With pleasure. With this question, you've summed up the crux of what I'm saying. You think I'm having a go at ATR stop losses, as maybe being too simple or something. Far from it. I think ATR based stoplosses are an excellent type of stop loss, along with prior candles, fixed risk, support/resistance, price action etc. But they are always part of the overall system.

But that is not the point at all. The point is why you think increasing your stop loss to 1.7atr from 1.5atr will improve your profitability, based on observing a few trades that it would work on. I'll tell you what it will do. It will arbitrarily increase your percentage win. It will arbitrarily increase your average loss. It may increase or decrease your profitability. In all likelihood it will change a loss making strategy into another loss making strategy.

Now, if you'd said you had tested your overall already promising strategy over hundreds of trades and were fine tuning the stop loss, and had plotted a graph of average profit per trade against stop, and 1.7atr was surrounded by other data points like 1.5atr 1.6atr and 1.8atr, which were all promising, but 1.7 looked the best. And then you'd calculated your max drawdown, put it into a risk formula, calculated your necessary capital requirement, and were happy with that amount. I'd have said you were well on the path to being profitable.

Do you see the difference? You don't have to be a automated backtester, but you do have to have some idea how to evaluate and test your strategies over and above trying a few trades and seeing what could have worked better.

I also think you are far too emotional and excited about this. You actually said something like imagine being able to just create money for yourself anywhere in the world. I'm afraid that is just the attitude that people are talking about on this thread. I don't mean this in an unkind way, but it sounds like greed or gambling. If you really want to listen to the top traders, do so, and they'll mostly all tell you you'll fail with that attitude. You need hard work, rational learning, calm emotion, and to stop trying to buy or borrow someone else's system.

Your analogies are wrong. There is pretty much a textbook way to fly a plane. If you're sitting on a plane, you don't need to know it, and if you're learning, of course it makes sense to listen to people who have done it. (However, there are psychologists who can't fly who have plenty of important advice to give to pilots. You wouldn't be listening to them though...)

Trading profitably is not a textbook persuit. I hope it's obvious why.

You know, I think a lot of people on this thread genuinely would like to see you work this out. You're kind of symbolic on this site now.