1) The statement concerning the ability or inability to guess direction was a quote from another poster, not me. 2) I do not know anything about binary options.
Michael, I hope these ET'ers didn't scare you away. I have a suggestion for a change I think you guys should make that you should seriously consider. Right now as you have it, when traders go live you start them on a 60/40 split and you let them build up equity. You make them keep 5k to 10k in their accounts before withdrawals and you scale up their payouts with retained equity. What I think you should do is pay out at the end of every month. You guys get paid and they get paid. Let me make my case for this. One, it's better for you because as you've stated many times, guys will build up 10k or 15k and give all of it back. This is very common in trading and gambling for that matter. The old "playing with the house's money" syndrome. Most if not all guys get complacent when sitting on equity. I've been trading for 15 years and I'm certainly guilty of that. The problem is you guys aren't getting paid when they sit on equity and neither are they. Just take your cut out at the end of the month. It's also good for them because I can speak first hand about what getting a check does to one's self confidence. Doesn't matter how small that check is. It's about rewarding good behavior. I think traders will trade much better with a fresh account at the beginning of a new month. I also think it's better for your investors because it means they are getting paid. It makes no sense to me to have a guy make 5k then lose 5k, make 5k then lose 5k. Now if the concern is keeping a guy from going negative, I honestly believe that building up equity with the investor by paying the investor more often will alleviate those concerns. If I was a backer and I already had cash in hand from closed monthly p&l, I would be much less worried about a trader going negative then I would be if we never got any p&l yet and now the trader is negative. Maybe you could even create a formula that would determine how much negative rope you would give him/her based on how much p&l you already collected. I use to trade at a notorious equity prop firm in NY. I was on a floor with 200 traders. And the first day of each month, this girl would walk up and down the aisle calling out names as she was handing out checks. Michael, getting a check was better then sex. It meant something. It was more then about the money because nobody knew how much was in those checks. But everyone saw that you got one. It was a status symbol. It made guys feel like a rock star. Guys busted their ass just so that the next month when that girl came out of the office with checks in hand, that their name would be called. I really believe you should think about this. As far as the payout, do this. Start guys at 60/40 and then after they have been live for 6 full months, bump it up to 80/20. Just keep it simple. I don't think the retained equity thing works for you or the trader. The investor wants to get paid! The trader wants to get paid! You can scale a guy up in contracts and drawdown limits based on how much p&l you collected from him. I think guys will be far more consistent if they know that at the end of the month, some money is coming their way. They will strive for consistency vs hitting some number like 30k. I'm curious what your thoughts are on this and what objections you would have for it. I'm still up for that beer. Let me know when.
Stop polluting every thread. I already responded to you. Magna, can you clean up some of these threads. There are duplicate posts on all of them.
Michael let me follow up on this while it's in my head. Another benefit for you doing this would be you would be holding the trader more accountable for losses and keeping them from going from live back to the combine too many times. Let's walk through an example. On the 100k account, I'm assuming you send them back to the combine after they draw down 4k in losses. Then when they go live again, you eat that 4k loss. Let's say a trader got 3 monthly checks so far. Say he made 4k a month the first 3 months. So the investor made 1600 times 3 or 4800, we'll call it 5k. The formula I propose is taking half the p&l from the investor and adding it to the drawdown allowance. So 2500 plus the 4k. Now the trader can go 6500 in the hole before being cut off. This really works in your favor. It means you are forcing the trader to make back those losses and you are giving the trader more rope as they lock in p&l. Their confidence will grow along with the investor who is now getting paid. If a trader wants to go back to the combine to practice, he can do that on his own. But I think you should give him every chance to make back his losses vs eating them yourself. This will also keep traders from getting mad because they are "getting sent back to the minors" so to speak.
I have tried to click on all the sites posted by Mr Patak regarding Topstep Trading as well as a Google search of them and none of the websites seem to work anymore. Is this true for everyone else?www._topsteptrader._com
Seems to work fine. GoDaddy had some issues today regarding their servers being hacked. Not sure if that has any impact.