My long term opinion about this kind of dream sellers is that good trader don't need them and they are no help for bad ones. However it's a good business model - steady stream $100 credit card charges month by month multiplied by number of dream seekers. Low risk in case somebody made through combine, prep and get funded for 10 days. All firm needs is to keep dream alive. Steady income, no regulations, no responsibilities. Much better business than brokerage or trading education. No wander TST is trying to protect it.
I can see where it's a good business model but I can also see some merit to holding a developing trader accountable to standards that he or she might not be able to uphold without the constraints of the program. Also most good traders were once bad traders.
Does developing trader need to pay TST $100 a month to hold him/herself "accountable" for his/her own "standards"? Wanna be trader don't need pay TST $100 a month for that.
Since I open this thread until yesterday, I already spent over $5000 usd (verifiable) to reset and renew my accounts many times over. After I blew my account again yesterday, I'm ready to give up and find a regular full-time job because I'm mentally exhausted and my bank account is running empty. Anyway, I'll continue to trade on sim to get more experience before I trade for my own account in nearby future. I don't mind to share my experience to those who plan to join TST, but my warning is that it's so easily to hit stop loss or weekly maximum drawn down, even if you follow your trading system and trading plan to trade. Maybe that's just me and I'm suck with trading lol...
That was quick: From his Conclusion : For the reasons stated herein, TopstepTrader’s Motion for a Temporary Restraining Order [ECF No. 7] is denied. In so doing, the Court expresses no opinion on the ultimate merits of TopstepTrader’s case but merely finds that the company has not met the burden to warrant the grant of the extraordinary remedy of temporary injunctive relief. The case was interesting, basically the court ruled only on the clickwrap agreement (not on the copyright case, TST gave that up for a quick Temp. Rest. Order) and said that it is unenforcable and too broad...
I'm a funded trader (although it's under a hole right now and trying to recover slowly, lol) and I found TST to be fairly helpful in my learning process. I did blow at least $2K or so after blowing many combines then FTPs and I did blow a funded account before as well so to be fair, they lost enough from that account to be that much profitable from my combine purchases ;p Here's the thing, blowing $2000 with the learning experience (especially learning that I HAVE to manage risk or I have to restart) is far less losing than starting my own account with $5k, $10k or more than blowing those up. I mean, with futures you can lose $2000 in a single trade if you don't know what you are doing. If you find yourself constantly losing and resetting, there is a lot to be said about your trading method(never start with more than 3 contracts until you build some cushion for the 'day' as that's pretty much where you start anyway for FTP and funded account) . What I did was test out a method in replay mode, start a combine to see if I can pass, if it fails, analyze why (did I make too many mistakes? emotional? simply no edge to this method over the long hall?) and repeat. You can probably do this simply on sim but I prefer having some skin in the game to keep motivated and analyze my emotions. I rarely reset my account because I would rather take some time off as punishment for not following rules or simply rethink about the strategy if I failed. If I failed, it just means I can fail again in the funded account to right? Why repeat the same thing and expect different results? Some thoughts. $50k combine is the best bang for the buck if you are going for it. Don't ever break daily limits, if you are, you obviously aren't looking at risk properly for every trade you make. Don't just blindly keep the combine fees going on monthly basis, I would either be done within a month and move onto FTP (at least FTP is free to keep going) or pause after a month to see if I'm doing okay before paying again. If my account has negative balance, why pay monthly fee instead of starting over? Honestly, it's probably better to see if you can be profitable on replays before even trying. Otherwise, you are just throwing out money.