Call me Vidvad - I day trade futures

That's good to know. In real life, I trade a fixed take profit and a fixed stop loss. I have criteria for when to move the stop to breakeven and when to trail. However, when trading the NQ, it often happens that I'll have quite a sizable open profit, but none of the conditions for adjusting my stop have occurred. In those cases, I've had a large open profit go to a full stop.

Trailing intraday stop loss serves one purpose and one purpose only: To benefit the "funding" company by forcing failure upon subscribers and inducing reset fees.

No real trader who has long term success has a trading plan based on an intraday trailing stop lol. Such a stop creates bad trading habits by encouraging a trader to trail a stop too closely, not adhering to his or her trading plan with respect to letting profits run to the take profit level etc.

I only did Apex because of the 80% off + 1 day pass.

I did find on their website that the account updates at midnight, which would explain (I guess) why I have not received an email telling me I passed the eval and giving me instructions for setting up a funded account.

Really suspicious of Apex. I think TradeDay is a much better set up. End of day drawdown, very clear trader eval dashboard with all information updated no later than 5:30 PM Eastern, no bizarre withdrawal shenanigans.

Now that Apex is out of the way, I'm going to focus on finishing the TradeDay requirements.

I tried Take Profit Trader but their $1100 intraday drawdown killed me. You hit $1100 down, easy to do intraday on the NQ trading multiple contracts, and the account is DEAD!

Not locked for the day, but dead, as in you have to pay for a reset OR wait for your next monthly sub payment. I cancelled my subscription to Take Profit Trader. The $1100 intraday kill switch is another rule made up by a prop firm to cause failures and generate reset fees. It serves no purpose if you are really interested in funding traders who have solid trading plans. A solid plan will be profitable week to week to week. But from minute to minute, there will be drawdowns.

I think most of the prop firm space is populated by "companies" that really just want to feed themselves off subscription charges and reset fees.

Again, TradeDay seems to me to be set up more as a real traditional prop firm.

We will see.

I did not use rithmic. I chose to use Tradovate. It has been years since I had a trading account using rithmic but when I did I found it to be very unreliable, unstable, and plain frustrating. With the discount, the difference in price to pay up for a Tradovate account was minimal.

Good luck with your eval!

Thank you for sharing that information. I appreciate it

There is no rules in real life, all rules are made up by people. Except Law of Nature. Nobody is forcing you to sign up with any prop. Trade you own money with you own rules. Yes companies are for profit. Cigarette companies kill half of their most loyal customers. Do you really think CEO thinks, lets cut production in half then 50% people will die ?
Want to trade with OPM, accept the rules or move on.

There is nothing suspicious. Yes its all business.

If I remember correct Topstep don't have daily drawdown too.

CL HOLO long opportunity but given the time of day, the proximity to red news, and the fact that price managed an hourly close below last week's high which may nor very likely get tested as resistance, I'd pass on this one.

$81.42 would be +50 ticks profit and the stop loss would be -10 ticks, so excellent reward to rick on this one. But the probability of success is going to be lower than the average HOLO trade. That does not mean that the market won't give +50 ticks. It just means that given the factors stated above, the likelihood that it will is probably less than 50%, whereas these HOLO trades have a 70% or better win rate when traded in the proper window of time.

If you're a good scalper, buying low and selling high and selling high and buying low, then today might have been a good day for you. Once price established what I earlier remarked to be a "no trade zone" it has essentially simply enlarged that zone a bit, but as far as the was I trade the renko Heiken-Ashi, there has been no signal since the last short (red circle with bold red border indicating a losing trade).

When they ALL state the purpose of their business is to identify and fund good traders, and then set up rules that foster bad trading habits likely to lead to failed traders, then I suspect that their business is somewhat ... suspicious.

In my opinion, even TradeDay fails to be perfect. How? Here is how real prop firms worked "back in the day." When you traded with a real stock prop firm back in the 1990's through about 2010's, the initial drawdown was locked. You were given buying power (none of this BS "$50K account," "$150K account" stuff). You started with 100 shares. That was your buying power. You could buy up to $100 shares of any listed stock (not OTC).

As you made profits, the firm increased your buying power.

You started with a $5000 drawdown. If at any time your losses had exceeded $5,000 starting from the $0 level, your account would have been liquidated and you would have been walked out of the office by security.

That is how the prop industry used to be. No need for a trailing drawdown because that is NOT in the interest of a firm that is funding you with their own capital.

Today, this new breed on online firms are really just casinos or gaming companies. Most don't ever give you "firm capital" and an account that trades live market.

But most, if not all claim otherwise, do they not?

Yes, it is their rules.

Doesn't mean one can't be free-thinking and critical of them, right?

Assuming Apex contacts me and sets me up with a "funded account," my plan will start as follows:

I will trade 2 NQ's until I have accumulated $3,000 in profits, at which point I will increase size to 3NQ's; or until I lose $2500 of my initial $5K drawdown, or otherwise find myself within $2500 of the auto liquidation level, in which case I will reduce my size to 1 NQ contract.

From Mark Douglas, The Disciplined Trader, pages 213-214. In my opinion, the only two pages of Douglas you need to read and follow his instructions.

T-30 seconds until rate decision:



This chart shows all the renko HA price action since the Globex open last night until just seconds before the rate decision is made public.

I don't mark these on my chart but I see them and I use them just like this. When I see price extended above the 34 ema and a long trade goes above a previous high price and then drops, that is a "2B" and when that happens, I don't take a long signal until price trades all the way back to the 34 ema.

The "2b comes from Victor "Trader Vic" Sperandeo, one of Jack Schwager's Market Wizards. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away he wrote a book called Trader Vic: Methods of a Wall Street Master, in which one of the many valuable pieces of technical observation he shared was the 2B.

Here are the first few pages of his explanation of this market behavior.

CL HOLO long gave a second entry after red news which would have been a smarter entry than the first. +50 ticks available on either entry. I did not take as we are outside my trading window.

ES amazing

Apex payout rule:



This is only in the firm's interest, not the trader. This rule exists because Apex wants traders to blow their accounts and not be able to get paid out profits.

Change my mind.

More Apex payout restrictions:

What a joke. You have to have $5100 in profits before you request a payout, but you can only take 2750 per withdrawal period the first THREE months!

The withdrawal limits, the 10 days of trading requirment: All are meant to keep you from getting a payout. For exmaple, suppose you have the required $155,100 in the account to request a payout. You request $2750 on the 1st of the month. That request, Apex tells you, might get approved anytime up to the 14th. Payouts are on the 15th. Meanwhile, if you want to be able to request a payout on the 15th to get paid on the 30th of the month. But, if you fall below the $155,100 by even $1 and it just happens that that is when Apex looks at your account to approve or disapprove you withdrawal request, guess what? That's right ... no money for you!

It will be interesting to see how this works out for me. I do not have high hopes for Apex. We shall see. Has anyone here managed to get consistent multiple withdrawals from Apex over a period of 4 months or more? I'd love to hear from you here.

APEX Certificate of Funding. Edited name to my FF handle lol
Call me vidvad.

Having read through the FAQ's about the payout limits Apex imposes on people during the first three months of being funded, I now understand why all these youtube traders have multiple Apex accounts: If you are trying to live off of your profits, and you're limited to two $2,000 withdrawals per month, you're going to have a hard time paying the mortgage, the car payment, and putting food on the table.

More accounts = more fees for Apex.

I see it all so clearly now.

Even I am tempted to grab another eval account with the 1 day to pass and 80% off as I fully expect to be able to qualify for payouts if I can survive the initial intraday trailing drawdown period. That really is a dangerous rule and clearly is designed to make the trader fail and have to pay a new fee for a new eval account.

I think people use trade copiers around to be able to open the same trade on multiple accounts at the same time.

Obviously withdrawal needs will change from person to person and zone of residence, for me 2000/month would change my life and fam for way waaay better, can't imagine 4000 so it depends!

Thanks for the explanation on 2b top rules!
Hugs