I've been very curious about these "funded trader" challenges so I signed up a demo account with Tradovate today and I will simulate the "15 contract" challenge which is: 1. Max 15 contracts 2. Max drawdown $3K 3. Max weekly drawdown $3K 4. All positions closed by EOD 5. Profit target of $9K 6. Minimum 15 days trading (or something like that) 7. Max 40% of profits come from one day (this is a stupid rule, but I also understand why it exists) Note that I am not actually signing up for the company's challenges. I just want to see if I can do it. I prefer to trade NQ but the volatility can be pretty unwieldy so I will trade ES instead. If I think it is a trend day I will add more where it makes sense otherwise I'll probably just take 10 points and go home if I can. However, the main reason I am doing this is because I do want to work up to big positions so I'm going to try to put on size once I get the hang of the platform. I do not want to do this on my real account because I'll get fucked. I'll record the screen while I trade and post the videos here when I'm done.
I tried to sim trade ES on a random date, man it was so slow compared to NQ schizo behavior even after I moved it to 400% speed. This will be an adjustment and require monk-like patience. Note the drawings that I cleared were from a previous day that I tried to trade before I realized the "random date" had been chosen to be the thanksgiving weekend and I didn't realize until I was wondering why price action was even slower than usual on ES: Anyway, here is the video looks like it works:
Two problems with it. One, you are trying to trade on back-dated inputs. Backtesting. That is not how the real world works in the fake world of simtrading at places like TST. Two, your background audio for that video is a Seinfeld episode? Dude, seriously? Nobody in the universe gives a shit about Seinfeld. That is such crap! How about a good prog-rock song instead, like Sympathy for the Devil or something?
K, well, it is your test. For the record, I think Seinfeld humor sux. Make it a sure shot. It is good juju!
I am used to the platform now, I have decided that I will just stick with NQ rather than ES. Tomorrow should be first proper day trading fake sim fake account fake challenge and I will try to get up to at least 6 contracts without blowing out. The loss came from me messing around with MNQ and ES. The NQ profit was ~$600. Fuck it, it's fake money anyway. I can't seem to post the image, but today's gross profit was -$80.
Apologies for not updating this thread. I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out the approach. TopStep funding basically want you to: 1. Know how to trade and manage risk 2. Make them money 3. KEY: BUILD UP AN ACCOUNT FROM NOTHING TO A GOOD CUSHION. MOST PEOPLE FAIL HERE. If you truly want to retain a funded account at something like topstep, then what you probably have to do is start out trading micros, build the account to a big enough cushion and then go with the minis. If I understand correctly, once your trailing drawdown gets to $50K (for the $50K account), you no longer have a max daily loss or something as the account is never going to go below the initial funding amount, so TopStep risk is zero. This is my assumption. What I did was I started with a fake $50K account which has a drawdown of $1K and simply used 5 micros where normally I would use 5 minis. A key part of my strategy is that when I am right on the trade, I add aggressively. This got me to a good cushion of about $2.5K after which point I lost interest since the game has been figured out. If you already have a trading strategy that works and want a topstep account, use the micros to build a cushion that allows you to have a drawdown that matches your properly sized strategy. Kind of a "duh, obviously" moment. If you're good enough though, and can self fund, not sure why you'd do this but I must say it is a good strategy to make sure you aren't taking too much risk on the initial account funding.