criteria found for this session.

ENTRY14:22

Filled 18 pips before your level. Stop placed outside plan.

BREACH22:04

Daily loss limit reached. Trading disabled for this account.

05Risk and psychology

How I size it, and when I stop.

Most new traders are hunting the one-day shot — the session that clears the whole target. Sometimes luck delivers it. It does not deliver it on a schedule, and building a plan around it is how accounts die. What follows is the ladder I actually use.

This is my method, not a recommendation. It's shared so you can see what a defined ladder looks like, not so you can copy the numbers. Your firm's limits, your strategy's win rate and your own tolerance are different from mine, and the whole point of the section above is that you build your own.

CFD evaluations

  • Trade 1 — 0.8% to 1% risk. Positioned carefully. No hurry, no FOMO. This is the trade that decides the shape of the day.
  • If trade 1 loses — trade 2 drops to 0.5%. I do not size up to recover. Reducing after a loss is the entire difference between a red day and a dead account.
  • If trade 2 also loses — the day is over. Platform closed. Maximum damage roughly 1.5%, decided in advance rather than in the moment.
  • If trade 1 wins — trade 2 at 1%, targeting 2R or 3R depending on what the setup offers. My strategy returns around 1:3.5 most of the time, so a single clean day carries a lot.

Futures — $2,000 max drawdown

  • In evaluation — $400 per trade at 1:2. One fifth of the drawdown on the line, never more.
  • Funded — $200 per trade. Half the risk once the capital is real, because the account is now worth protecting rather than winning.
  • Trade 1 wins, trade 2 same risk. Both win and I close the day at 4R. That's a finished day, not a reason to keep going.
  • Trade 2 loses — I still close, roughly +$200 up. Green is green. Trade 1 loses, I close immediately. One loss ends the session either way.

The pattern underneath both ladders is the same: the first trade is placed with caution, risk goes down after a loss and never up, and the number of trades in a day is decided before the day starts. Profitable traders are not the ones catching every move. They're the ones who have already decided what today can cost them, while they were calm enough to choose sensibly.

06Red flags

Most of what's sold to you doesn't work.

Not because every seller is malicious, though plenty are. Because a strategy with a real edge is worth more traded than sold — so the ones being sold are, almost by definition, the ones that aren't working.

A strategy being sold to you publicly. If it genuinely printed money, it would be in a locker and traded quietly. Reach degrades an edge — the more people running a setup, the worse it works. Nobody gives away the thing feeding them.

Signals, at any price. You learn nothing, you build no conviction, and identical trades appearing across many accounts is exactly the pattern prop firms detect and void evaluations for. You carry that risk; the seller doesn't.

Any guarantee that you'll pass or profit. Nobody can promise either. Someone claiming otherwise is lying or doesn't understand their own product well enough to be teaching it.

Anyone offering to trade your account. Account sharing breaches the terms of essentially every firm, and it means handing your credentials to a stranger.

Lifestyle as proof. Cars, watches and hotel balconies demonstrate spending, not trading — and rented ones don't demonstrate even that. Screenshots take thirty seconds to fabricate.

Urgency. Three seats left, price goes up tonight, closing the doors. Pressure exists to stop you checking, which is precisely why you should.

Anyone telling you to build your own strategy — even though it's slower, less exciting and much harder to sell you.

Dated, named certificates you can open and inspect, rather than a cropped screenshot of a balance.

Someone who talks about their losses as readily as their wins. Everyone who has traded for real has both.

You keep control of your own account. Always, with no exceptions and no credentials shared.

07Who runs this

I started with a scam. That's the whole reason this exists.

I'm Aryan Sharma, from a small town in Himachal Pradesh. My trading journey didn't start with a good book or a mentor — it started with a fake guru who took my money for a strategy that was never going to work.

The money was the smallest part of it. It cost me my mental health for a stretch, and it cost me years — years I spent trusting somebody else's entries instead of building anything of my own. You don't get those back.

So this is free. Not free-for-now, not free-until-I-build-an-audience. Free. And what I get in return is honest: a community to trade alongside. Trading is an intensely lone game, and doing it from a small town with nobody nearby to ask is lonelier still. I'd rather build the room I needed than keep sitting in an empty one.

Which means you should check me too. Everything in the red flags section applies here. So here are dated, named certificates you can open — not screenshots. Nine of them, across three firms, between December 2025 and July 2026. I've also blown accounts, which is most of why the earlier sections exist.

9CERTIFICATES DOCUMENTED
10FUNDED ACCOUNTS
₹3.39CrCAPITAL ALLOCATED · $356K
8CLEARED IN 52 DAYS
NAMEAryan SharmaHimachal Pradesh, India
INSTRUMENTXAUUSDRoughly 8 of every 10 trades
METHODPrice action, 15-minute chartNo indicators. Built over about 18 months.
PLATFORMSTradingView + MetaTrader 5
LIVE SINCE2023Self-funded through evaluations throughout
DOCUMENTED9 certificates · 3 firmsGoat Funded Trader, FundingPips, Lucid Trading

Firms I trade

FirmFunded accountsSizesCapital
Goat Funded Trader5Dec 2025 — Jun 20262 × $100,000 · $10,000 · 2 × $8,000$226,000≈ ₹2.15 crore
FundingPips4May — Jul 2026$50,000 · 3 × $10,000$80,000≈ ₹76.3 lakh
Lucid Trading1Jul 2026LucidFlex $50,000$50,000≈ ₹47.7 lakh
Total10 accounts$356,000 · ≈ ₹3.39 crore

How to read that table. Cumulative capital allocated across ten accounts between December 2025 and July 2026 — not capital held at one time, and not my own money. Converted at ₹95.35 per USD, August 2026. Challenge completions are evidenced by the certificates below; individual account sizes come from the firms' own dashboards, since the certificates don't print them. Phase milestones that never reached funded stage are excluded.

Goat Funded Trader

4 CERTIFICATES · DEC 2025 — JUN 2026

8K Challenge — Completed — 15 DEC 2025 · TWO ACCOUNTS

8K Challenge — Completed

15 DEC 2025 · TWO ACCOUNTS

100K Challenge — Completed — 18 JUN 2026

100K Challenge — Completed

18 JUN 2026

100K Challenge — Completed — 19 JUN 2026

100K Challenge — Completed

19 JUN 2026

10K Challenge — Completed — 22 JUN 2026

10K Challenge — Completed

22 JUN 2026

FundingPips

4 CERTIFICATES · MAY — JUL 2026

Phase Two — Evaluation Stage — 25 MAY 2026

Phase Two — Evaluation Stage

25 MAY 2026

Phase Two — Evaluation Stage — 03 JUN 2026

Phase Two — Evaluation Stage

03 JUN 2026

Phase Two — Evaluation Stage — 12 JUN 2026

Phase Two — Evaluation Stage

12 JUN 2026

Phase Two — Evaluation Stage — 16 JUL 2026

Phase Two — Evaluation Stage

16 JUL 2026

Lucid Trading

1 CERTIFICATE · JUL 2026

LucidFlex 50K — Funded Account — 09 JUL 2026

LucidFlex 50K — Funded Account

09 JUL 2026

Everything on this page stays free whether you join or not. But it is better with people — Day One is on Telegram, it costs nothing, and it is open to anyone in Himachal who trades or wants to learn. No signals, no copy trading, and nobody there will promise you'll pass.