The first time I passed an FTMO challenge felt a lot like my first profitable month back in 2021. It wasn't about one massive win. It was about a string of small, disciplined trades that simply didn't blow up. Everyone asks me how to pass prop firm challenge, and they always expect a complex answer about indicators or secret entries. They're asking...

Every central bank meeting, my feed is flooded with the same thing: breathless speculation about a 25 or 50 basis point move. Traders line up on one side or the other, place their bets, and then get chopped to pieces in the volatility. They think the game is about guessing the rate decision. They're wrong. The rate decision is almost always the lea...

Ultima Markets Daily Market Insights - February 23, 2026

So here's what nobody's talking about. Everyone on YouTube is selling you the dream of passing a challenge. They're obsessed with the 'how to pass prop firm challenge' question. But they never tell you what happens the Monday morning after you get your funded account credentials. The euphoria is gone. And it's replaced by a quiet terror. I know bec...

Let’s get this out of the way: I think the market is getting spooked by shadows when it comes to the USD/JPY. Everyone is glued to their charts, waiting for the Bank of Japan (BoJ) to jump in and smack the pair down. And while intervention is a real risk, it's also a distraction from the main event. My USD/JPY analysis today isn't focused on what t...

Let me be brutally honest. Most traders fail prop firm challenges because they're playing the wrong game. They think the goal is to make 8% or 10%. It's not. The actual goal is to not lose 5%. That's the entire secret. I learned this after blowing my first six accounts trading forex pairs with insane leverage at 3 AM. Once I switched my main focus ...

Let's be honest. The consensus trade right now is to be short the Euro. Every analyst on TV is singing from the same hymn sheet: the Fed is hawkish, the ECB is dovish, so sell EUR/USD. It's simple, it's clean, and it's probably wrong. When a trade becomes this crowded, I get interested in the other side. My time at the ECB taught me one thing: cent...

I stared at my interest rate differential spreadsheet for a solid five minutes this morning. The spread between the German 2-year bund and the US 2-year Treasury note just widened to its largest gap in three months. That’s not just a number on a screen. That’s the bond market screaming that the economic paths of Europe and the United States are spl...