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.
Tim Flossbach is introduced as a trader of more than ten years who went from losing every dollar he had to a multi-million-dollar account, and who trades live in front of thousands of people every day. The host has seen the streams. Flossbach will not reduce the work to one signal. After ten years it is a selection. He skips more than 90 percent of what he sees. He used to take everything, and he lost far too much. The condition he keeps is liquidity, and inside that, the liquidation sweep and the liquidation hunt. The mistake for years was entering the moment the hunt started. He learned to wait a minute, or another, for the reversal structure. When that structure is fine, he enters. Boring, he says, is what pays him.
A feeling, and then a zone the market has already visited
There are not three rules that fire together. In German he has a phrase for it. In English it is a feeling for the chart, the candles, and the liquidity, the way driving on a highway tells you someone is about to pull into your lane. If the liquidity is shaking, high candles up and high candles down, he skips it every time. A new situation. A post from Trump about Iran is the example he gives, and he will skip that every time as well. He wants clean trends, clean structures, and clean ranges, and then the liquidity, with the indicators he built with his team.
He would describe the approach by those indicators. They show him every liquidation on the chart. He says he is no longer thinking like a retail trader. He is trying to think like an institution, figure out where that size would enter, and follow it. He does not take a trade because a chart has a symmetrical triangle or a head and shoulders. He calls that a lie coaches tell. He enters where the money is flowing.
Liquidation matters because it is what moves the money, and he thinks it moves every market. The picture people have, that the market produces new money, is an illusion. It is an exchange. See where the money goes, and follow it. That is why liquidation is the key, and why he also says there is never a point in trading that is 100 percent. With the indicators and this view he thinks you can get to something like 70/30 or 80/20.
For someone who has never heard the word, a liquidation is not only a limit order. A limit is an instruction to a broker to enter at an exact level. A liquidation, in his use, is an area where people have placed money. It can be a stop, a limit, a liquidation, a stop hunt. The book will not show how large every trader's position is. It can show estimated volumes of liquidation in a range. If the chart is going to that range, something will happen. Over time the feeling for what happens inside those zones is what gets him into the trade. The host's version, that price hits the zone, a bunch of people get stopped, and he looks at that as a breakout, is one he calls completely correct. It is the main thing. He has two large versions of it. The live streams are the intraday liquidation hunt, and he also trades a lot of reversal structures. For the last two years, and right now, the timing he likes best is DCA, dollar-cost averaging. Find a lot of zones, get the best average entry over a longer period. In crypto, in what he calls a bear market and a very low price range, those levels can be positions for the next six to forty months, and with the right exit he thinks there is a lot of money in them.
The chart work starts with the basics, which he thinks is funny to some people. Every day, the weekly first. The trend. Whether any large target has been hit, including a liquidation zone. He does not open on the indicators or the moving averages. An old, large zone with a lot of liquidity, a lot of action, and tall candles in both directions, sitting in the same area, is a place the downtrend might be ending. It is a maybe, not a fact. Top-down. Weekly, sometimes already the monthly, then the daily, and then the averages. He says he is focusing on only three, and then that maybe two are enough. The caption has him saying 250 and 30, and that the 30 is optional. The line he actually uses in the example is the 200-day. On Bitcoin the bear market started, in his marking, in October 2025, and price followed that average on the downside. Below the 200-day average, the situation is a downtrend. A downtrend does not mean he only looks for shorts. He thinks that rule is an illusion people repeat. Bear markets go up and down. It depends on the strategy, the timeframe, and how often you trade. A scalper, in his opinion, should be open to both sides. A beginner taking very large swings should look at the short side before trading against the trend.
Back on the weekly, the range he marked is the whole picture. The chart runs from 2019. The first bull market on it topped, first at 65 and then at 69, and he followed that price range. The second bull market, from 2023 upward, stopped in the same range. He does not think that is random. It is liquidity. The level is a sell level. Without enough buyers to get through it, the market goes down, which is what happened. The important change is the breakout through the top of that structure. From that day the resistance may be support. Coming from below, the reaction is selling. Coming from the top, the reaction is buying. That is how he finds the ranges. He says everything he is showing works in every market. He has traded forex, futures, CFDs, gold, silver, and oil. The chart in front of them is Bitcoin because, at the moment, that is the one he thinks is good to trade.
The daily does not change the story much. The averages do. A reaction down at 57, then up, a structure with a lot of buy volume, confronting the intraday top. Price has pushed toward the 30 and the 50 and is still under the 200. He thinks a range is possible between those averages. The first range is the push up to where they are. The second is around the 200. If the trend is being followed, he would focus on range trading between those zones.
Two indicators, and a stop under the first grab
He and his team found a way to put liquidity from the order books of the major exchanges onto TradingView. He calls it top secret. It is not something you find outside his platform. The first one is the X-ray, which the caption also hears as the Xway. It is one of his favorites. He had marked ranges before he turned it on, and the ranges are where the liquidity is. Blue lines, brighter and darker, are a replication of that liquidity. The numbers on the side are millions of dollars, and he is clear that the money is leveraged. A very large liquidation zone sits on the top of the last structure, the top of Bitcoin from the 16th of June. The tell is to wait until the market grabs that liquidity before entering. What people do, short the top, stop a little above, target two or three to one, is a normal trade and, in his opinion, the wrong one. Wait until price goes up and takes the liquidity, then focus on the reversal into the lower liquidity. That is one way he enters.
He still does not know what kind of liquidity a block is. Buy volume, sell volume, liquidation volume. Maybe 70 percent of it is a stop-loss range. They will never know for certain. They know there is a lot of money, and a brighter color is more volume. Between the first two lines he reads 149 and 128 million dollars in leveraged volume. In that range, people may get liquidated or may have their stops. What a market maker wants, in his telling, is to get them out of the positions before the reversal. He waits for the market to come up, and then for the reaction. On the livestream the day before, price went to the zone and it was a reversal. The bears were stronger. He does not enter the short immediately. He goes to the lower timeframe, and if the reaction continues he may enter on that candle. It worked quite well there.
The four-hour is his favorite timeframe for large positions. The second indicator is the X-ray Pro. Green and red, and he calls it a game changer. It is still a liquidation area, and it shows only the large ones. Institutional orders, not a retail trader with a five-thousand-dollar stop. An institutional position, in his example, of 50 million in volume. It is his favorite, and the reason is risk management more than the entry. The problem he sees in his community is that people can have a strategy and a good entry and still not know how to be in the trade. Green is the long-liquidation side. If the market falls, the person being liquidated had a long, not a short. Red is the short-liquidation side. The market goes up, short positions get liquidated or hit their stops.
On the example, a consolidation after a longer downtrend, and green lines. Full lines and dotted lines. The dots are liquidations that have not been hunted. The straight lines have been hunted already. Before the market came down there was a lot of liquidity, because it was the absolute low of Bitcoin at that moment. He was pretty sure they would see a sweep, and that after the grab it would be, 80 percent of the time, a reversal upward. He says it is always the same. He did not place a limit there for luck. The market could keep falling. He marked the liquidation and waited for the reversal. It reversed. He waited for the down move that made a higher low than the one before it. The trend had changed to an uptrend, and that is where he entered the long. The target was the top of the short liquidation, the red lines, a lot of liquidity above from the last situation, and it fit. The stop went directly under the situation where the first liquidation was grabbed, the first green line. The same tool for the entry and for the risk.
A liquidity sweep, said simply, is the market sweeping down, grabbing the liquidity, and reversing. No indicator, in his view, can tell you that a sweep is developing. It would be nice. What can alert him is not one pocket of liquidity but a lot of it, combined, in one zone. The market goes very slowly toward those zones. A slow range, and then one candle out of nowhere. The red candle he points at was 3:00 a.m. his time, the middle of the night, and then a very fast move. It is always the same. A beginner who sees a lot of liquidity in a very small range should treat that as the alert. The sweep can also fail. Price can blow straight through. Both sides can always happen. Never 100 percent. Seventy-thirty, or eighty-twenty. There is always a percentage that goes through the liquidity.
The entry after the reversal is not the first obvious long. Price blew up and came back down. People would say the long is obvious. On the timeframe the caption renders as the 50-minute, the breakout was not clear enough for him. There was still liquidity available underneath. When they came back to the range very fast, he thought they might test that liquidity too, so he did not go long. He calls it a feeling. He waited for the strong breakout. A red line there is short liquidity. He waited to see what the market did with it. After a sweep of that liquidity as well, he was pretty sure of one more reversal. In the same period that liquidation was also support and resistance. It had been the top, near where the fall started, and it was a support the market had tested. A double confirmation. They reacted and did not grab the liquidity. The bulls were very strong. The uptrend was very strong. That was the reason to enter. For the risk, they had not had the power to reach the liquidation below, so the stop belongs in that range, and the target is taken as far toward the top as the short liquidations allow.
He would not say every trade. About 80 percent. A liquidation sweep, then a liquidation sweep, then a pullback to support. The other 90 percent get skipped because that picture is not on the chart all the time. It cannot be. He makes quite large positions, so he does not need every trade. A small percentage is worth a lot to him. He wants the high-quality setups, and this is one of them.
Never below one, and the weekly wins an argument
He does not wait for a single 100 percent take-gain. He takes small parts. In the last cycle of a trade he may still have 10 to 20 percent of the margin in it. Eighty percent of the trade is already managed. Stops at break-even, stops in gain, and partials taken at the liquidation targets. If they break one of those points and he sees a reversal structure again, he takes another part. A cluster of green lines is a clear signal to take more. A big range, broken into a lot of small gain areas. The target is another clustered liquidity zone, because another sweep can happen there. The stop in the example is more market structure than a signal. After the sweep, price pushed up and came down again, and it made a higher low. That zone is support, because the up-range started there, and the stop goes below it. The liquidations in the area had already been grabbed, so it was no longer interesting, in his view, for a market maker to push price down there. If they did push it down, they would fall below the area, and that range was too big for him. The stop stayed with the market structure.
He will never be in a reward below one to one. A trade like that makes zero sense to him. He does not like a small ratio either. At one to one you have to hit every second trade or you lose. He wants larger ranges, a larger reward, and small gains taken inside the range. Twenty-five, twenty-five, and the rest toward the top, is the way he says it. Ninety-five percent of his trades are a minimum of two to one. Never below, to be honest about it. If the next liquidation cluster is too close and the reward is small, he will not take the trade, even if the entry is there. He likes real-life examples. Something being discounted is not a reason to grab it. If it is the one thing you always wanted, and it is discounted, then yes. Not everything on sale. The same with trades. Two hundred of them might change your mind in the moment. The point is to come back to the strategy. High quality only. If the rules are not there, skip it, whatever it is.
What invalidates a setup while he is still deciding is news, most obviously. A Federal Reserve decision, and the liquidation structure can be clear, and he will not enter. He does not block all news trading. He is deep in fundamentals and he likes reading the news. Some events are larger than the liquidation, and those he always skips. The other invalidation, once the entry is good and he is placing the exits, is the higher timeframe. The top-down from the start of the session is not optional. He can have the trade, and he can know that the weekly has a resistance that has been figured eight times, the biggest resistance on the weekly of Bitcoin, with the liquidity sitting there. In that case the liquidation is not as relevant as the weekly level. If the higher timeframe says something other than the lower one, there is no point in going with the lower one.
The scale-out is both a method and experience. He thinks it can work without the experience, and that it works better with it. What beginners do not include, and what he did not include, is the stretch where the hit rate is very good and they feel like a superhero. Every strategy has to take losses. Loss is part of trading. Greed, fear, and mindset are not in the model for someone who has not been in the market. They arrive over time. They are not in one video. On a scale of one to ten, the indicator is an 8.5 for his trading right now. Very important, and he can be profitable without it. It makes the life easier. If the focus is liquidity and the smart-money ideas, he does not think a person needs even one indicator to be profitable. For him it is convenience. A student who asks whether to use it or not gets told to use it. His comparison is a job that pays a million a year against the same job at fifty thousand. Take the million. The indicator makes the liquidity obvious, the risk management easier, and the entries easier. There is also no rule, in his opinion, that says you cannot learn it without the tool.
The lie, the birthday, and two to four hours
What he hopes people leave with is a move away from trading two lines and calling that the method. He has seen it fail in too many cases. The one point he will give is liquidity. It was the key, and it changed his life.
The biggest lie, and he thinks there is more than one because there are too many liars in the game, is that a person who has lost a lot of money has to find the perfect strategy. There is no perfect strategy. The traders who are profitable over a long time have a simple system they follow for a long time. They do not change it every two weeks. He compares it to not changing a partner every two weeks. Follow one thing. Learn it. If after six to twelve months it is not the way, then change it. Do not change it too early. Do not make the life more complicated than it is.
He knows the German-speaking market very well, and he does not claim to know every part of the American one. He sold educational products for a time. He saw those people from the inside. One day he told himself it was not the way. He had been profitable for a lot of years before he started making content. He left what he calls the coaching bubble. The educational material on his socials is free. The sad figure he gives is that 95 percent of the coaches in that German region cannot trade. They do not live from trading. They live from selling the illusion that someone can learn it. The path is the same. Sell something. Teach the basics. The student reaches the point of thinking trading is nice and still not knowing the key, and then the offer is a one-on-one for fifteen thousand. They cannot trade profitably, so they cannot teach it. That is the biggest lie. Someone whose first video this is should not buy a course at the very beginning, on social media or on YouTube. There is a great deal of free material that is very good. Follow people who seem smart and who do not want to sell you something. If the first instruction is an email address so they can call and put you on a sales call, skip it. He thinks those people are damaging the trading market in Germany. Someone who helps will offer the help for free. If they are giving fifteen calls a week, he will not be angry that they need to be paid for the time. If the first thing they want to do is sell, skip them.
For a trader who is struggling and wants to be successful, the next step is not the perfect entry. Not every candle, every candlestick pattern, every market pattern. That is maybe 10 percent of trading, and not more. Positioning, sizing, the exit, which trades to select, and risk management are much more interesting. Protect the capital first. Do not overtrade. Do not try to enter every trade. Very high-quality setups.
Patterns are the method he thinks flatly does not work. There are a lot of methods in that category. The illusion of trading patterns is the big one. A pattern might work in one or two situations on the weekly. Trying to trade every head and shoulders, falling wedge, and ascending triangle on the five-minute and the fifteen-minute is an illusion. It is a way to make trading look easy enough to sell. It is not how trading works. He tried them at the beginning and lost a lot of money. Volume profile on a weekly chart is quite good. What most people do not see is that most indicators are not real time. They are backward-looking. RSI, scrolled back, looks perfect. Oversold, take the trade. Overbought, take the trade. In real time it does not look like that. Divergence on the weekly, on the indicator the caption calls the ASI, is quite good. Going to the five-minute and trading because a line is up or down is not. Averages are quite good. RSI is quite good. Volume profile is quite good. MACD is maybe okay, and he does not really like it. That is the list. He never used much more, and he will not recommend the crowded indicators on TradingView.
Someone can build in the wrong direction. The worst thing they can learn is that trading is based on indicator signals. He has seen the German market teach people to enter when the MACD crosses its signal line. He calls that disgusting. If trading were that easy, everyone would be profitable after one day. If that is the position someone is in, patterns or indicator signals, pass it and go another way. He knows because he went the wrong way himself. At 17 he lost thirty thousand dollars in five minutes. If he had told his parents, he says, they would have hit him. He started at 16. He is 26, so it is about ten years. His father, who is in business and in the stock market, gave him a thousand dollars because he was annoying about buying Bitcoin every day. Bitcoin was six or seven hundred dollars. He went on Binance and took a long. It was the period when Elon Musk was in the crypto market with Dogecoin and everything blew up. A thousand dollars, with leverage he puts at something like ten, went to thirty thousand very quickly. He says he was 17, and that it was his eighteenth birthday. He woke up, saw thirty thousand on the phone, and gave himself two options. The craziest eighteenth birthday of his life, and a hundred thousand by the end of the day, or he does not make the hundred thousand. He was not clear that he could lose everything. He went all-in long at a hundred times leverage. It did not take five minutes to liquidate. He was sweating. He was shaking. He called himself the stupidest boy in Germany. He stopped trading for a while. He thought it did not work, that it was an illusion. It was the most important point in the career. Some months later he came back. He had made thirty thousand out of one thousand. Thirty times. There was a way to make money, and he had not found the right one. He put more time into risk, into position management, into entries, into strategies, the parts he did not have. He backtested. He journaled everything. After a while he was profitable.
What clicked after that loss was that trading is not as easy as it seems. It is not a bet on red or black. His opinion of the place is that you are at the market before the money goes into the stores. It is the right place to make a lot of money, and the way has to be found. It is possible. It is not too hard. It is not easy. Then consistency. Every day, 1 percent more than yesterday. One step forward. If that is the mindset, he thinks the trader becomes profitable. The mindset was what changed at the beginning.
How much time it takes, he finds hard to answer. A normal job, or a student, and he would not do eight hours a day. That is too much. The work is full focus in a short window. From 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., those two hours should be the entire focus. No messages. The phone in flight mode. No girlfriend, no kitchen. Someone trying to put eight or ten hours a day into it cannot put that focus into a short period. Two to four hours a day is more than enough to get into it and to become profitable. A Saturday of theory can be eight hours. Realistically he would not go past the two to four. It is individual.
It can be a side job, and the answer surprised him because he had not thought about it. Swing trading, or the dollar-cost averaging he described at the start, can be a side hustle. A scalper, or a day trader, next to a main job, he does not think can. The stress is too much. It depends on the strategy.
The moment to quit a full-time job is time, and it is not one profitable month. One good month is not a reason to throw a life away. The strategy should be profitable for six months, or twelve, a longer period. That is where he would take the risk. It is easy for him to say. He is 26. If he loses everything he can start over. At 65 it is harder. Longer than six months, and the way is a good one, and a person can go fully into the trading. The second point is scaling. Ten dollars that has been profitable for six months will not pay for a life. Funded accounts, or savings, and then it is possible to live from it. Over time, he says, it happens, and it is possible for everyone.
If he started over with no reputation and no money, the first five years of his own trading were behind closed doors. He likes teaching for free, because people get a better feeling for the market. From day one he would put the journey on social media, because it is interesting to watch someone go from the start to profitable, and he would document the whole thing. The second point is that trading does not scale without capital. Ten percent of a thousand is not much. Ten percent of a hundred thousand, or of a million, is enough to change a life. He would try to build a business with a real cash flow, use the business to feed the account, and use the skill to grow the account.
The last lesson is not a setup. He has had a lot of personal trouble. Cancer, diagnosed twice. A leg he smashed completely. Escaping a war. Trading is a good thing. He loves it. It can be done from anywhere, and that is freedom. The problem would be being stuck somewhere he is unhappy. Do the things that make you happy. Life is short. Dying at thirty without having lived it, he says, sucks. The liquidity, the wait, and the partials are how he trades. They are not, in the close of the hour, the reason he thinks the hour was worth having.