I just want to thank Ryan, Peter & Francis for all their help in setting me up for trading beginning Midnight Sunday 09/16/18. I have worked with those three guys for hours on the phone, chat and email. At some point I was yelling at them...they took it and all they wanted to do was to support me and the other traders at Earn2Trade. You must be patient to work with me as I get stuck on things... I am charting with NT charts. No brokerage account. I hook my NT up to Rithmic that Earn2Trade provides...no license key required. Rithmic allows multiple connections. I trade from Rtrader Pro that Rithmic supports and provides (877) 408-0008. I use their order-book which is a ladder type DOM that is just as good as the others. There is even some custom stuff similar to what TT and others have... trade histogram, brackets...OCO...market if touched...etc. Ok there are not any ATM strategies that I know of but I do not use them. Rithmic has been around forever and it is a stable proven product and they have upgrades far more often than NT. You see... NT wants you to buy their charts and trade with them. This is their business model. Whether I agree with it or not (I do not) does not matter. So I arranged my desktop to have the two NT charts (ES & ZB) and two Rithmic DOMS. Ninja and RTpro are sharing screen real estate on each of my two screens. Chart-DOM, Chart-DOM-Performance. I watch the screen from NT and trade from the DOM from Rithmic. This is seamless and no problem...it is if I am trading from NT. So how much have I invested? Time. $349.00 dollars in advance to start the Gauntlet (if your nice you can get the occasional coupon code from Ryan which is quite generous). Charts and DOM free! yes free. All I got to do is trade at least once a week and make 10% by the 60th day. I was simming anyways so I am not losing any live trading time. I am training 8 hours a day by camera with a veteran trader that has taken me under his wing (no it is not TraderEx..it is nobody ET knows as he actually trades intraday and makes bank..I get to watch). This is very focused and I really should not be posting on ET anymore to avoid distractions in my brain. But I want to pay it forward to Ryan, Francis & Peter. So there are two stages...First 60 CALENDAR days trading the Gauntlet. Make 10% by the 60th day and trade a minimum of once a week. Earn2Trade presents you to a third party to get funded. They seem to work with just one funding company named Helios. I could imagine they might work with other funding companies in the future...but that is none of my business. Earn2Trade has a solid business plan and is providing education for newbies and a way for an experienced trader to go prop shop. Some may argue that this is not a real prop trading event...but all I care about is to get funded and to trust that Earn2Trade will do their part and market me in a favorable light. The day of the Mba graduate getting his CTA and funding a prop shop with his money for the chance to trade their money is a dying business. Some of those Prop Shops do not trade Futures. ...so you pass the Gauntlet and get an offer. Hopefully it is one that you can live with and they only want 20%. Did you trade well? Did you follow your rules that you told Earn2Trade about? This is all up to you. This is what I like about trading..it is results-driven. You can be a jerk or whatever...if you make money with little risk you are WANTED. So why not make money in your own account? GO AHEAD! Earn2Trade/Helios is just a way to trade an extra 15k...25k....100k...etc. I am sure you ET wonderboys can manage to trade two platforms...hey you might even be able to use a Rithmic feed...I have not really thought about that! So you except the offer...you now are professional trader and you now must pay CME a data fee of $105.00/mo. If you trade your own money too...well you gotta pay the piper the $105.00/mo and disclose it. But you ET wonderboys are all millionaires...so what? Little notes I have kept along the way...Commish at the time of this post in this program in a live-funded account and using Rithmic RtraderPro for order entry is: ES $0.50 commish $1.18 Exchange Fee $0.02 NFA Fee 0.25 Rithmic _____ $1.95 per side $3.90 RT "all in" ZB $0.50 commish $0.80 Exchange Fee $0.02 NFA Fee 0.25 Rithmic ____ $1.57 per side, $3.14 RT "all-in" Now in the Gauntlet there is a different way to count the commish as Rithmic does not allow Earn2Trade to separate commish on each product so it must be averaged. This is hard for Earn2Trade to explain to its prospective traders that want to use Rithmic...but it is not them as they want you to succeed. So they will average your commish fairly if you trade several products. I trade twice the amount of the ES than the ZB and they averaged and then accounted for 2 times ES too! So my ES and ZB Gauntlet is $1.82/side. ($3.64 RT "all-in") This matters as my results must be 10% on the 60th day. When signing up folks...especially if you have NT...it is not hard at all. You can make it hard like I did...but Earn2Trade sets this all up for you. You just need the Rithmic username and password...configure the connection in NT and your all set...there is the Gauntlet and the Earn2Trade sim...choose one and trade! Caution: if you trade the Gauntlet then the 60 day clock starts ticking...if you do not trade the Gauntlet within 72 hrs. it will start ticking anyways! (now I cannot prove it...but I bet if you asked Peter for an extra day or 2 to get ready he would want to help you). You always will have access to the sim as long as you are an Earn2Trade/Helios trader. ok thats it...PM if you have any questions ok? I am going to hit the "post reply" button but I have a bad habit of late edits ...so please give this post one hour before quoting it. I will keep in touch and if I am allowed... I will tell you what offer I get ok ETer's? and wonderboys?.. Rithmic, Earn2Trade & NT are sponsors here..so they care about their reputation and they all have threads here if you need to verify anything that I posted. ES P.S. I took a look at TopStepTrader who is also a sponsor here...but the deal breaker for me was the 1099...With Earn2Trade no 1099...you pay tax just like you do now for Futures. TopStepTrader also has some very strict rules about trading news events, no overnight holds...trailing drawdown from high water mark with an additional little funky rule that I do not understand. It's like TopStepTrader is a casino and they want you to fail because of a rule infraction so you can pay a resart fee...there are no restart fees at Earn2Trade.
Thanks for the feedback! My only comments would be: - RTrader doesn't have "ATM strategies" as you mentioned but you can configure their brackets to be pretty close. - NinjaTrader does require a paid license key (configured for Rithmic) if you plan on actually trading from NT - Gauntlet™ commissions... By default in the Gauntlet we give a $2.22/side average commission so that traders can pretty much trade whatever they want. As you mentioned, if a trader lets us know they plan on only trading a single asset or two, we can find a new average commission for them. The whole idea being to make the Gauntlet as close to realistic as possible when it comes to commissions. Since they don't simulate exchange fees, we have to provide a single "all inclusive" commission.
Folks! to get the license key from Ninja is 180 bucks/quarter or a purchase of 1K! Just use Sierra or RTraderPro...Ryan can hook you up for free... Traders if you already have your set-up and charts and licenses...call up Earn2Trade (888) 502-2260 to see how they can integrate with you..they are real helpful and I learned a lot. It's just I had nothing when hooking up to Earn2trade and NT was all new to me...I was using Tradovate and their free charts.I did not want to buy Jigsaw either...it is like over 500 bucks...but it is my dream to use it someday...Earn2Trade hooks up to Jigsaw too! Jigsaw is a sponsor here too! ...also there is a little quirk you must know about if you want to trade from NT (I only use it for charting). Their ability to hook up to Rithmic is held back with an antiquated APi (because they want you to trade with them not third parties) so if you use stops and targets you pay double margin. Ryan can explain it better. ES
I did Rithmic for the Gauntlet and wanted to let you know (in case you have not discovered it) yet that you can make the "Order Book" stay on top and sized small so it will stay on top of whatever chart you are using. You can also enter trades from the quotes screen and close from the position statement. It was my preference to use those two rather than the "Order Book".
Illini, Wow Thanks! I use the order book because I need to see flow and pace a little more descriptively as a component of my entry and exit. I have a lot of monitors in the Garage that I never threw away so I have much screen real estate. I am trying the impossible task of trading intraday. It can be done but the ES is evil and its rotational nature with narrow ranges acts as a thief ! ZB is my favorite instrument to trade, but I fill in with the ES as the ZB can get a slow pace. I do not mean to get personal with you in this public forum and make you feel uncomfortable...please PM with you experience with Earn2Trade and if you are still there and how it is going for you. If not post right here in this thread. ES
I don't mind sharing at all. First of all, Ryan was great to work with and over the course of the 60 days I think of him as a friend. I finished my 60 days and traded almost exclusively CL but I got absolutely destroyed trying to daytrade it. In the nine weeks of trading I did not have a single profitable week. My hat is off to all on ET that can daytrade futures successfully. I went into it cold turkey never having traded CL before and got caught up in the noise of very short term stuff and made way way way too many trades averaging about 20 trades per day. In my observations there is a mountain of opportunity in CL as there are several strong trends of $.60 or more in a week. The trick of course is to find those trends without giving it back in the chop. I am using Sierra Charts to experiment on now trying to find that sweet spot. Ryan told me about Sierra and I love it. Their sim account sells to the bid and buys the offer so you get exactly the fills that you get on the Gauntlet. Maybe I should have done a PM because this will probably bring out all the boo birds who think you should lose all your money trading live before you find out if you can do it on the simulator. For what it is worth I find that YM trades much more smoothly than ES even though its volume is a small fraction of ES. Still if you trade 10 contracts or less it would have plenty of liquidity. My main thing is options on TOS but I do have an AMP futures account open with the Sierra Charts Platform. I am really challenged by futures now so I am hitting it hard.
I am thinking of doing the Gauntlet in the next few months. I currently trade FX with Oanda and use MT4 primarily. How does that setup work with the gauntlet? Thanks
illini, Are there two types of Sierra Accounts? is there the .net version and then the paid version? ES