Once you prove yourself, I think it makes sense. But you haven't proven yourself, you haven't earned it.
they are accepting DD. Isn't it -4% for the 50k account and -3% for the 100k account? I'm looking at Topstep page. I believe Earn2Trade has smth similar. They just want to see if you can beat the DD and by how much, that's it. If you're making 30% a year but had an open (or realized) draw of -40% at any give point in that year, noone will hire you.
There is no 50K or 100K account.(more like 5K and 10K) Once you realize it, those quoted %s go up. But wouldn't you think a 2-3% fluctuation is normal in even a good trader's account? The best system on C2 is up like 22 times (or whatever). Yet the last 4 weeks it is down -11%. Now that is a rather small DD for such a huge returns, on the equity curve it really just looks like sideways.
doesn't matter if they play the margin game or the demo game. The idea is that theoretically you have 100k account with a -3% open draw limit. That percentage isn't even important, it can be 10 or 20%. The idea is that they wanna see if you can make (i'm guessing) 3:1 return to open risk, that's all. This isn't about making money when you're being evaluated, this is about seeing how do you contain risk. Because if you prove you can make 9% with -3% draw then they can easily raise this later to -10% which means they expect you make +30% and so on. The real question is: can you beat 1:1. 99,99% can't. An they have to go through all the 99,99% of traders before finding "the one". Again, the actual percentages are immaterial here, first let's see how you trade. I'm sorry i don't even know what C2 is Please explain.
Collective2.com, --------------- Let's say a trader's 6 monthly returns are : 10%, -3%, 12%, 5%, -4%, 8%, etc. I hope you can see where I am going with this, but I will spell it out for you. Just because he had 2 months of slight losses that doesn't mean that his equity curve isn't going up over the long run. He is a profitable trader judging annually. Yet applying these backer's DD threshold he would be kicked out, just because he had very small DDs. (never mind if it is monthly, same logic applies to daily or weekly) That is my problem with these firms. They don't have the trader's best interest in their sight, in fact they act like bucket shops trying to get any profitable trader to be kicked out.
So far, trading fewer hours has led to better decision making and rationalizing "phantom" trends has slowly dissipated as a result so this has been a tremendous benefit, confidence-wise. The 5-pt stop.....I'm still deleting them ocassionally but now whenever I delete a stop loss order, my conscience is screaming at me and I'm slowly learning that it should never become a habit. I'm getting close. Trading a tight stop on the 1 minute chart has been okay. I'm feeling myself getting better as a trader. A lot also has to do with my re-birth of my morning exercise....I'm in the gym for probably 3 hours then I start trading at 12pm-ish. It's been a relaxed trading mindset due to the fact that I was able to sweat, stretch and meditate before beginning the trading session. Albeit, much shorter but that behooves my personality since I am by nature not a very good decision maker thus the fewer decisions to make with a well-meditated state of mind works to my favor as long I respect the 5pt stops. I. Got. This.
You got it. 5 point stop loss on ES is all that's needed for the current market if you combine it with a best-of-class entry. Are you trading MES or ES? $123 on a day like today seems low if you are trading ES. Stop being afraid of being wrong. You got it. As for morning routine, absolutely gym is necessary. 3 hours seems excessive though.
MES only. I employ a scale-in and scale-out strategy for both booking gains and losses based on the chart movements and my ability to minimize/maximize gain/losses. I will do a max of 20 MES contracts but I tend to feel most comfortable with a max of 15 MES. I've come back from steep losses before so now the mindset is that "I can easily come back from a $500" loss and patiently wait for the next opportunity since I'm mainly looking at the 1M chart even though I'm a multi-TF charter at heart. The patience is slowly creeping in to gel as a habit. Feeling very happy. Especially since that approx. $3K loss a few sessions ago. Most people would have crumbled. I've always been a bit of a gym junkie. Need to get back into muay thai training to hone my killer instincts. Used to train for like 6 hours everyday with Coban....back then.