I never saw any hidden rules, complicated rules, maybe, but hidden? Can you elaborate? (Tried them a long time ago). Except for the trader here that mentioned he was given additional rules when he was asked to go to an actual live account, Double is still in the process of evaluation and sim funded account, i wonder what hidden rules they have there.
After you passed their evaluation, they put you into "PA account" with more trading rules, you can withdraw money after your profit reach a certain level. You still have to pay for subscription fee which is way higher than what you paid in evaluation depending on what fee structure you choose. I don't want to be in a scenario where like a "Indian ancient IRS agent" called you to ask you to pay your taxes, after you paid they demand for another payment, then later find out his a scamer. If you know what I mean
What this dude really wanted was validation as a trader. Passing the evaluation was for him to say, "There, I ain't no loser!" I think everyone can relate to that feeling.
Not all prop deals are bucket shops and sim platforms. The prop industry has changed a lot in the last 20 years though. It looks as though both Top Step and Earn2Trade are no longer ET sponsors. As none are a sponsor, if I were to go the sim trade pray for pay route, I'd choose Apex over those two.
I am well aware of their trading rules before I enrolled in the evaluation, I don't have any problem with it, it's their respond on technical issue that made me hold back on keep paying anymore fee and worth my time to trade with a prop firm like this. I was using their preferred platform to make trades and my balance was going up. But the result they see is different from what I see. I showed them my trade history and balance, and try to have them figure out why there is different result. They simply answered back by saying "you look at the balance on the dashboard". Now imagine you are trading a live account, your orders were executed on your end, and the true is they didn't even put in order for you. I am still waiting for their respond after few useless email exchange for days.
You have to have Rithmic Trader open, that reflects what they see. If you're using NinjaTrader you have to manually enter in your commission schedule the first time or else Ninjatrader will show results without commissions. They get fed information from Rithmic (Which majority of prop firms use) as far as I am aware. If you're using Tradovate that's CQG data provider not fully sure about that, but assuming you're on Ninja since that's the preferred platform of APEX.