
Haleema Sadia
I am Haleema Sadia, 22, based in Pakistan. I do not think of myself as an ICT trader or an SMC trader - I read liquidity and structure, and I use whichever lens confirms what price is actually doing. Alongside my own execution I manage funded and live capital for clients and run a signals and analysis community.
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I got into the markets in 2021 and was funded for the first time in late 2022, so there was over a year of pure learning before I had a funded account to my name. That gap mattered. I was not rushing toward a payout - I was trying to understand price before risking anything real. What changed once I was funded was not the strategy but the weight behind every decision. The market does not teach you risk management until something is actually at stake.
On my own capital I have blown five 100K evaluations and one 200K evaluation. Those losses stung. But here is the distinction that kept me going: I have failed plenty of my own evaluations, and I have never breached a single funded account I manage for a client. Not one. When it is my own money, a small voice says I can recover it; when it is someone else's capital, that voice does not get a say. A blown evaluation is expensive data - painful, but still just data.
My single most expensive lesson was 14,000 dollars in one sitting, during a CPI release. I held a position through a major news event when I already knew better. It was not a lack of knowledge - I knew CPI was coming and convinced myself the structure would hold. It did not, and it was never going to. High-impact news does not care what your order block says. I do not hold exposure through high-impact events anymore, full stop.
My lowest point was not financial, which genuinely surprised me. One of my largest Telegram communities was permanently taken down overnight - thousands of members and years of trust, gone with no warning and no real way to appeal. Losing money in the market was a cost I had already made peace with; losing a community built by hand, conversation by conversation, felt personal in a way a losing trade never has. Starting over from zero was mentally harder than any evaluation I have blown. But quitting was never on the table. I just started rebuilding, one post and one member at a time.
My approach blends Smart Money Concepts, ICT, Turtle Soup and Candle Range Theory, all tied together through liquidity. They are not separate systems to me; they are different lenses on the same question of where liquidity sits and how price will interact with it. I am mostly inactive during the Asian session and focus on London and New York. My day is built around preparation before execution - I mark my areas of interest on the higher timeframes before the open, and I never react live to a chart I have not already studied. No confirmation, no trade. And I run one hard rule regardless of how the day is going: two losses, and I am done, no exceptions. That single rule has protected more of my capital than any entry model I use.
What separates me from someone who washed out at their third evaluation is not strategy - most people who fail already know where to enter. It is psychology: managing risk consistently, waiting patiently instead of forcing a setup out of boredom, and executing your process after a losing stretch without spiralling into revenge trades. I have blown six evaluations of my own, and the difference is that I never let a single one convince me the framework itself was wrong. If prop firms disappeared tomorrow I would still be trading, because a large part of what I already do is managing private client capital. And if I were handed a million-dollar account, I would not touch my risk percentage - the first week would go entirely into understanding that firm's execution environment. A bigger account calls for more discipline, not more risk.
About the writer - Haleema Sadia
Haleema Sadia is a 22-year-old trader from Pakistan who reads liquidity through SMC, ICT, Turtle Soup and Candle Range Theory, and manages funded and live capital for clients alongside her own accounts.
