MGC
Vanguard Morningstar Mega Cap ETF
stock NYSE ETF

eventhough both are gold, but they are slightly different in term of chart datafeed,
for GOLD CFD (XAUUSD) you can look for your related cfd broker in tradingview (pepperstone, icmarket, vantage, etc) different broker has slightly different price datafeed as well,
meanwhile for GOLD Futures (GC/MGC) you should look for CME datafeed, other than this one you might expect different result

eventhough both are gold, but they are slightly different in term of chart datafeed,
for GOLD CFD (XAUUSD) you can look for your related cfd broker in tradingview (pepperstone, icmarket, vantage, etc) different broker has slightly different price datafeed as well,
meanwhile for GOLD Futures (GC/MGC) you should look for CME datafeed, other than this one you might expect different result

Yeah, short term futures is basically all I trade day to day. Gold (MGC) is my bread and butter, the range gives the tick value room to work without needing much size, and volume holds up well across both London and NY sessions so there's usually something happening. Setup wise I mostly wait for a clean rejection off a prior high or low with confirmation on a lower timeframe, nothing exotic. I'll still take MNQ when the NY open gets moving but gold is where most of my screen time goes.

Handwritten or typed beats a dashboard for this specifically, the act of writing the setup out forces you to actually articulate why you took the trade instead of just reviewing the P&L after the fact. Nice on the MGC scalp. For backtesting, even a rough manual pass works to start: pull up 50 to 100 past instances of your setup on a chart and mark whether it would've hit stop or target first. Gives you a real hit rate before you risk more money finding out live. Worth doing before you scale size on gold specifically since the tick value is bigger than MES/MNQ, so mistakes cost more per trade while you're still dialing it in.

NinjaTrader offer some sort of a dashboard for this purpose, but perhaps there’s more merit to journaling it by hand/or typing that can help with reduction of overtrading.
each trade has to be jotted down and explained by the pattern/setup, thus reducing the probability of random trades.
I’ll look into Gold. Friday I made a little $40 profit on MGC buying a low and selling after a dozen of ticks higher. But to this point perhaps I do have to step back and do some back testing

MGC and MES at the moment.
It's been a mixed experience, but the more I've learnt to accept how markets actually behave, especially how gold reacts to news, follows its broader trend bias, and how it makes corrections...
^the more consistent my trading has become.
The biggest improvement, though, has been simplifying my approach and sticking to it (and not making last minute decisions off what other people are saying).
Currently, I'm look for setups around that 1st hour of NY open Initial Balance (IB), then use that as my baseline alongside the news context and market structure.

Yeah exactly. One more thing that helped me personally: keep a simple trade log with entry, stop distance, and outcome for every single trade. After 50 to 100 entries you'll see patterns you can't see in the moment, like whether losses cluster around certain times of day or certain setups, which is way more useful than just watching the account balance go up and down. Since you're in Europe, worth noting gold futures (MGC) tend to have solid volume during London hours too, might be worth a look if you want something outside the NY session grind.

Micro futures like MES/MNQ are unforgiving on a small account because a couple of bad ticks against a tight stop wipes out a whole day's edge. The pattern you're describing, wide logical stops forcing tiny size or tight stops getting clipped, usually means the setup doesn't fit the account size yet, not that the strategy itself is broken.

Two things that tend to help: pick one instrument for at least 100 trades before judging it (bouncing between MES, MNQ, MGC, MCL and M2K means you never build a real sample size for any single one), and backtest the exact entry rules on historical data first so you know the real average stop distance and win rate before risking money on it live. That number alone usually answers "why does my stop keep getting hit," it tells you whether your stop is actually too tight for that instrument's normal noise or if the entries need work.

Breakeven for two weeks after a rough stretch is a solid signal you're improving, not a reason to switch products again.

This is why the prop firm stuff blows my mind. Why in the world do people use that crap when you can just trade MES or MGC