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@sharmas, please confine your comments to discussing any actual substantive issues you have with the vendor, rather than making personal attacks demanding that someone be fired.
If there is or was a support issue or a customer service issue, then that is a legitimate subject for a post. But an attack on an individual is not.
Your post has been deleted. Please follow normal forum standards of civility.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
I have been trading with TopStep since 2019, I have been funded a couple of times and always paid religiously 375 USD per month, plus many resets.
Last month I decided to simply stop trading with them this is why:
1) I wasn't informed that SierraChart was available again though I was a previous user of Sierra, it was enough to send an email but they didn't send any information. This cost me around 40USD per month to use MotiveWave on top of Sierra.
2) in their website they offered discounts to new users, so basically someone who was just starting out with TST would pay half my monthly price
it was a no brainer, I let them go.
However the thing that hurt me the most, was that nobody reached out to ask why I stopped paying after 3+ years. I have always talked good things about this company, and though we are miles away they were part of my project to become a trader.
I felt completely forgotten by this company, they just collected the fees everymonth.
I didn't expect anything, but it would have been polite to just ask "why are you leaving?".
It has great intentions but always let down by their sub standard customer care agents. An orgainsation is a collective people who work towards the aims and objective of the orgainsation.
Looks like @Topstep has let some of its people believe they are bigger than the orgainsation itself, hence customer care is alien to them. They seem not care about the customers but grab new customers to make money by giving discounts.
Time has come for them to conduct a review and become a more customer friendly company. No matter how great a product is but if it has poor support and ZERO customer care, orgainsations don't last. People make or break Orgainsation. People will jump ships and leave the orgainsation in ruins.
Major training must be given to support and look after customers and especially long term customers who have been loyal to Topstep for years.
I think that their business model is now copied by hundreds of other companies, so market competition will bring prices down and unless they stand out for other reason people will just leave them.
I can understand your disappointment, but let me offer a different perspective.
I just went through the posts in this thread that kept track of the developing situation between Sierra Chart, Rithmic and TopStep. The posts on the subject began in Feb of 2021. TopStep was projecting at that point a likely adoption target in the second half of 2021 (which is when it actually did occur, by the way). I was interested, and so I followed things as they developed. TopStep did not do a good job of keeping people up to date, but someone following this thread would have known what was happening, and would have found out in November of 2021 that they were offering it again, which is in the late part of their projected timeframe. (This was from a post by a user, not by TopStep.)
So while I agree that TopStep could and really should have been proactive in reaching out to their customers and to customers who had been users of Sierra Chart, it was possible for someone with a strong reason to be interested to have kept themselves up to date, and to not have been taken totally by surprise. It is also a trader's responsibility to know about the things that affect him and to be informed of what is happening with them.
As to how you feel now about TopStep, that is for you to say, of course. In your shoes I might well agree, because it would have been easy -- and good business -- to simply send out an email to former Sierra Chart users to let them know that it was coming, and to notify them when it had come. But that is also not for me to say, either way. I am simply making the point that developments were being tracked and were available in this thread and a person could have been prepared for the change, when it came.
I hope you are doing well. I miss your posts on your trading, which were interesting and informative.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
Thank you @SBtrader82 and sometimes one believes in loyalty towards a company and stick with them.
However it is very much evident that @Topstep has no value towards loyalty or customer care. This is a clear sign of when a company shows how arrogant they have become as they feel they are market leaders and they can treat their customers like ATM machines.
All because the customer care agents have no respect and ZERO customer care. Michael Patak might not even know how badly his people are treating his customers and all the negative feedback.
I'm currently in a Pro account. Last week I received an email saying I had broken a rule exceeding the maximum number of contracts and the account had been closed. I knew I hadn't as I print a trade list in my journal each day that includes the maximum position size I had on for each of the trades during the session.
As I live in the UK I sent that in early in the morning then received an email back in the afternoon apologising as it was a problem that had affected CQG feeds or TSTrader accounts.
I missed that day of trading, but as I am not paying any fees anyway, no big deal, and the original account was reinstated by the end of the day.
That was Nick A. who I know has dealt with various customer service requests of mine during my time with Topstep. Like all my previous dealings with Topstep support agents, I have always found them courteous, professional and quick to sort out any issue. I have often said the same in the feedback form I receive after they solve and close the issue. I did that last week and even got a quick thank you reply back from Nick.
I was going to comment last week with your original post, but then thought I wouldn't bother as Topstep had my feedback, but this time I will just to put up a different opinion.
My impression is that trading related companies have had a 'very good pandemic', with lots of people looking to supplement their incomes over the last year or so, as trading provides the obvious attraction of allowing a person to potentially make money sat at home. So companies have seen their customer demands grow at the same time as frequently being required to send their staff home from the office. Support, services and speed of response are bound to suffer. Even once everybody is back in the office there is probably a lot more customer demand and higher workload now than there was before which might require an increase in staff hiring and training.
Clearly you are not happy with the support you have received but that doesn't mean all the other customers are unhappy too. You'll know as well as I do that in most cases on the internet people who are complaining are a lot more active and visible in making sure they post about it and telling people compared to the often much larger majority of others who are quite happy just quietly getting along fine.
Just my opposite experience for counter balance.
( I will say though, it is a shame that Topstep no longer replies here anymore. They replied quite frequently up until March last year then only one post since then. (Same with the Jigsaw AMA thread, frequent replies up until June 2020, one-and-a-half years ago, and one post since then, but in both cases mostly just the sound of crickets)).
You do not win as a trader, you just get to play again the next day. If that game doesn’t appeal to you then you should not trade. Gary Norden
I take all your other (customarily articulate, well-informed and fair) points above, too, but have to say that I also agree with this one. I suspect it's costing them some potential customers, too. I find it very hard to understand.