That makes sense, but for me there's a huge interest in not opening a personal account, even if I could put 5k in it : taxes. In extenso (considering you are making profits of course) you are not obliged to withdraw anything, and even if you break the rules you get the first x profit at 100% (in the case that breaking the rule wasn't the dropdown). Therefore : no withdrawal => no taxes (in my country, up to 70% taxes in trading, and they don't consider topstep/oneup as income but trading... The idea being to grow the account, escape abroad, withdraw, start a new trading life...). Anyway, that might be a dream.
Are you sure they see it as trading income? My country also has very high taxes for trading, however i always thought the income from TST or OneUp wasn't taxed as trading income. https://help.topsteptrader.com/hc/en-us/articles/236069127-How-are-my-profits-reported-on-taxes-
Yes, pretty sure even though I don't have a court case but only asked a lawyer about it. This could happen if they (the tax administration) decides to reconsider the Ou/TST contract as trading for someone else, in that case it's financial services (huge amend for illegal activity without declaration and taxation) or trading activity... They are not obliged to re-qualify the contract though, its at discretion because of a lack of precision in the law here (European country). I might think the distinction is made between the first 100% (you trade for you) and the shared profits (which would be an income), and, if I were to be right, shared profits earlier and minimal full withdrawal could be a better option. An interesting thing about this issue is that I've asked OneUp and they confirmed that there's no obligation to withdraw (even it's written the funding firm could ask us to do so...). But, and this is quite important, in case of breaking a rule, something is of concern and not really clear: you could withdraw 50% of profits/profits_above_threhold (?) if you traded less than three months, 100% if more than three months, making me think that 1. most traders withdraw while in profit and so they don't grow the account over time or 2. they stop/fail before 3 months... In that case, those 3 months are crucial.
Hey @caacapital, fwiw... I've only read this far. But it appears you have been actually changing your trading methodology (tighter stops and targets) in order to try and not hit the risk limits. I get that, I see the sense in that... however, it appears you are changing what you were doing that got you there in the first place. Now this is an issue with Topstep, and the tight loss limits. You can have a regular series of losses in a very successful trading system, and that alone is enough to hit the loss limits... even though if you continue, your system will make money. Good Trades, Yukoner