The Trading
Research Lab
Most trading content explains concepts you can find anywhere. This is the opposite. We take real broker data from real prop firm careers and study what actually happened, one trade at a time. The first investigation dissects 1,797 trades. Every number on this page traces back to a published study.
Original data beats another explainer.
Search engines and readers are drowning in trading articles that say the same thing in a different order. What does not exist anywhere else is the careful study of a single real career, with the trade log opened up and read like evidence.
This lab is that work. One anonymised trader handed over a complete export: 1,797 trades across 12 FundedNext accounts, spanning August 2024 to January 2026. We rebuilt the career trade by trade and asked one question of every pattern: what would have changed if a single structural rule had been in place from day one?
The answers became the studies below. The tool lets you run them yourself.
The Interactive Trader A Tracker
A working laboratory built on top of a real career. Toggle six rules on and off and watch 1,797 trades and 12 accounts recalculate in real time. As far as we know, the first tool of its kind.
Run the counterfactuals yourself
Every rule corresponds to a study in the series. Flip a switch and the equity curve redraws, the headline P&L recalculates, and the 12 accounts repaint their pass or breach status. The full dataset loads into your browser and never leaves your machine.
- The headline card — actual vs filtered career P&L, with the swing between them.
- The equity curve — the real career in red, the rule-filtered career in gold, overlaid.
- The 12-account grid — every account repaints PASSED, BREACHED, SAVED or RECOVERED.
- Six rules, five presets — including the Top 3 stack and the single most powerful rule.
The Studies
Eleven forensic studies on one trader's career. Each isolates a single pattern in the data and measures what it cost or could have saved. Read them in order, or jump to the one that names your own bad habit.
The stop-loss that would have saved $29,633
What a single hard-stop discipline would have done across the entire career. The largest preventable number in the dataset.
Read the study →The 36-minute autopsy
How one trader lost two funded accounts inside a single hour. A minute-by-minute reconstruction of a tilt session.
Read the study →You can go 9-for-10 and still blow the account
Why win rate barely predicts a prop firm pass, and what actually does. The first ten trades tell a different story.
Read the study →Same trader, same strategy: 6 passed, 6 breached
Twelve accounts, one method, opposite outcomes. What separated the survivors from the casualties.
Read the study →The hold-time paradox
One mechanical rule, a 60-minute minimum hold, worth $10,198 in real data. The single most powerful filter in the series.
Read the study →The Friday anomaly
Why Trader A's only consistently profitable day was the one retail traders fear most, and what that reveals.
Read the study →The 22-trade spiral
What 22 minutes of self-destruction looks like inside the order book. The anatomy of a tilt cascade, trade by trade.
Read the study →The $7,048 cost of trading the wrong markets
What 1,797 trades reveal about asset selection. Where the edge lived, and where it quietly bled out.
Read the study →A winning trader who traded at the wrong time
The original timing study. A profitable edge dismantled by the hours it was deployed in. The finding that started the series.
Read the study →From −$3,103 to +$2,545
The full rule stack applied to the whole career. A $5,648 swing achieved by removing 83% of the trades. Less, done right.
Read the study →How to use the interactive tracker
The walkthrough: six rules, five presets, five experiments worth running, and how to run the same analysis on your own log.
Read the guide →What the data actually showed
The method is the lesson.
The specific numbers belong to Trader A. A different trader with different instruments, hours, and psychology produces different numbers. What transfers is the process. Run it on your own broker export and you will find your own version of these rules.
Here is the exact seven-step workflow the studies are built on.
Export your trade history
At least six months of closed trades, ideally a year. Most brokers and prop firms allow a CSV export.
Add six columns
Hour of day, day of week, hold time in minutes, instrument, whether a stop was attached, and net P&L per trade.
Run pivot tables
Group trades by each dimension. Calculate win rate and total P&L for every group. Look for where expectancy collapses.
Find your three worst splits
The hour, the hold band, the instrument where your edge dies. Three is enough to start.
Write three mechanical rules
One per worst split. No judgement calls. "I do not exit positions in under 30 minutes."
Stress-test retroactively
Apply the rules to your history and compute the swing. A real edge problem moves the career by more than 50%.
Run them forward 30 days
No exceptions. Then pull fresh data, recompute, and iterate. This is the loop.
What's being built next
The retrospective phase is complete. The lab now turns forward, from studying a past career to running a documented experiment in the present tense.
The Prop Firm Rulebook
25 rules synthesised from the ten forensic studies, the two CTE books, and the wider library. Rolled out across eight posts in four phases: Mind, Method, Money, and prop-firm-specific.
The Trader B Diary
A brand new funded account, traded live under the rulebook. Every trade, every rule violation, every confirmation, documented in public. The experiment that tests whether the framework survives contact with a real market.
Bring your own CSV
A future mode for the tracker that lets you upload your own trade history and run the same six-rule counterfactual analysis on your own career, locally in the browser.
About the research
Is this real trading data?
Yes. Every figure comes from one anonymised trader's actual broker export: 1,797 trades across 12 FundedNext prop firm accounts, August 2024 to January 2026. Nothing on this page is illustrative or invented.
Whose trades are these?
An anonymised real trader we refer to as Trader A. The account numbers and personal identity are withheld; the trade-level data is genuine and forms the basis of every study and the live tracker.
Do the findings apply to my trading?
The specific rule swings are true for Trader A, not universal laws. A different strategy, schedule, and psychology will produce different numbers. The value is the method: run the same analysis on your own log and you will find your own rules. The seven-step workflow above shows you how.
Is the tracker free?
Yes. It runs entirely in your browser with no login and no data collection. The dataset loads locally and never leaves your machine. Use it as much as you like and share it freely.
Why does removing 83% of trades improve the result?
Because most of the career's losses were concentrated in identifiable conditions: wrong hours, wrong instruments, trades held too briefly. Filtering those out leaves a smaller, far higher-quality set. Less trading, done in the right conditions, beat more trading.
Open the lab.
Run the counterfactuals on a real career, then learn the method well enough to run them on your own.
