The Moment I Realized Less Is More — Passing My First FTMO Challenge

I entered my first FTMO challenge armed with five “favorite” setups, three different risk scaling rules, and a conviction that more trades = faster progress. The result? Whipsaw equity, sleep deprivation, and the slow bleed of discipline.

Everything changed when I asked a simple question: “What would this look like if it was boring?”

I cut the playbook to a single structure: London continuation after Asia sweep. One session, one setup, one management plan. It felt restrictive — until the data started behaving. Less optionality = less cognitive load.

Takeaway: Scarcity of approved trades forces you to value each decision.

FTMO challenges punish emotional scaling. I committed to 0.8% risk per trade, maximum two trades per day, and a hard “stop trading” rule once I hit -1.6% intraday. The discipline wasn’t about the percentage; it was about preserving mental bandwidth.

Takeaway: Guardrails protect the future version of you — the one making decisions on day 18 when equity is sideways.

Each trade got a post-mortem in Notion: bias, execution, did I follow the plan? Within ten sessions the patterns were obvious — my losers were rushed entries outside the kill zone, my winners patiently waited for the sweep. The journal did what memory refused to do: it told the truth.

Takeaway: Journaling isn’t nostalgia; it’s a lab notebook.

Day 22: +8.2% overall, no daily breaches, psychological clarity intact. The headline isn’t that I “traded better”; it’s that I engineered boredom. Less became more because consistency became measurable. The funded account that followed wasn’t luck — it was a system performing inside constraints.

If your current challenge feels like chaos, try subtracting instead of adding.