It's a carrot on a stick and you're the rabbit business plan where all the rabbits eventually starve.
I am intrigued by your range of brokers, on one hand there is Schwab which is a huge corporation with its own shares and on the other there is Fxview which is I believe small time.
That’s why after gaining some experience no trader sticks around with funded accounts and moves his own way with managing own funds independently.
I would like to ask some clarification (that I cannot find on their site). What does "Profit Target (Per Step) $2,000" means? Does it mean that every time you make a trade there must be 2K profit to qualify? thanks
Topstep is legit and not a scam. However that being said is it a viable long term ongoing solution to a traders funding needs? in my opinion NO, in my opinion due to the way Topstep uses a trailing max drawdown (instead of a fixed drawdown) it is only a temporary solution to funding because after you are funded your “funding with Topsteps money at risk” appears to be removed once you have made more than your trailing drawdown amount in profits. At that point it seems that you are now trading with your own money at that point going forward because if you withdraw all profits your account is closed (hence no more funding from them) Topstep’s risk and funding appears to be only for a brief initial period after getting your funded account. Once you have made profits equal to or greater than your initial trailing max drawdown it is essentially up to you to leave “your profits” in the account to have any “funding” to continue to trade with and you must pay them 20% of profits off of your money from that point forward Basically a “mirage” in my opinion
I agree with what you have written, but my thought on it was freeing up the money I have in my futures account to put into the equity markets. Currently I keep between $80,000, and $125,000 to cover margin for multiple contract trades. With one of these operations I can leave very little in and they cover the margins on up to 10 ES, NQ etc.. At the same time giving up 20% isn't that appealing as well as for Topstep it seems they issue a 1099 for taxes so I would lose the benefit of futures tax treatment of 60/40. I also wonder if after you demonstrate you can trade whether they are open to widening the trailing loss. As I go up contracts I have had days I would have been shut down by their rules for trailing stop, yet for me it was within the limits of my stop I just had more contracts on so it was part of the trade. It has been especially true with the volatility for awhile now. I have wider stops, but they are defined by my plans for each trade. I also don't like the idea of potentially losing 3 weeks of income while doing the trial.