IT Consultant Creates Systems to help Pass Funded Trading Tests

The most important thing that stands out in Jakob’s statistics is the size of winning v losing trades. Average winner $901.04 v $239.28. His win rate of around 45% means his trading is really pretty profitable.

Jakob’s Prop Trading Success Story

What other funded trading firms have you traded with?

Fidelcrest, TopstepFX, TopstepTrader, TrendtradingDNA

Why did you pick FT+?

I finally integrated the fact that I need: 

1: No time limit, 

2: 1:5 leverage (FT+ dropped to this on my request)

3: No tricky trap rules 

4: Accessible staff with a personal touch and teamwork mentality, connecting the money to people, mimicking a real business relationship, as I need this because I am excellent in real world business relationships, but “slot machine prop firms” tend to work against me.

I have had previous experiences with different firms and they ALL gave me all the rope I needed to hang myself with combined with sneaky rules. At the end of the day it is 100% my responsibility and I know beyond a certain level you can trade with ANY firm, but to get to that point, I do required the 4 points above, and Funded Trading Plus generously provide these variables and they also lowered my leverage to 1:5 on request because I have a single focus to reduce risk even though it is a challenge.

When I came to FTP I had 2 x 500k accounts at prop firm XXXXXX in Phase 2 (sim with 50% pay cut when target hit). They nuked me for having two positions opened within 1 minute in both accounts, which was an unintentional configuration mistake in my backend that can send orders to different accounts to make the risk uncorrelated. Had this been 2 minutes it would have been ok. Paragraph 14B section C or something like that…

That finally did it for me and here I am and I’m happy that the penny finally dropped for me of what I need to succeed.

Please give us a short history of your trading

Roughly 4.5 years into it. Have probably invested 50k in lessons learned by now. I’m fine with that because I am so very very close to a career shift now, from a 10 year career in IT. I would say I am super high level when it comes to market read and understanding of pretty much everything. I have a single problem that is not fully integrated yet. Patience in trading tiny size. I have zero ambition to trade more than 1.5% with 0.5% per slice in a single market, I understand perfectly well that this is the only way. Final solution has two parts to it:

1: My custom RMS that is now finally working great and operational.

2: Following a daily meditation routine and other mindfulness practices during the day, for example breaks, standing up, breathing deep, etc. 

I consider myself someone who is working very dedicated towards this with an elite performance mindset, aware that I am not perfect and I have a challenge with discipline that I am working very hard on to overcome using technology and mindfulness practice.

How would you describe yourself as a trader?

Hybrid between short term and multi-day swing. I break things down from weekly down to 2 minute and I read the order flow in all timeframes.

Why did you originally start trading and what are your future goals?

I have always been a seeker of freedom that has taken various expressions during my life. This is just the latest iteration of it, having spent 10 years as IT consultant, and until last summer when I returned from a long time working from home had to endure corporate Covid restrictions, and I very quickly decided I am not going to submit to that anymore and I found new way of doing business as freelancer with a former employer that did not impose any restrictions (Sweden never had any lockdowns or harsh restrictions in the first place because this is against our constitution) and gave me a great level of operational freedom to launch my trading business from. 

The past years I spent in bootcamp getting myself to a level where I could make use of such a platform and here I am now, not perfect, but good enough to grow from here into replacing a career.

My future goals are to move to the countryside with my fiancee, live closer to nature, grow a lot of our own food, live a healthy, simple and balanced life which I believe is a foundational requirement to succeed as a trader. One’s life must be very simplified, enjoyable outside of trading, and healthy.

What has been your biggest trading success?

In terms of PnL I made over $100.000 in one day on 1:500 in gold in live money with $600 in starting capital. This is recorded on MyFXBook.com and was the equivalent of striking triple sixes 5 times in a row, which 1: was insane 2: will never happen again. 3: was a new world record in being rewarded for bad behaviour.

In terms of actual professional success, it has been I NEVER GAVE UP despite how impossible it felt at times to overcome my specific set of challenges. I was beaten down hard many times but I always got back up again.

What has been your worst trading experience?

In PnL terms, losing the $100.000 in a matter of hours after I made it in about 6 hours. My poor brain had turned into oatmeal porridge and a cesspool of brain drugs and I went completely insane and blew up in a spectacular fashion and it took me about five days to recover from this experience.

In actual professional trading terms it was that it took me so long to understand how prop trading firm configurations in very subtle ways worked very hard against me and how naive I was about the real nature of risk management and what works for longevity and a long lasting career in trading.

What is the main strategy that you use?

I have a combination of algorithms on TradingView that provide me with opportunities that I send via webhook into my backend and I get them listed for me such as “EarlyLong”, “Long”, “TakeProfit1”, “TakeProfit2”, and so on and I triage those opportunities, but I also begin by following markets of interest.

Charts are very clean with 200 and 100 SMA and I’m quite good at figuring out who is trapped and will be squeezed and which levels in particular gold and FX always, repeatedly shoot for, due to the fractal and algorithmic nature of how price is delivered by the interbank systems, which I find very hard to explain but I’m quite certain it is there and very very far from random.

There are certain things in a chart that I look for, I do not have a retail perspective, I very much look for when traders are wrong, and with that, I am more interested in where large funds are wrong (where the liquidity will be). I don’t care so much about where retail traders are wrong as in FX we as a group are so small that we do not even matter, except possibly in scalping scenarios.

I have a smart money perspective on things you might say. Wyckoff comes to mind, and is definitely a big part of my thinking. I used the most excellent tools from TradeGuider for a long time until it all got integrated and I don’t need their indicators anymore, I prefer charts with nothing on them.

I have a strong belief in that price is delivered to the market in an algorithmic fashion, by very very large entities in the market and if the price is currently in bid mode, there is no selling pressure that will change this until certain things happen and the price delivery model changes to offer mode.

This means that price *must* do certain things in certain situations. I do not for a second subscribe to the model that markets are random. Markets are fractal and chaotic at times, but not random. This shift in mindset has helped me tremendously.

I have no way of proving this but for my internal tea leaf soothsaying it is an evolved model of smart money v.s. retail, which I do not believe in at all, whereas I do believe in smart money v.s. dumber large funds reality. The “whales” are not out to get us small retail, but they are very much into battling each other, and that makes waves, and I attempt to surf those waves.

Do you have systems to help money management and trade planning?

Yes I have a highly sophisticated custom risk management and rule following engine that takes over after I have placed my trades. My trading system is configured to be set it and forget it, and after a trade is placed my job is to tighten stops and take profits.

I have as mentioned some algorithms running in Tradingview that alert me to opportunities as they scan about 40 markets in 5 timeframes, which would be impossible for me to do manually.

Do you keep a trade log/journal and has it helped you?

Yes in the sense that I can upload my trade history into analytics but not a written organized journal. I have unorganized daily notes, but I need to improve on this. It has unfortunately taken lower priority over improving trading psychology and discipline.

Can you describe a typical trading day

No, each day is different. That is the wonderful thing about trading. Each day is a new adventure for better or worse.

1. Do not under any circumstances use your own capital.
2. Learn to get profitable in SIM before you attempt live.
3. Understand that SIM trading with no skin in the game is fundamentally different from LIVE and when live trading begins, you are back at square one psychologically.
4. When you go live, you have ONE JOB – survive a full month. You do this by using a firm that has no time limits, low leverage but you need to trade 0.01 lots the first week, 0.02 lots the second week and so on. => Do not think about profits. Only think about not losing money. This will probably be harder than anything you have ever done in your life as all your demons will come and visit you, but this is the best approach.
5. Do not listen to the people around you who tell you that you should give up on your dream. They do not understand what you are about to do, and they probably never will.
6. Never, ever, give up because the saying will be true, it will be pitch black dark just before you begin to see the light.

What are your top 3 tips for passing a funded trading test?

I will write a full blog post about this later but:

1. Request 1:5 leverage and trade very small. 0.5% risk per trade, Bo not be seduced by firms offering high leverage. You have an extremely low chance of being able to use it wisely anyway.
2. Practice in SIM aside your live account with a $1M account or even bigger and trade 0.25% per trade and meditate on just how much “money” you just made on 0.25% and just how many times you can get slapped around without being taken out of the game. Meditate on the power of account compounding (cap raise scheme)
3. Do not trade on mobile phone. Request investor password for mobile phone so you can monitor, but not trade because mobile trading 

• has a skewed perspective on charts because of the screen and 
• it very easily becomes a little video game you can play when you are bored. 
• It invites you to mess with your trades when you are supposed to sit on your hands.

If you find it hard to abstain from this and you have the technical ability like I have, set up a system that prevents you from trading from mobile and only allow to close positions but not open them. An alternative approach is to use investor password and delete your login credentials from your inbox and keep them on a piece of paper in your house so you can’t be lazy and find it when out and about is enough.

Final Note

Jakob is clearly a dedicated trader looking for and achieving great results. His methods and his systems may be of interest to you and we will be publishing more articles from Jakob. These will explain in more detail his systems and if you would like to contact Jakob directly you can message him on our discord channel #strongland Once you’ve made contact you can discuss privately.

Our YouTube Interview with Jakob

We also have a YouTube interview with Jakob and you can view that below.