This is nuts. Contact the CFTC tomorrow. Erroneous pricing in sim? WTF dors that have to do with funded accounts?
Their "funded accounts" are sim accounts. They are not real money. The payouts are real--if you actually get one. But the trades are not real.
If they admit to that, internalizing futures orders, then it's patently illegal. It's sim if the orders are not transmitted to the exchange.
Okay, that was typo in my previous message. I have edited it. They appear to offer three different types of accounts: an Evaluation Account, a Performance Account (PA), and a Live Account. Their website has the following text: The Evaluation and PA are meant to be as close to a realistic simulation of trading under actual market conditions, including commissions, to mimic real market conditions and this: All trades presented for compensation to customers should be considered hypothetical and should not be expected to be replicated in a live trading account. PA Accounts may represent simulated accounts or live or copied accounts. A performance account may be a sim account, or it may be a live account. And they are not going to tell you which LMAO
That's insane. Not knowing if you're trading a sim or production account yet receiving a performance fee cannot be legal.
Ehh, so you guys don't know that trick for those props ? You just need heavy instrument, with some tick size much bigger than transaction cost (ZB is perfect for that, ZN also good, UB a bit too volatile), you stay bid/offer, and you will be filled totally irrational way. So let's say there is 100 lots on bid on ZB, you wait with your limit there, there is 4 lots traded and you will be filled (even normally you would be at the end of the line and usually filled only when the price is not good anymore), then you just give it back with 1 tick. ZB is 31,25 per tick, trade cost ~4 usd, you put more lots, you copy to other accounts, and voila - you have those huge payouts. Of course you need to use correct time for it, not too volatile, also there is another way to do it, which I won't share. But this is basically it. Does it have sense ? If your goal is to exploit the error and get payouts out of SIM - yes, if you want to "normally" trade - no, it won't work on live market. The problem of those ppl is they were greedy... Go hardcore (and probably earned a lot at the beginning) and now it will be blocked for everyone...
I do not believe they are pure scam but the math is simple, you want 5000 (150K APEX TDD) you need to make target 9000. If I make 9000 on my account I have 9000 on my account while 5000 on APEX account. But APEX might be better than sim trading when it comes to psychology. If somebody wants to "demo" trade discretionary APEX might by a way. For couple bucks you get Ninja, live data... and well your overall risk is couple bucks here
It seems quite possible (maybe even "likely"?) that while all the CFD/forex funding companies are obviously scams, and some of the futures funding companies too (like Apex, whom nobody doing even the smallest, most basic amount of due diligence could ever possibly consider an honest business?!), there may actually be one or two - maybe even three? - futures funding companies that aren't actually scams. I'm thinking of maybe Topstep, maybe Tradeday, maybe even E2T? Long established (in at least one case government-sponsored-award-winning) businesses that have been under various regulatory and administrative microscopes, have published endless independently audited accounts, can be seen to be making some proportion (even if only small) of their income from their profit-share of successful traders, and so on. Some people understandably do business with them, even if temporarily, because there's virtually no downside to using their facilities, if you can confidently pass an evaluation and securely withdraw some profits. It's easy to overlook the reality that it's actually blatantly apparent, if trading CME futures, whether or not your orders show up in the exchange's DoM, so it's not as if any "futures prop-firm/funder" can pretend to be funding a live account while actually keeping a "funded" trader on sim. It's too easily independently verifiable. It's objective and factual.
Apex is a total waste of your time and money. Why? They can't even commit to a set of rules for everyone to play by. They bend a change the rules to benefit only their selves.