How Funded trading rules separate talented traders from monkeys

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It takes too long! And other typical objections.

We get lots of questions and they pretty much all compare us to the standard funded trading business model funded trading rules. Typical questions like:

Can I use MT4, Ninja Trader, cTrader etc?

Can I trade over news?

Why can’t it be 1:1 risk reward?

Can I just send you my trade results?

Can I use an EA is the second most asked question and after I deal with the top objection, I’ll answer this question further down this page.

125 Trades

The number 1 question and comment about our funded trading rules that fill our inbox is that most traders want to be able to take fewer trades because they think it will take them too long to complete our 125 trade task.

Most of us are naturally a bit impatient, we like quick gratification and we expect things to happen quickly. It’s therefore not a surprise that we get more questions about the number of trades we need talented traders to take before we’ll give them real money, than anything else. Some traders want to get funded within a week or just a few days. But let’s just think about that for a few minutes.

On our program, talented traders can access a real $500,000 account and we’ll instantly give them a $20,000 cash bonus direct to their bank account. That’s not demo account money, it’s real.

There are a few facts we’d like you to consider and if you then still think that our 125 trade task will take you too long or you think lesser trades would be better, then please sign up to FTMO, TopStep, the5%ers or one of the many other proprietary trading firms who run a profit reach target business model. You’ll be welcome to come back to us in the near future when you’ve learned the reality of their model.

The profit reach funded trading business model

Fact 1: The profit reach funded trading business model exists to take money from naive traders in the form of monthly subscriptions and/or fees. The money paid out to successful traders is just a small percentage of the profits generated for these companies from subscriptions and fees. It’s a smoke and mirrors, business model. They want and need traders to believe they can complete their evaluation and they need a certain percentage to “get funded.” 

Those that “get funded” are their marketeers’ fuel for their marketing to new naive traders. You’ll find plenty of evidence of traders who have “succeeded” to “get funded” on youTube, Facebook, Reddit and every other online channel the marketeers can place them on. This programme of marketing drives more traders to their business, more fuel, more fire and a seemingly successful business model for the trader and business alike. But however, don’t forget the “smoke and mirrors”. The owners of FTMO, TopStep, OneUp Trader add a few million to their personal wealth pot. The money has not been made from trading, it’s been made from you the trader and a conveyor belt of other traders.

Fact 2: Any random trader can (and does) pass profit reach funded trading business model evaluations. If you’ve already passed one of these companies’ evaluations tests, please don’t take this fact personally.

Statistically there is a good chance a monkey from a dozen trained monkeys will be able to string together a number of “winning” bananas in a row and if these winning bananas equate to winning trades , then our monkey will find himself “funded”. Once “funded” however it’s unlikely that our trading monkey will be able to repeat this feat on their “real account” . Our monkey will still get fed, unlike our naive trader who’ll be back to square one paying monthly fees again, hoping they’ll be able to do it again (and again, and again).

This is exactly what the TopStep, FTMO type business model marketeers don’t want you to know. Most “funded traders” from their business model NEVER get paid serious money in their bank account, ever. Please hunt online now and find us verifiable proof any traders from any of these companies have ever been actually paid more than a few thousand dollars. Is there anyone out there that’s actually earnt more than minimum wage for 6 months or more? If you have or you can prove someone else had please let us know in the comments. We’d like to be proved wrong on this. Please note our top talented traders will get a $20,000 cash starting bonus paid directly to their bank account!

I know many of you hard working traders don’t want to be compared to a trading monkey. In many cases you’ve put in years of hard work to get to your current level of skill. But if you are a seasoned trading pro, you’ll know and agree that a successful trading streak could be actually just a good run of luck. Any trading test that allows a trader to win funding based on just a few winning trades is clearly questionable. Come to think about it , surely that’s why nearly all of these “funded trading” accounts are demo accounts. Every single trading statistic for the general public suggests that a real account would lose massive amounts of money. I think we’d rather leave demo account trading to the trading monkeys. What do you think? Comments welcome.

Fact 3: The funded trading rules of the reach profit target funded trading model are designed to let a few win “funding” and then ensure only small or zero payments to funded traders. 

The marketeers use big account size numbers to suck naive traders through the door. The reality is that these accounts and a) demo accounts b) limited by drawdown size and this can be really small. Ask yourself: Is a $100,000 account worth $100,000 if it has a drawdown of $5,000. Surely that’s a $5,000 account – or am I missing something here? And when the drawdown moves with your positive trades, (relative drawdown) then the value of the account diminishes accordingly.

Now if you are not beaten by the drawdown stick, You’re likely to find yourself closed out by one of a mirrade of rules. They close you out so you are forced to buy again, remember that’s their business model, that’s how their owners get paid – the conveyor belt.

Fact 4: A valid and accurate statistical model for a trader requires hundreds of trades, and that is significantly more than the 125 trades we’ve settled on. We have analyzed data from a large number of brokers and it’s certainly clear that a small number of winning trades can never be a measure of the success of a trader. In reality, decent traders (and they are hard to find) have hundreds and hundreds of trades we can measure them on and generally have taken these trades over a period of between 3 and 5 years. Maybe it’s not a coincidence that a professional trader in a bank will have spent a minimum of at least 3 years in constant learning before they ever get the chance to trade real money.

When you analyze this data it’s clear that our 125 test is actually a pretty low number. Our modeling and testing of the data over the last year or so suggests that closer to 200 trades is required but we’ve settled on 125 because it will filter out most of the potential for a lucky monkey to get funded by us. Please remember we don’t give funded traders a demo account. We give real money and a real cash starting bonus. It’s not the same, please do not compare us to the profit reach target funded trading model. We pay serious money, they don’t.

Serous money for serious traders

We want serious traders, who have learned their trade and now deserve proper funding. Our task is different from the others because our model is not the same as the others. Our aim is to give you money, for you to make money for you and our investors.

Our Talented Trader Program will ask you to slightly adapt and change how you currently trade. All of our testing so far suggests a good trader can easily adapt. How long the program actually lasts will depend on you as the trader. We have had test traders finish the test in as few as 3 weeks, but most will take 2-3 months and some will take 6 months. We don’t charge a monthly fee so it does not matter how long you take. We recognize this and feel that our cash bonus of $20,000 is a great starting bonus in your bank account if you succeed and a good reward for the time you have put in.   

If you’d like to know more then please comment and or ask a question, we’ll come back to you. If nothing here convinces you that our program is different from the others, then please buy a subscription to one of the profit reach funded trading business model firms and we’ll see back here in 6 months to year’s time.

Can I use an EA?

Expert advisers (EAs) are automated trading robots often used to identify and execute trades following indicator-based strategies. Most of the profit reach funded trading firms will allow their customers to activate EA’s and sit back. And why wouldn’t they? It suits their business model: take the fees and accept that a small number of traders will “get funded” and an even smaller number might get a payment or two, but the fees far outweigh the payouts. 

Our business model however is different. We invest nearly all the fees in the trader and we want and need talented traders to shine through. Note the term “Talented Traders”. We are not looking for quants or talented programmers, we’ll leave that to the high-frequency hedge funds and their multi-million dollar budgets. 

For us, a talented trader is a person that makes a decision to go long or short and then makes the appropriate trade management decisions. It’s not someone who turns a bot on and heads out to do something else. We don’t have a problem with EA’s as trade advisors, but we believe that a trader needs to be the decision interface for any trading. We, therefore, do not use MT4 or Ninja Trader, or any of the other platforms that allow automation.

Filtering real trading talent

Our portal for the Talented Trader Program is a simple manual trader input. Traders can use any of these other platforms to run an EA and then when the EA advises a trade, the trader can decide to enter this on our portal or not. This is how we can filter real trading talent and then reward the trading talent with a $20,000 cash bonus and a real money $500,000 funded trading account. Once funded our talented trader can trade their preferred platform, whatever platform that may be MT4, Ninja Trader, Tradestation, cTrader etc and then use their EA’s if they and we agree its a sensible and logical use of our money. 

So the answer to the question: can I use an EA? is yes – but in the Talented Trader Program only as an advisor for your manually entered trades. Funded traders can use EAs on their preferred platform once funded.

The final point I will make here concerns the simplicity of the talented trader portal and the simplicity of our trading rules. We know that the biggest complaint made of the profit reach funded trading firms (other than the fact that nobody actually makes any serious money) is that the complexity of the rules means most traders are closed out for minor infringements quite early on. Consequently, they end up paying reset and long ongoing monthly fees. Our rules are simple and our portal is simple. Nothing to distract you. Do your own trade analysis using your normal platform, maybe executing a trade on your own broker and just simply manually entering the trade on our portal. Simple. No-fuss, no confusion, no changing of trading platform, no barriers.

Your Turn

We expect this post to get some kickback – please let us know your experiences with other firms. What do you think of their funded trading rules, please comment below. We’d really like to hear from you if you can prove us wrong, let us know if you’ve been making $10,000 a month for many months and are prepared to prove it.

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