My point. Who cares what $$ they have or not? Wasting endless hours trying to compute anything else is exactly that... a waste of precious time = life better spent living, instead. Far as trading = work goes, if they offer an opportunity to flip 10 or 15 or 50+ contracts and you think you can qualify, everything else is irrelevant and moot.
Yes and no. As we both agreed, it doesn't matter from the trading point of view, the ability to trade size what matters. But it does matter from the red flag point of view when we are trying to evaluate a business if they are kosher or not. If account size is really irrelevant, why they are advertising it so much? I guess to impress newbies and people with less math skills than a 4th grader... As about wasting time, unless you are a scalper, most traders have plenty of time to waste while either waiting for a set up, or waiting for the trade to play out. Personally, here at the correction facility I have plenty of time and the library have good internet access... Fighting off the Amish gangs only takes like 20 minutes tops a day....
50 weeks and 129 pages later and deaddog` rhetorical question OP is still the best post about what TST is.
OK, let's try this one more time regarding scaling up. However much money you make, your so called "size" is determined by your "equity" just like at Amp Futures. So if you trade "size" in a live account and you lose 50k, that 50k is actually YOURS!!!!!! This is the easiest part of the debate. They are not going to let you lose 50k of "their"money. So scaling up is simply a function of how well you are doing building equity in your account just like at say, Amp. So again, it's NOT an advantage. You are losing YOUR money when you lose on size. What's stopping you from dropping size now? A fear of losing money right? Well, that same fear will still be there. For the life of me I can't figure out how I am failing to communicate this.
You are only communicating HALF of the equation. Of course, the trader is responsible for the LOSSES in his retail account and his funded account of whatever equity he has built up. Take the example of the Series 56 prop equities trader vs. the retail pattern day trader ("PDT"). The prop trader puts up a minimum of 5k capital contribution and gets 100k of bp. The retail trader puts up 25k in his Schwab account and gets 100k of bp. The prop guy loses 1k, the retail guy loses 1k, so dollar wise, the losses are the SAME. However, the prop guy only has 5k, whereas the retail guy has 25k. BOTH can "scale up" size, but the prop only has to put up ONE FIFTH as the PDT to trade the same "lot" size. Now, take the same example to the futures markets. You have a retail AMP account, and you have a TST funded account. You want to eventually trade say 50 lots of ES. With the AMP account, you have to maintain a minimum amount of equity to use the margin required to trade 50 lots. Maybe to start, you put up 5k in the account, and build up the equity in order to trade size. With TST, you have to maintain a certain profit buffer to trade 50 lots. To gain an "edge" with the funding, you should be able to build up to 50 lots by having a LOWER equity buffer than the amount of equity you need at AMP. Once again, the LOSSES are the same. If you lose 1k in the TST account or the AMP account, your equity buffer is reduced by that 1k. I've already posted this, so I'll post it again. To justify the haircut, there has to be an expectation in the funded account that you can trade MORE lots than you can trade with the same amount of equity in a retail account. Putting the psychological aspect of trading in a structured account aside, this is the ONLY other reason you will trade the funded account. So to recap, yes, the losses are the same, but the equity required to trade size should be LESS in the funded account vs the retail futures account, just as it is LESS in the equity prop account vs a retail PDT account.
Joe, the prop equity is a bad example because in the securities world even a PDT account only gets 4 to 1 intra-day leverage, that means a retail trader has to put up 25% of notional. In futures, in a retail account in some cases you only have to put up 1% of notional. There is ALREADY insane leverage built in. For example you can trade ES with $500 intra-day and that controls 97,500!!!! That's about 40 to 1 leverage. That's more money then Don Bright gives to "hedged" pair traders. So now you are saying you want to get more leverage then 40 to 1 and to do that with size???? That's like FX bucketshop leverage. I mean Oanda will give you 50 to 1 leverage and most guys can't handle that. You really have to separate prop equity with prop futures, two very different animals. There really is no mathematical way to extend beyond the 40 to 50 to 1 that is already available to you in retail land.
After 129 pages I'm not so sure that's right. It's a damn tough way to find out if you are capable of being a profitable futures trader. I donât think I could do it. My biggest problem is the over all winning days greater than 55%. My own strategy has about a 37% win rate but the winning trades are larger that the losing trades. As a place to demo trade itâs more than likely worth the money spent. Sure you can get a free demo account but with top step you have to follow the rules and you canât cheat just a little. Hit your loss limit and your done. If I ever develop a strategy that has a 55% win rate Iâll spend the money to test it. Until then Iâll watch from the side lines.