Don't forget to whittle down the 5% who pass your combine by rejecting them after the interview process. Gives your business model a boost!
I think the owner is netting more than any of the traders. If he wasn't then why would he be doing this for 3 years instead of trading ?
Thank you Austin for coming back and showing us the final result! But please listen to me. The 100k 10-day combine doesn't suit your style. The 150k 20-day combine is just perfect for you! The 3k Daily Loss Limit makes a lot of difference. I should know because I passed my very first combine, only to fail the Live Combine Preparation. I would love to see Pekelo, NoDoji, and the likes to take the plunge and do the combine. I'm actually rooting for marketsurfer. Hopefully, he'll do it again. Hell, he almost made it on his first DAY!!!
TST (probably) makes money 4 ways: 1. Combine fees. 2. Trading education.* 3. Backing profitable traders. 4. Piggybacking swing traders.** * This was added and improved later on in their history, originally they wanted to find already developed talent, but I guess they realized there is good money in trading education. ** I can't prove they are doing this, but I would if I were them. If you think about it, they only need to find 2-3 traders who are trading just a few times per day for longer time frames, thus slippage doesn't matter that much and if they put 5-10-20 times more contracts behind the trader's signals, they are making a killing...Since the trader doesn't know how much he is really trading, there is no added psychological pressure...
In my first Combine, I ended up with 700$ trading mostly 1 ES contracts and I got a roll over, because the stats were good. Happy now? When I was messing with oil and gold, I still traded them until the last day of the Combine (and the stats were good until the last day)and didn't blow it on the 5th day like Austin did and I didn't get a special treatment like him. Again, once you blow the daily limit or the max. DD, you can not finish the Combine, show is over. So somebody explain it to me how Austin was able to trade for the full 10 days after already blowing it????
He didn't get a special treatment. You were right. He was done when he reached the Daily Loss Limit. But the T4 software allows you to keep trading on the next day because the max DD for the day resets to 0. Austin just chose to finish it but yeah, he was done.
I totally agree with this. But man, I gotta tell you guys. TopStepTrader is the best thing that ever happened to me! I used to painfully save up between $2,500-$3,500 every few months or so, so I could daytrade, and blowing it anyway after just a few weeks, realizing that there were flaws in my paper trading. With TST, I only needed between $190-$400 to find out if I'm right or wrong with my analysis. In other words, the bleeding was less. And the upside potential? Infinity baby!