Thanks for the update and sorry to hear the news, but good to be able to do another Combine for $1, and GL yourself ... and have a good holiday.
I would have been more patient waiting for the higher probability trade opps during the FTP. Day 1 of FTP I was up around +$1500 at one stage, so instead of pushing hard to finish it off on Day 1 (and losing it all) I should have banked at least $1k and ground out the result. When I get to the FTP again I will be less aggressive as there is no reset available. With the combine I prefer to be more aggressive early on, knowing you have the reset available to be deployed within the monthly combine period.
Unless your system trades in the "noise" zone, you should always wait for high probability setups. I'll share with you: 1) Identify trend or consolidation days - based on the price action, your gut will tell you how much energy is in the market. If no energy its best to stay out. Mean reversion is most days where price is in consolidation zones and trades within ATR's 2) Use objective indicators that keep you inline with the trend or ATR. Once you identified if its a ATR trade or Trend trade. Use indicators where projected trend is indicated. 3) Wait for retrace when price signals at the edge of ATR trade or trend trade. 4) Don't violate intraday trend indicators. Even within the ATR price trends from edge to edge. During trend days, ATR edges bust. 5) Use stop losses, the size of your stop loss dictates, whether the setup or entry distance to stop loss validates or in-validates trade. On the 10K combine day limit was 300 bucks, or 6 ES points/24 ticks. The above will keep you out of trouble,.. gist of the rules I gave my bro apart from specific details. Goodluck!! Chris
Yes, you are correct that when TopStep mentions the number of newly funded traders (those who have passed the combine and FTP), a large percentage "are solely focused on CL." CL trades like a momentum stock, with a price that even resembles a stock price, whereas ES/NQ, and other instruments do not. It is fairly simply to calculate the P&L since each tick is $10, ten ticks = $100, and so on. We learn math in "base 10" so it follows our logic since grade school. Also, an index such as ES has 18 events where a trader must be flat one minute pre/post the event as per TST rules. So this puts a greater restriction to ES vs CL, whereby CL only has ONE event where a trader has to be flat (inventory numbers). As Pekelo stated earlier, there's more "bang for the buck" on CL since the average daily range often can exceed 200+ ticks in a day, or a $2,000 swing on one lot per session. For ES to exhibit the same move, it would require 40 ES points intraday. And yes, ES "chopping around intraday sucks." When CL has "trend days" the moves are quite often choppy with brutal pullbacks, so it requires tremendous patience to hold for a longer duration to get the full trend. It's more likely that one will trade size and take quick gains, especially when there's limited room for a draw.
These things are sometimes hard to predict, and I've been wrong before, certainly, but I'll be extremely surprised if that guy easily passes a Combine. I actually disagree with most of what he says and would guess - just on the basis of what he says above - that he'll blow it up. I suspect that many people fail Combines, some of them even when they have a genuine edge, for not being conservative enough, not for being too conservative.He seems to me to be one of the many who have missed the fundamental point that the traders TST are (for obvious reasons) trying to identify are those whose primary emphasis is on risk-management. His argument about most of the funded traders having done $100k/$150k Combines is clearly completely wrong: first, one can see on TST's blog all the people funded through $10k Combines (quite a lot of them, recently); secondly, if the average Combine-level passed by funded traders is about $30k, there must be a lot of $10k ones in the mix, to make up that average, given that $30k is the smallest-but-one of the five. (His point about the first 10 trading days in a live account is valid, of course, but this is common knowledge.)
If there's one paragraph to take note from his post, it's this one: "ALWAYS keep in mind you are competing for a FIRST LOSS account balance day 11. You are trying to build an account balance of at MINIMUM $7K by the end of 10 days, ideally $10K. At that point, you have created an account to trade by your hard work."
Apparently it is easier to give good advice than following it. After 3 days he has just restarted the Combine. At least that is a good deal this early... "Mister, would you like a quick refill?"
A triumph of "interpretation", there: it still genuinely doesn't occur to you that his advice is actually bad and wrong, and that that's why he's already in trouble, exactly as predicted above?
The point of his advice was to trade the 100k/150k combine and to maximize the potential of the "first lost" balance on day 11. In order to get there, he mentioned one must trade aggressively, which I agree with. However, I differ with his definition of trading aggressively if it suggests exceeding the scale up required by the live account. In other words, trade AS IF it was already a live account and thereby with the scale up rules, weekly loss rules, etc., or the results will be skewed, including the expectation of generating the "$7k minimum" in the live account. For the FTP, he clearly mentions to "go into preservation mode" once the profit target is met. For the "first lost" balance on day 11 in the live account, he says to "press hard" and "scale up quickly" which of course makes sense, given you only have 10 trading days to reach that level. You mentioned it's "common knowledge" regarding the day 11 balance. However, since you also mentioned the majority of traders are passing the 30k combines, then either they are ok with starting off with a small account, or simply haven't analyzed the TST model well enough to recognize that only the 100k/150k combines are the ones to trade if they truly want to maximize the potential of the live account.