Risk disclosure

Nothing here is financial advice

Counting Ticks is a publisher. Everything on this site — strategy write-ups, prop-firm and tool reviews, market news, guides and podcast episodes — is educational content and independent commentary. None of it is financial, investment, tax or legal advice, a personal recommendation, or an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any instrument.

We do not know your circumstances, capital, experience, tax position or risk tolerance. Nothing we publish is tailored to them. If you need advice, consult a professional who is authorised to give it in your jurisdiction.

You can lose money, including more than you deposit

Trading leveraged instruments — futures, CFDs, forex, options and margined crypto — carries a high risk of rapid loss. Leverage magnifies losses as much as gains. Depending on your broker and jurisdiction, losses may exceed your deposit. Only risk capital you can afford to lose entirely without affecting your financial security or lifestyle.

How to read the performance figures we publish

Where a strategy on this site shows a win rate, average reward-to-risk, trade count or drawdown, those numbers come from a back-test on historical data unless the page explicitly says otherwise. You should treat them as follows.

• Hypothetical, not achieved. Back-tested results are not a record of actual trading. No real money was at risk. They are calculated with the benefit of hindsight over a period that had already happened.
• Live results will be worse. Real trading adds spread, commission, slippage, partial fills, latency, platform outages and your own execution and psychology. None of those appear in a back-test in full.
• Past performance does not indicate future results. An edge that existed in the sample can decay, invert, or turn out to have been an artefact of the period tested.
• Sample size matters more than win rate. A high win rate over few trades tells you almost nothing. Where we publish a result we publish the trade count, the drawdown and the worst losing streak alongside it, and we ask you to weight them accordingly.
• We publish failures too. When we test an idea and it does not hold up, we say so. A null result on this site is a result, not an omission.

Prop firms and funded accounts

Evaluation and funded-account programmes carry their own risks that are separate from market risk: evaluation fees are generally non-refundable, account rules can be changed by the firm, accounts can be breached and closed on a technicality, and payouts depend on the firm remaining solvent and willing to pay. Figures we publish about a firm are gathered from public sources at a point in time and change frequently. Always confirm current terms, rules, fees and payout policy directly with the firm before paying anything.

Automation

Trading bots and autotraders do not reduce risk; they execute whatever logic you give them, faster and without hesitation, including when it is wrong. Software faults, bad or gapped data, connectivity loss and unhandled market conditions can produce losses very quickly and without supervision. Our automation guides describe practices we consider sensible; following them does not make an automated system safe.

Third-party content

Our news section aggregates headlines and short excerpts from third-party publishers and links to the original. We do not endorse, verify or take responsibility for third-party content, and opinions expressed in it are the author's, not ours. Some items carry an AI-generated summary; see our Terms for how to treat those.

No liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, CountingTicks accepts no liability for any loss or damage arising from reliance on anything published on this site. You are solely responsible for your own trading decisions and their consequences.