Yeah you will need about 2-3x the average daily range for swing trading, and for day trading 5min bars it would be based on the biggest spike that you would expect, plus 50% or so. Getting shaken out with tiny stops is a guaranteed way to bleed out your account. Have you considered funding a normal stock account with a few thousand bux? Then just buy a few shares AAPL or NVDA, since commissions are zero on those, and learn how to get your account growing. As Munger said: "invert, invert, invert". If tiny stops kill your profits, imagine what small targets can do.....
Just for the benefit of our friend here Padu, I did some more research on India and TopStep trader. Well, I continue to maintain that TopStep is really a bad idea. They set it up in such a way as to make it darned near impossible to succeed for the simple reason that there is a time variable attached to it. And that time variable is critical for them to be able to make a profit on their end. You can't force the market to give you a profit in a given timeframe. It doesn't work. Markets don't feel sorry for traders and say 'we need to give these guys some volatility, they're struggling'. When you look back at the charts, you see this all the time. I myself have situations where for more than a week at a time I just have to sit it out. Setups aren't happening. Too bad, but I know what happens when I decide to force a setup. TopStep doesn't accept that reality, at least not in the initial gatekeeper stage. That is why it's more of a lottery than a real trading evaluation. And even if by some miracle you pass the combine, I have talked to people who worked with TopStep. The TopStep people hands on manage what you do. They're not idiots over there, they keep an eye on how you trade and if they don't like it they pull your account or put you on some form of probation. I understand their position, because it's difficult dealing with some remote individuals who trade your capital and whom you haven't vetted in person and seen in an office day in and day out like with a prop firm or hedge fund. That said, given the very big challenges of trading US markets through India (and yes, US markets are definitely THE most liquid which are best suited for short term trading), I can totally see why Padu is married to this idea. He may not have $2000 to open an account to trade MES on his own, because then he has to bend around the law. Even so, IF he really badly wants to trade so much and TopStep is absolutely the only path forward, then he has to sharpen his pencil even more and work very, very hard on finding a reliable enough edge so he has a fighting chance. If I were he, I'd take a good 3-6 months off TopStep just to do back and forward testing in demo mode. If he can't do that, then it's going to be Groundhog's day all over and over for him. ...and one more problem. The people at TopStep obviously know his track record and how many times he's blown up. The more he fails, the worse he looks in the eyes of the risk manager. At the end of the day, even if he 'wins', they can put such strict rules on him that he will be forever struggling to get through. You have to remember that TopStep is a business and they don't just look at you as a number. They have an HR department which has to protect their bottom line.
What kind of time limit are you talking about? Never heard or seen this before. Also never heard of traders who got their account taken away because Topstep doesn't like their trading, also not in their Discord channel that has over 80.000 users. They also don't put any strict rules on a trader because he blew up a lot in the past, however it would take such a trader much longer before they increase the risk allowed from the standard parameters or before he is moved up to a live account, because the risk for Topstep is larger. Topstep is far from perfect, but if you can manage your risk it can be an alternative to putting $2000 in your own account, but you have to keep your risk management very tight, otherwise the chance off success is very small, but that also goes for a personal $2000 account, if you risk $800 in one trade in there it won't last long either.
LOL Topstep/market makers/brokers commission too high .... all did it to me. How about some personal responsibility?
or your chart management so perfect that it acts as risk control. Es is the easiest to trade because it is most liquid in the world and so follows technicals to the letter which is why brooks trades it
yes but that is illegal in India. i want usd income and the only legal way is to through the prop route. And one of the cheapest albeit perhaps the best is TST