Interview noteThis page restates a public interview in new words. Dollar results, win rates, and payouts are claims made by the speaker or the host. They are not this desk's record, and they are not a result to expect.
Matthias, has taken more than $400,000 in prop-firm payouts, and the number is the part he thinks people misread. He started learning in 2023. After about half a year he started on prop accounts. The progress was not a straight line. Behind the payouts are the downs, the fear, the panic, and the fear of missing the move. He is a day trader who scalps with the trend when he can. On the S&P he is looking for about ten points a trade. On the Nasdaq, about fifty to a hundred. He calls it scalping because it is a small piece of the day. Get in, follow it, take the money, and leave. A fixed reward, a win rate he puts slightly above 50 percent, and he does not want to stay in front of the screen. If he stays too long he does stupid things all day.
The trend, for a long, is a strong candle on the five-minute. Not a lot of wick. A strong body. He lets it play, waits for the pullback, and follows. Bullish candles, a correction, the bullish candle, the pullback, the break of the high, and he is out. Fixed risk. He can tell you more easily when a trend ends than when it is happening. That is why the win rate is not 100 percent. He says 50 to 52 percent, because he might have it and about half the time he is wrong. The difference is a positive reward. Emotions stay out. Small stops, larger gains. The chart is read as naked as he can make it, and then Bookmap is the confirmation. A downtrend with pullbacks and a lot of liquidity on the downside, and he waits for the confirmation to short. A chart, and a heatmap.
The low that did not break
He records himself, and he has a Discord where he shows the work, because he needs to see what he actually did. The live example is a two-minute Nasdaq chart with Bookmap on the right. Buy limits below, sell limits above. The market has gone short. On the left, a 21-period exponential moving average in green and VWAP in yellow. Those two are the confirmation of where he wants to enter and the minimum of where he wants to get to. They are below both. The low gets attacked a second time. One large red bubble. A lot of market sellers, and they do not break the low. Liquidity is sitting on the upside. The market is trying to form a bottom. The candles look terrible. A big wick, pushing down. He does not forget that the low rejected and that the strong sellers did not get through. He goes long. Scalping, a few seconds. On the book the price moves a little lower. They keep trying to short. In the second he sees the push up, and he is long. The stop is below the low. Nine points. He says they went in at 16. Strong buyers push. A green bubble, 190 contracts. Sell limits above, at 730. Even that distance is already a positive reward. Sellers try to break back through and get very close. He puts the take-gain up at the liquidity and they push. The liquidity is still there. If it stops him out, that is fine. The market would be following the trend. He is trading toward the liquidity. It gets taken. Market buyers show up. The confirmation is strong. They are on VWAP and the 21-period average, and there is a reaction. He says the management was not good. The clean exit was at those two lines. He waited for a higher potential, a break of the range and a run to 780. It did not come. He pulled the stop up and was taken out in the 30s. Fourteen points of gain against a nine-point stop. A positive ratio. That is what he watches. Stick to the plan. Do not make a loss bigger than the gains. Anything above that is the cherry. Three to one, or four to one, is brilliant, and it does not happen often, because he is scalping.
The bubbles split the book into passive and active. Sell limits above are passive sellers. Buy limits below are passive buyers. That is liquidity. A large red block he reads at 189, and again at 189 and 89, is sell limits above. There is a high chance the market wants to go there and fill them. It might be the take-gain of someone who is long, or someone who wants to short with a limit. When price moves up into a lot of market buyers and they break through, that is the confirmation of a potential breakout. The bubbles start small. They speed up and get bigger. A passive order is filled by an active one. To fill 187 passive contracts he needs at least 187 active buyers, and more than that to break through. The green bubble fills the passive limits. More people push. Aggressive buying. They broke the level, and the chance of continuing was high. That is why he stayed. If the market had gone down even a little at that moment, he would have been out. A wall of liquidity, aggressive buy orders exhausting it, and a continuation, is the confirmation to stay. It is how he manages the exit.
The entry was the bottom. First test, second test, strong sellers, and the level did not break. He reads it at 28,710. A very small downside and a high potential toward the liquidity above. He is taking the chance because the advantage is on his side. Order flow, for him, is how he stays calm and gets the confirmation. He likes this example because it did not run. It was not a good trade in the way people mean, and that is why he thinks it is the best one. You have to make the best of the situation. After the breakout it was very likely, in his read, that they would go to 780 or 770, the next liquidity. The market rejected hard. He still had the positive ratio. The idea comes first. The management sits behind it. If the idea does not run, the management is what saves the gain, in the best case. Scalping is fast. There is not a lot of time. The bubbles are the confirmation. He wonders whether it would be better not to have them, and then he says he would not have had this entry. On the chart alone he would never have gone long. He sees a short. A pullback with a big wick. Everyone would say it is going lower. Bookmap is why he used the setup. He will call it X-ray vision, because without it he would not see what is inside. A strong short on the candles. A hot candle, a good close on the bearish candle, a pullback, a rejection, and the short continues. He went long because the low did not break, then a small long, a pullback, and a small breakout. The host calls the selling absorbed. Matthias calls it a rejection. A pretty good absorption, he says, would show up in the delta. Down there the small red and green graphs did not. A simple order book could do the same job. On the Nasdaq it is hard to see whether it is speeding up if you are stuck to the ladder. The heatmap is easier.
In as few words as he will give it: they formed a low, they did not break it, he waits for a small breakout and a pullback, and he follows the breakout. He knows a few traders would say there is no trend on this chart. He took the example because he is flexible. He loves trends. If he understands a small loss against a large potential, he still takes the situation. It can be called a range. It can be called a short, because they broke the range in the picture. At that point he was trading a reversal. He lives as a scalper inside whatever the situation is. Different setups. Trend-following is what he loves, and he is open to this if the setup is reasonable. If there had been no liquidity on the upside, he would never have taken the long. The full confirmation was Bookmap. Some days he only trades the chart. Without the book he would never have taken this one.
What he tells a new trader to look for on Bookmap is an accumulation. The market goes short, forms a bottom, and breaks out. For a reversal, wait for it to build, test the low again, and break. Price already gives a lot. The book gives a better entry. He shows the version without it. He took the trade early, which was good, and he also shows the later entry, after the body of the candle broke, with a small stop. A strong candle, a rejection, and they were checking the market a second time. He went long again. It was a good setup. He took it out. The second exit was because the market was struggling again on VWAP and the 21-period average. He did not repeat the first mistake. The first setup was the order flow. The second was the confirmation of the bullish candle.
If the liquidity had been underneath, the long was gone
The big red candle, with nothing from the book, is a large move down. Many times the market at least tries to pull back. It might then go shorter. The chance of a pullback before more downside is, for him, pretty big. How he knows is screen time. He thinks collecting it, and checking what shows up every day, is the important part. He believes someone else can train themselves to the same place. He started when Joe Biden was president. Under Trump it is a different tape, and the risk management is the same. The market is more volatile, so he takes smaller positions. That is the job. Different phases, different years, different point values. They are around 28,000 on the Nasdaq. When he started he thinks it was something like 18,000. Backtesting is fine. Living the situation is what teaches it. Afterward, a big wick looks obvious, and it is easy to say you could never have gone long because of where it closed. In the moment they were already on VWAP, and it was a good trade. The moment has to be lived.
What kills the pullback idea is the book. If that block of 189 were buy limits sitting on the 700s, instead of sell limits above, he would not trade the long. The chance of a pullback that simply continues the downtrend would be too big. Liquidity on the downside holds him out of the long. He follows the trend, lets it pull back, and joins the short. Bookmap, in that case, changes the picture of the day completely. Price is a lot of information. This particular opportunity needed the book.
The gain target goes to a liquidity area. The stop is market structure. Some situations are too fast. When he moved the stop to 730, Bookmap showed very strong buyers. That was the furthest he would let it pull back. Somebody wanted to push it up there. He does not see why the market would come back through that level, so that level is the exit. He does not let it go deeper. Positive reward, and the second rule is the confirmation. If they do not hold the level, he is out. A setup without a positive reward is a setup he does not take. Worst case, two winning trades to get one loser back, and that is not a deal he wants.
Four points of risk, nine points of target, and then stop
The next chart is a long trend. Price is pushing up and holding VWAP, the yellow line. On the S&P, Bookmap shows liquidity at 6,950. He goes to the lower timeframe. The market bounces on VWAP. A large green bubble. Big buyers. The market pumps, and the first try takes him out. It did not reach the liquidity. That is scalping. He goes in a second time. Stop below the low. Liquidity on the upside, and again at the 50 level. A breakout, a return, and a positive ratio. Four points of stop against nine points of target. Strong buyers, the green bubbles getting stronger. They struggle. The liquidity above is still interesting. VWAP is the support. Inside the book, buy limits keep appearing one tick below. They add, and add. His read is that the market is rising and they are pushing the buy limits down because they want to add, with a limit, at a good price, and not at the market. The market is already pushing so hard that they do not get in. It takes the liquidity above, pulls back a few times. He does not see sellers. Positive delta the whole way, and only market buying, long. Liquidity on the downside he reads at 290 buy limits, a small pullback. If they break the high, he expects the market to go long. It pulls back again. A different heatmap, the Nasdaq, is long as well. The S&P breaks out, pulls back, tries again. It takes time. Long, pullback, long. The pattern from the start of the conversation. The exit on Bookmap is 6,950. A small rejection, a small pullback, and the liquidity gets bigger, 320. Aggressive buyers. The trade is done. Typical trend-following. At VWAP, where it struggled, many people would ask why anyone would be long. They cannot see it on the chart. The book showed the liquidity above and the strong buyers. He believed the setup.
VWAP matters in that picture because the market is long. After they went above it, in an obvious uptrend, the S&P spends very few points not above VWAP, and then it bounces and does not break it. A nice place to enter. Another confirmation. He does not draw a lot of lines. The volume-weighted average is enough to tell him it is normal for the market to pick up power there and for him to follow the trend.
Scalping fights the spread and the commission, so the timing is the work. He waits for clean setups. Patience is the first thing, even for a scalper. The second is that he does not trade a negative reward. He does not sit there for three or four hours. One hour, up to an hour and a half. Two trades, three at the most. On a day that is long the whole way, with only very small pullbacks and no clean setup, he might take one trade and be done. He will not hunt a second. He knows how many times he has bought the high of the day and been fished out on the correction.
The three-trade cap came from a spreadsheet, and from a journal. When he took two trades, the third could be fine, and basically it was a loss. He only takes the third if the setup is very good. The strict rule is two losses and the day ends. Two in a row will not be a good day. The third might get it back. The next day is the better focus. If the first is a loss and the second is a gain, he may take a third. If the first and the second are both losses, the day is over. If he has two wins, the day is over as well. The problem with the third win is the math. His win rate is 50 percent up to a maximum of 60. Two wins in a row is already good. The statistics, for him, say no to the third. Two good trades and he has used what the day had.
The losses that were not the payouts
Before any of this was consistent, he knew nothing. Day-trading courses. He knew which candle was positive and which color was negative. Nothing about support and resistance. Starting from scratch may have been the advantage. He jumped in, tried strategies, tried to improve, and after some months tried to build his own. Two things traders think work, which did not work for him, are trading every support and every resistance, and trading only breakouts. A breakout has to break a support or a resistance, and those are the areas where he wants to be getting out. In a long, at a strong resistance, he prefers to exit, because the market rejects there so often. He does not see a reason to enter a trade at the place where he would want to be flat. If he does not get out, he is not trusting himself. He wants to be in the part of the move where he is willing to let it move. At support or resistance, his understanding is that it should react, and he wants it to stop. One trader is trading the level. Another is trying to break it. That is a coin flip, and he thinks you have to pick a side or you cannot trade anything. He tries to avoid the argument. On a previous day's low, price moving down and breaking it, then a short trend, he wants a confirmation to follow. He will not short exactly on the support. He waits for the break, then the confirmation. He will not enter at the level. He tried the other way. It did not work well, and it has nothing to do with the $400,000. He burned a lot of challenges. Trading only the day's highs and lows never worked out.
The click was the size of the move he was chasing. He wanted extremely large trades so he could post them to friends who trade. A 500-point move. The advantage got bigger when he stopped needing the emotion. A clean setup, one move, and out. The chance that his emotions jump in is much lower on a small movement than when he is watching the market run for four hours in his favor.
He thinks most traders make it more complicated than it is, and that the complication is in the head. There is too much to hear and too much to change. He is sure some traders would be profitable if they were not always trying to get better, and getting worse, because they will not stick to the plan. He is not saying nothing should ever change. If you learn from someone, you have to know who. In January 2026 he booked mentoring with an American coach he names as Carmine Rosato, because Rosato trades a lot like he does, with Bookmap and the order book, close to what he was already doing. He tried to improve the simple strategies he already had. Adding something is fine. It has to be the right thing to add.
Simple, in his opinion, is the effective way. He has been profitable since 2024. He quit his job one year and three months after he started, in the summer of 2024, and went full time. He kept trading, and the mentoring came later, on top of a simple base. People never get to simple, he thinks, because of patience and the fear of missing out. He has failed payouts because of emotions more times than he can count. He is sure it could have been $500,000 if the emotions were not there every day. He thinks that is normal. Every prop trader, every few weeks, has the emotions kick in and does something crazy. He does not think anyone is always on point.
A loss is still hard to hold back from, even now. Monday, the first trade of the week, is usually a loser for him. He sits down, takes it, and if it loses and there is no re-entry that fits the strategies, the week starts red. Disappointing. Not trading would have been the same result, or better. Then he wants the second trade, and he has to ask whether it is an A-plus, whether a very red Monday is worth it, or whether Tuesday is the right day. He finds the good emotions harder to control than the bad ones. He does not think anyone in trading can switch emotion off. They are human. Asked whether psychology is the key or whether that claim is empty, he has trouble answering. Emotions are useful for him until a week is very red. He had a month of losses, every week a loss, and he says you cannot imagine how disappointing that is. He got out of it, maybe because of the psychology, and he guesses it was the setup. He did not overtrade, thankfully, in that stretch. He thinks it is both. The strategy forms the emotions.
Before he traded he was extremely emotional. Super angry. Sometimes screaming at a loss. His advice is not to throw anything, and to stay calm. Use a strategy you like for a couple of months. See how it plays out. Do not trade your own money. That is the first advice. Stick to the plan for a few months before you change it. It shows you what you do not like, and what kind of person you are. He thinks you have to change your personality if you want the job to work. Of the emotions on a bad day, the most dangerous is telling yourself that you are a loser and that you cannot do it. If you tell yourself you are bad, you will be. If you do not believe you can do it, stop. Whatever happened, it was a bad day, or maybe a bad week. It is not that you are bad. You are bad if you do not follow the rules. If you are trying, and you follow them, there is nothing bad about the trying. He agrees that the name for it is self-doubt.
He would not say every trader should use this software. If everyone did, it would get boring. He likes the argument. ICT on one side, order flow on the other. Different kinds of traders keep the discussion alive. The payout is not the whole picture people miss. He trades every day. He lives it. He cannot imagine the day without the chart or without the book. He loves it. Stick to something and you get better, the way the gym works, or running, or a language. It was never only the money. The money is nice. The intention was to be a successful trader.
A career, for him, means not giving up, over years. Nobody can try it for one year and declare that it does not work. They do not know yet. One year is a small amount of time. Three years is not a lot either. In Germany, learning a job is at least three years. Studying can be five, six, or seven, depending on the degree. He asks how anyone expects to master something that can earn a hundred thousand without it being hard. The expectations, when people join, are wrong.
He does not agree that a career means going all in, with no other work. He had a job he liked, at a company he liked, with colleagues he liked. Counted in dollars, he earned about five thousand a month, or four and a half, after tax. He says the German tax system is rough. He traded without pressure. Half a year after he started learning, prop trading was paying about ten thousand a month, twice the job. He has the certificates. He was not thinking about quitting in the first three months. He worked until the afternoon. The S&P and the Nasdaq open at 3:30 his time. He got home, had ten minutes to prepare, and traded. An hour a day. Ten thousand a month. He does not think you have to go all in, because prop accounts exist. He did it after a year and three months, and by then he could live from it. He had backup. Stocks, ETFs. He built that, and then he went all in.
What he would tell the version of himself who was just starting: micros, not minis, on the S&P and the Nasdaq. Do not take losses that are too big. Do not buy so many challenges. He bought far too many. Take it easy. He did, in the first months. Do not get arrogant. After the first three months he lost all of the prop accounts in a few weeks, because the positions were too big. He wanted twenty thousand a month, then thirty. It stopped working. He went back to the old plan, ten thousand a month, scaled a little, got a bit better, and took more payouts. The single biggest mistake across that year and three months was adding to losing trades, too many times. Winners were not allowed to go. Losers were allowed to go all day. Hope that it turns. The market has to stop going short at some point. It cannot go short all day. Then the account is gone. He does not add to losers. To cut that period in half, two things. Do not add to losers. A fixed stop, and do not move it. And stop after three trades a day at the most.
For someone who is struggling, the advice is to keep going, and to get up again. Downs, then ups. Do not push too hard. Have a stable income before trying to make the trading successful. Do not try to make a million out of ten dollars. A stable job, or a stable business, friends, a relationship, and build the trading on that. Do not try to make everything out of nothing. If they ask what to learn, it is not to be too greedy, and never to lose more on a trade than you win. That is rule number one. The consistent system gets built on top of it. If they ask for the best strategy, thinking back, a long is a bull flag and a confirmation breakout. He calls that the easiest. A short is a bear flag and a confirmation. He would not tell them to drop everything for order flow. In his opinion it makes sense, and it is worth sticking to. It is not required in order to get profitable. He thinks you can get there without it. It is a large improvement to add once you are already making money. You can also start with it. He sees it as a powerful add-on. Trend lines, RSI, and MACD, and he will say they are thinking too much and making it too complicated. He never really tried that stack. He watched so much theory that he told himself he would never even attempt it, and he did not. He might draw a line where a large order of market buyers went in, so he can see it, and the second it breaks he deletes the line. He does not trust it much. RSI, if someone insists, shows a strong trend. A strong short, and the RSI is triggering. If the market moves and then returns, it is powerful. He does not need the indicator for that. It is nice to have. A strong candle as confirmation, and then the long can be traded. He would not go long because the RSI is at 20, or short because it is at 80. The indicator can be a confirmation. One indicator, by itself, is not the trade.