I know, a few hours still left until the end of this month, but I am bored, so it is time to revisit our friendly wager: So Austin? It has been 5+ months, time to tell us how it went. Can I send the gift certificate? I haven't seen your name on the list of funded traders, but you could have used an alias. Either way, I think we are all curious how your efforts went and what did you learn if anything... Personally I did warm up to the whole Combine idea, specially since they halved the profit targets...
Well, you can see his profile and badges: http://www.topsteptrader.com/ViewProfile/austinp/0/p/0 He was still doing the Combine on Apr 4th (he got a badge), so technically I won the bet. I was actually pulling for him. No badge activity since then, he could be doing the Live prepare all we know.... An update would be still nice....
I have been doing combines with TST for quite some time. about a year now and I can only say it was all my faults I had not been able to be profitable or scratch trader. Lack of complete trading plan, lack of discipline, patience and over leveraging. Should have been consistently profitable since spring had I been controlling my daily losses. So, it all came to me suddenly and I did make a plan for my previous Combine. Ended in profit and got rollover first time. I am on my next one and currently at BE. 11 days left I am not sure I will make it this time. Unfortunatelly, I finally put the plan together while 7th day into Combine and already was in DD some 1.5%. Managed to bring account back up trading the plan with low risk. Set daily loss at $240 daily out of $1000. My goal is just to trade my plan. I have been searching for trading plan for few months. and looks like I have got one finally. The one I traded during previous Combine would not make me funded. I already can see clear trend in my trading resuults and I can add that taking Combines has improved my tarding and trading psychology in a way i was not able to achieve trading on my own. Regarding Combines rules and targets, I think that the perfect combination would have been Previous Minimum Combine rule which would allow trader to trade more than 20 days if any rules areèt broken and equity trailing stop not hit and probably a bit lower target. 5-6% instead of 7%. It would encourage slow and steady instead of taking bigger risk to achieve profit target. Also, I think once going live target is same is to go slow and steady and treat it like a business which takes few years to start bringing real income. I know that after going live once trader makes first $2000 on $50K account he gets additional buying power. but the goal of course is to continue trading slow and steady with low risk to keep adding to that buying power until increased buying power will be sufficient to bring in nice income still with small risk. I am going under nick: Chikot in Combines but I rarely post. I practically never post now anywhere as it simply takes my attention from thing that matter. My trading.
Just finished my second slightly profitable Combine. waiitng for review and rollover to start new one. Hope this one will be well profitable or if market permits will finally meet the goals. Looks like I am a scratch trader now. It is mostly mental state I think now.