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I appreciate your kind thoughts. For me, the realization that I am a guardian of someone else's money has been crucial to better decision making. I like your word "solid" since it describes well how the combine has made my decision making much more sound. Best wishes to you in your trading journey.
Turveyed- You can customize your rules. All traders should have rules they follow or they will struggle to stay on a consistent path. IF you are not consistent then you have no idea what to work on to get better. Trading is a process. The Combine is a career development tool as well as a funding opportunity.
We have traders in the Combine with only a couple rules, as I mentioned above you can customize them. You mentioned there are a lot of rules. Can I ask what rules you would like to remove?
Here are the rules:
-trade 10 days within 30 calendar days*
-always implement stops with an open position
-only trade permitted products, during the permitted times
-achieve an Average Net P&L greater than $0 for each product traded
-achieve an Overall Winning Day percentage of 55 or greater
-ensure my Largest Losing Day will not hit or exceed my Daily Loss Limit
-ensure my Account Balance will not hit or exceed my Trailing Max Drawdown
(https://www.topstep.com/)
I believe this is a good move on TopStep Trader's part. I was looking forward to not having any time restrictions. That was the only part about the combines that I didn't like, the restriction and added pressure of making x dollars every day or in y number of days. Enter the continuous combine. Good job TST.
When you get near the end of a 10-day Combine (or 20, same issue), and you are close to rollover (or, I assume, to passing -- just never got that close ), needing to have one more winning day, or x more dollars, can put serious pressure on you. This way, they back off on the pressure, but there is still enough to make it semi-close to live, and so it's a good learning experience and a fair test of what you can do. But the deadline is less artificial.
Hulk- We try to listen and make appropriate adjustments at TopstepTrader when we receive feedback that we feel will benefit the trader as well as aid in their development. I was happy to be apart of the Continuous Combine project.
Traders now have all the time they need to meet the objective. I like the Continuous Combine as I believe it will give traders a better opportunity to develop their patience. The Combine has already proven that it helps traders develop their discipline, which is one of the biggest hurdles a trader has to overcome.
Now a trader can develop another fascade of their game, while working towards a funding opportunity and that is what I am most excited about.
-ensure my Largest Losing Day will not hit or exceed my Daily Loss Limit.
Reason........... Unless your an uber small SL user then you can't use your 5 Lots, well not at first on the day
-ensure my Account Balance will not hit or exceed my Trailing Max Drawdown
Although you need this, 4% of account value is to restrictive, 10% and that's more like it.
The Continuous will help, it was going to be hard to make enough profit, with the above restrictions I don't like, but no longer an issue.
Absolutely. I, for one, am very thankful. If you think about it, when trading a live account, there are no time restrictions. As @bobwest said, when its the last or penultimate day of a combine and you are short a few dollars, to either make the target or earn a rollover, it becomes so difficult because now, you are looking for a trade rather than let the trade come to you and we all know what happens then. I have been there about 5-6 times now and not once has it worked out in my favor. The only times I have cleared the target is when I did it earlier during the combine.
So now, the continuous combine makes it as real as it can get to trading live, without actually having anything but the monthly fee at risk. Its brilliant. Thanks.
The rule that keeps me from taking a combine is the 55% winning days.
In reality with a 10 day combine it's 60%
It shouldn't matter how many winning days a trader has if they can meet all the other goals.
By asking a trader to have a certain percentage of winning days you are setting them up to have to trade their way out of trouble. If the first trade of the day is a loss the trader is now forced to take at least one more trade to try and get back to even. They would be better off waiting for the perfect set up.
To me the object should be to achieve the profit goal. I like the daily loss and max loss limits. But if a trader can stay within those limits and still trade profitably does it make any difference how many profitable days he has?
"The days when I keep my gratitude higher than my expectations, I have really good days" RW Hubbard
I believe that it has to do with consistency. They would like you to be consistent with your profit, not make $2000 in a day and then lose $300 over the next 9 days or the other way around.