New member onboarding: costs first, strategies second
If I ran onboarding for this forum I would ban strategy hopping for the first fortnight. New members need a cost and risk spine before another entry-pattern clone. Without that spine, every new thread becomes another way to avoid measuring the bill.
Proposed path:
Week 1: journal costs, daily loss limit, news blackout — no new strategy threads required.
Week 2: one session playbook, tiny size, process score at end of day.
Only then: refine entries and compare setups after costs.
Edge without cost literacy is cosplay. The kindest thing we can do for new scalpers is make the boring modules mandatory before the exciting ones.
Would you support a costs-first onboarding path for new members — and what module would you put on day one?
Mentors who jump straight to entries are often selling excitement. A costs-first path is slower content and better survivors — which is what a scalping forum should optimise for.
I'd support it. For day one, I'd pick one exercise: work out what a single round trip costs on your own broker, with your own lot size, in your account currency. That means spread at the time you actually trade, plus commission both ways, and then that figure as a share of your usual stop.
Most new members have never done it, and the first time you see that a 5-pip-stop scalp gives up 15 to 20% of the risk before the market moves, a lot of the strategy threads read differently. A simple shared spreadsheet template would make it a ten-minute task.
