Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
Day trading - Considering throwing in the towel for good.
Thanks. Could be an option, but I have to say I'm a bit skeptical towards those firms in general as they don't seem to have an interest in actually funding traders. I saw that MyForexFunds took home $310 (!) million in fees alone, so that's where the money is. Honestly, that number blew my mind. I had not imagined they'd be pulling home that much money on fees alone.
I've no doubt that a larger capital base would improve my situation greatly. I've talked to and heard of several traders who started out with $500K accounts and a year of savings. And here I am with my $5K account.
Especially point 1) is one I'm working on and still improving. Generally, I like to call it a day if I'm up decently after the first 30/60 minutes. This is also partially motivated by the fact that I have a full time regular job.
I did the 40-50 hour workweeks in my regular day job + the full US session every single day in the past, but it's just not sustainable long term. I will take the occasional full session, but generally I try not to.
I'll see if maybe I can pull up some of the other statistics you mentioned as well. I'm at a new computer and most of my trading history is archived there. But I do of course keep track of all those statistics, too. Simplistically, the most important metric in my book is your net P&L curve, though, and a daily one seems fine with me.
But of course there's a world of difference between futures funding companies and spot-forex/CFD "funding" companies like MFF, just as there's a world of difference between futures and CFD's: futures are a real, transparent market in which all brokers have the same prices for the same financial instruments, and one can easily tell, objectively and reliably, whether one is trading a real or a sim account.
Neither had I.
"Fees alone" are their sole income, aren't they?
Even the complaint by the regulator acknowledges that they paid out $173 Mil of that $310 Mil income to their traders. To my mind, one irony there is that out of deposits of $310 Mil, no spot forex "brokerage" would be paying out anything like $173 Mil - only a very small fraction of that.
There seems to me to be some similarity between what it's being alleged MFF did and what FXCM did (that finally got them kicked out of the US when it turned out that they themselves owned the so-called liquidity provider to whom the trades of their "STP clients" were "processed" and that their clients had been dishonestly treated by that liquidity provider).
The MFF case itself has not been heard yet, of course: for now there's only a preliminary, temporary asset-freezing order in case the regulator's allegations turn out at subsequent court hearings to be substantially correct (I suspect they might well, myself, as they seem to me to be based largely on inside information, some of it apparently documented, from a whistleblower). Anyway, I don't think this is relevant to the reality that some futures funding companies (e.g. Topstep, Tradeday) do open genuine, funded futures accounts (sub-accounts) for the customers who pass the "try-out".
Agreed. However, keep in mind that many or even most of these futures funding companies have you trading on the simulator even after you're 'funded'.
Because of that, there's an incentive for those firms to not pay successful traders. I'm not saying that will happen, but I'm suspicious when that is the case.
I think only Topstep and E2T puts you on an actual live account.
From what I can tell, those two are the best alternatives for that very reason. In addition to not having any rules on withdrawals (unlike Apex and similar where your money is basically on a lock-up period - I suspect to increase the chances of you blowing up in the meanwhile).
I don't have sufficient knowledge to answer, but yes, I would think fees are their sole income.
Topstep, E2T and Tradeday all give you a choice, when you pass, of whether you want Live or Live-Sim (but reserve the right to move you from Live-Sim to Live at some point, too).
There are one or two others, too, I think. But I'm sure more are sim only, as you say.
I hear you there - though drawdown limits that trail open equity, time-limits to qualify, and withdrawal strings and catches can be pretty significant to many people, too.
That's my reading of it, too (though I wouldn't touch them anyway, myself, for other reasons).
Is that Apex or 'get funded' firms in general? May I ask why?
For what it's worth, I actually signed up with E2T yesterday. They are currently running a huge discount, so I figured it was well worth the potential upside.
I feel you. Perhaps you could take 1 year break and then come back and look at the market again with a pair of fresh eyes. There is this beautiful poetry in Chinese which I now attempt to kill; Initially, you look at the mountain as mountain. 2nd time, you look at the mountain but it does not look like mountain. Finally, you look at the mountain as it is.
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results"
Good luck to you and apologies for the poor English.
A simple, rhetorical question with arbitrary numbers, where would you be now if you had repeatedly doubled accounts then pulled out half the profit and never risked that again?
I've been at a similar if not exactly the same point, more than once.
In general, improving risk management and money management was what got me past it.
Where would you be right now if you had regularly pulled a certain percentage of profits out and never risked them again?
What if you had stopped actively trading after a certain amount of account drawdown, say 10 to 25% just to be specific, then analyzed your trades to see what was causing the losses and making adjustments before making low-risk trades again until your back to break-even, essentially, never blowing an account?
You certainly have a trading strategy with an edge since you've repeatedly tripled and quadrupled accounts, but you need to improve your psychology and risk/money management strategy to retain enough of those profits and to preserve enough trading capital to be able to continue generating profits
A quote I often recall goes something like this... the goal of trading is minimizing losses rather than maximizing profits.
(I'm on a phone, sorry for typos or disorganization... hopefully I wrote something helpful.)
