Becoming A TopStep Trader 2020

3406.25 on the run up to 18:00 (BST) there were ~ 1700 orders sat there, which held price in a range from the US open.

this is on my live account, haven't seen a decent set up for me to take a trade on the e-minis and the combine account.
Just waiting to see if we can get out of the initial range and then make out move towards 3420

The only reason this is dead as a markets go, is due to FOMC tomorrow.
Anytime there is a FED meeting or announcement which could be market moving we get to a level and then get held in the holding pattern.
Tomorrow we'll end up with the start of the expansion and then towards the end of the week the charts will make perfect sense and we can get on with our trend days next week. That is my plan anyway

As mentioned yesterday, FED FOMC tonight, so things will be slow.
However, I spotted an opportunity and took a trade on the Combine account.
Ran it up as far as I feel it could go - as it approached Supply and reversed. Yes, it could go higher. But there is always tomorrow.


Only $1727 to make to hit Part 1 target of $9k and today is the 5th day. So if by chance there is a set up after FOMC, I may take it.

Step 1 of the $150k combine completed.
Took 6 days to get from 150k to 159k and that isn't so bad considering the short week last week, which affects the trading momentum and this week FOMC.
Simple buy the demand, better known as Buy The Dip today.

I have left my live account running this trade with 2 micro ES contracts, targeting 3400 and maybe above.

However, there are no prizes for doing more than the requirements for TopStep, hence why I cut the Combine trade when the target was reached.
In the past I have tried to see how much and how quickly I could make, with varying results of success. Yes you can pass the combine steps in 1 day, but then you have to spin your wheels taking silly tiny trades each day just to get through the minimum trading days requirements. In the past though I had to find a methodology, a position size, and a mindset that I knew could carry me through the Drawdown periods and something that if traded well could get me not only through the Combine steps but into the live account, where things get more real.

So here it is, Step #2.

Basically the same as Step #1 but they want to see if you can a) make the $9k again and b) if you do, can you keep it for the remainder of the 10 days of assessment.

First the bad.

I set out to begin my new Part 2 of the Combine and made a school boy error out of the gate.
In Part 2, you have a scaling plan, which allows you to add in contract size as you grow your account. I didn't follow this rule. So I know they would have killed my account. I did a reset.

Second the ugly.

Getting back into the trading and decided that as it is a Witching day today, price could be messed up whilst we wait for traders to sort out the Options trades. There will be some tom foolery for sure in the US session.
I looked at the Daily, and the H1 and decided it was a tight range so I would attempt to scalp my way through the London session.



I just about got away with it.


Thirdly the good.
It's Friday, it's a triple or quadruple witching day and I have been able to make some money on my live account and I am starting positive on the Combine. So I am going to take the rest of the day off and be happy with my achievements.

@NevFX (or anyone who's been funded), let me know if this is not right thread, hopefully you might provide me your own view on this, but for me, I was considering going with them at some point, because, on a 500K account you can keep risk very low (which is a great habit to have) and upon making 1% profit you still potentially get around 5K to withdraw.
But then I noticed a small detail: they give you not a certain "account" amount but a "buying power" amount, which for a 1:100 leverage, so you're not actually getting a 500K account but a 5K account to trade (for a 500K buying power, which you can't even use unless you want to break the very tight rules). I guess trading my own live account is almost the same thing, thanks for nothing TopStepFX!

I said for some time now in some threads here and there, the real account / money you have to trade with is just the maximum drawdown allowed. All your trading and risk must be based on that. These prop firms operate with the same business model a bank operates but so many traders do not get it, that fee you pay is interest for the borrowed money, that is, drawdown allowed.

To be more precise, maybe someone else will see this and ring a bell, take Ftmo example, 10k account, aggresive mode, you pay 250 Euro for 10k account WITH 20% DD allowed, that is 2000 Euro effectively, your real live money! So, your interest is 2000 euro / 250 euro fee = 12.5% INTEREST ! Pretty damn good business model isn't it ?

Hope it clarifies, spread the word, maybe somewhere in the future we will have enough educated people to change the "prop wanna be industry".

Good day.

I appreciate your comment, thank you.

Everybody has got their perspective, and I know what you mean, we all know that already, but in a perfect world retail traders would be treated fairly, but right now, we need to take what is given to us and try to make it work. So, when you have several years of trading under your belt but are under capitalized (majority of retail traders ?), I don't think it's a question of being more or less "educated".
It's understandable that some of us prefer to wait for the perfect scenarios to come.

Honestly, I don't care about their business model and how they make their profit as long as I can get the means that can make paying their fees worthwhile. FTMO allows that, and as long as they don't play with payouts and withdraws I'm okay with whatever interest they earn themselves. I think taking 5K home at the end of the month from a 232€ (or x2 or x3) investment would be worth it (that's how I first interpreted the info on TSFX pages). Problem is that it's seems that's not the case, considering that the profit % is based on the account size, that looks more like by hitting the 1% a month I would actually make a 500 bucks profit... Wow, that's a mere 2x ROI if making it super-smoothly on the first month, that's basically paying them to pay me!!

At least FTMO talks about account size and not buying power which, aside from looking as attractive big figures on a webpage, doesn't mean anything for the trader and is actually misleading. But yeah, in the case of TSFX it really is ridiculous and not worth it for me.
Just MHO.

there is nothing wrong with what you have written or understood.

My rationale is,
• I pay $300, I have to trade a minimum of 15 days before I get anywhere close to making any real money but when I do, I have $3k of their money to lose potentially.
Rather than saving up $150k putting it into an account and losing $3k of mine, should the overall experience be a negative on my balance.
If traders want to put their hard earned cash into the markets and risk it, then that's up to them. But I am risk adverse and would rather they stump up the risk than me. I don't even care if it's a notional amount, as long as the withdrawals are real cash. That is all that matters to me. $300 of my real cash, for the chance to take $9k out of the market, net $8700. That is what I aim to do and document here.

But more importantly for me at this point is that trading the account with such tight rules, where they close the account if you break them, means that I am day by day training myself to be a better trader, where the Full Tilt days start to go away. Where the concentration lapses don't result in my throwing on a trade through FOMO.

You guys can trade your own money, risk your own money and have a lovely weekend. This is my path and I am happy with it.

I think any decent trader with a bit of brain power, realises very quickly that the model that BluFX, FTMO, Kickstart, 5%ers, etc. etc. are all designed to get:
1) Subscription to the account fees.
2) Rebates from the liquidity provider through the volume traded
3) High % of winnings from good traders
4) reset fee's
5) multiple account fee's

by the time a new trader has, opened up an account, paid a monthly subscription and traded 20 round trips, the Prop Company has probably made money on the trader in 4 ways. If the Trader should get beyond the resets, and the multiple accounts, the volume they trade then probably puts another pip for every trade into the Prop Firms pockets and then they take the 20%~50% of the winnings. So this is not a long term model for a decent trader, but it is still the fastest way to trade with potentially 10x your initial subscription fee in notional Risk.

How many traders save £1000 open up a CFD account, start trading 0.01 lots on the EURUSD before getting sick of seeing 10p at the end of the day as their winnings, only to decide that they are good enough to put 0.1 lots or even 1.0 lot on to the next trade and immediately blow up their £1k account of real money. If nothing else the 'wanna be' prop industry drags out that £1k account a bit longer.

If you want to know the types of firms I don't like, it's the ones that:

Make you pay for training before you are allowed to 1st go on sim and then if you pass the assessment trade a live account.
I won't name them here but I am preparing to let rip on a very well known firm who lured me in on the promise of Teaching me the ways of the futures markets on the likes of their Trading Technologies platform and CQG data provider and in doing so show me how the professionals make money, only to put me on a CFD forex broker and teach me less than you get from a quick google search. For that, I paid £3.5k and got a piece of paper with a Level 5 diploma on it, which is worth Nothing in the real world.

Stonks only go up right?

for me this week was a range expansion week. Most of the trading day was frustrating and I am glad it's done.
So we have had 2 of the 3 phases, range leads to expansion. Next is trend.

3350 will be key for me, as it may prove to be a resistance turning point, or if we do go higher than the FOMC high, maybe the 3350 will get tested one more time before prices really run up.
It's quite a big range approx 100 points and this weeks expansion literally, took the sell side stops and the buy side stops, so I really do feel there is a trend phase on it's way.

couldn't see us getting out of the US opening balance, though secretly wanted to see a slight push lower into some Daily Demand.
3220 held, but couldn't bring myself to hold my nose, close my eyes and buy. So ended up scalping all day.
Got to what is my daily target for a real account, though this is on the Combine Step 2 account

Great thread NevFX. Thanks for the excellent information you have shared in this thread.
Good luck with the combine. I recently started the combine also. Will follow along.

..likewise, good to see a few other TS Traders, i'm 2k into the pro-account stage and deliberating whether or not to continue with them (assuming i hit the 5k+ target) or open an account with the likes of Infinity, 3k to open an account and $500 day trade margin per contract - i'm happy trading a max of 2 contracts.

Sent you a note, NevFX.

Some technical analysis, hopefully, gives you all a better idea of what I am looking at on the charts,


what I try and wait for etc.

I think it is important to know what you are looking for, where you would like to see it and what to do when you do see it.

In this example, I am showing that at the LVN which is the lowest part of 75% of the US session volume, so far - is a place where rotations can happen, and the thinking is that you target the POC (Point of Control = most traded volume level for the session so far) or the HVN which is the highest part of 75% of the vol.
Some people don't care about volume, so they may look at the Initial Balance.

Initial Balance for me is the highest high and lowest low of the first 60 mins of trading in the US session. Again, things can rotate at the extremes and target the opposite side or go sideays bound by the IBH or IBL.


I mainly look at D1/H4/h1 supply and demand and then try and get a good read of entries on the m15/m5 that is nested within those ranges.

Some traders may look for Candlestick formations, like a pin bar. For me a good pin bar is one where the stops have been run, clearly visible on the heatmap as an orange line. Then when heavy Market Order Volume, big Red balloons in this case come crashing through, the Pin Bar is created when the price and volume to back it up goes the opposite direction. If there is no heavy volume at the pin bar. I am not that interested.

Got these questions about my latest post. Figured others may be asking themselves the same thing.

Bookmap is a great tool, if you are concerned with the volume that occurs. If you are a fundamental macro trader or someone that relies on other indicators, Bookmap probably isn't for you. A while ago, I was watching the DOM and seeing 400, 600 and sometimes maybe 1600 lots sat on certain levels and I started to think that price was gravitating towards them and that could possibly be part of a strategy. Turns out I was right in my assumptions but I have no idea how to turn it into a winning strategy.

Yes I believe it is possible to observe a false breakout on the candlesticks and I find more accuracy when the candlesick (m5 chart) looks like something interesting e.g. a pin bar, and Bookmap shows that Volume and a reversal of Volume occurred. More importantly after that, is the Return. Bookmap can highlight when the Bids and Offers on a level that I am watching dry up. Basically the Best Bid or Best Ask returns to a price level, but no actual trading occurs via Market Orders, and you're left with no bubbles on that line. Or very few at least.

The shape of the Volume arriving at the level: For instance, if there was a large number of lots sat at 3300 yesterday, all day, and after some bullish trend, price approaches that level, but on first attempt gets repelled, I assume that is either Buyers bailing out and taking profits ahead of the level, or the Sellers front running the price action, as in the futures market, if you are number 1201 in line for the 3300 level, you have to wait for 1200 orders to get filled. So maybe, 3299 is an easier place to get in.

- If price runs up fast, into the 3300 and then more Volume comes in giving a really big Green bubble at the level and fires all the way through, with what then looks like a verticle response in volume, only to then reverse with a similar amount of Red bubbles back inside the level, that can be 1 of 2 things. A stop run / false breakout or an Iceberg Order getting filled. To have a better idea of that you need to consider the size of the Biggest Green Bubble, does it have > 500 lots or whatever threshold you consider a decent Stop Run or you need Rithmic's full MBO datafeed and these orders can be tracked and an indicator can give you a signal for when that occurs.

With regards to my screengrab, my Stops that I labelled were more likely Buy Orders. However, I have no way of telling. If you look left on the candlestick chart you'll see some pin bars at 3272 where I would have put my SL's if I were long from there (just before 17:00 hrs). Regardless of whether they were actual Sell Stops or Buy Limits, they were resting orders on the Buy Side of the DOM, and when I see a level like that appear and not get broken-up or moved about, my mind thinks of them as Stops and it's more of a shorthand for a Trigger Level, where I expect something to occur. When it does, all the better.

A lot of the time, 500 lots will get put into the market above and below the price and you see these levels of volume move up and down as the Algo's try and push price in their preferred direction and into what I imagine to be the real level where they want to do business. Many trades are algo driven and seeing the computer's place, lift, remove and move their orders around is fascinating. When us mere mortals or other Attacking Algos hunt these levels of illiquidity and liquidity that is also fascinating to observe. However, I have to admit, I have no idea of what they are doing, when they are doing it, so it's not a way for me to build a full strategy. What I do quite often is, as I see some large orders moving up in incremental blocks of prices, and to me it looks alorithmic, and I am luckily trading in their direction - I use their levels as a place for my SL's. This I will try and demonstrate as it is quite useful.

AMPLIFY TRADING - the biggest joke in prop
eFinancial Careers website used to promote them in their fake news articles,

They have no funded traders.