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)
Anyone interested in me trying the get funded scams?
1. The cost for me was $ 99
This was to get what they called a 50k account.
However your Actual Account size is $2000 because you can drop down only 2000 dollars and the combine is over.
2. If you drawdown 1000 dollars at anytime in one day then you have failed the combine. This is what I did and I thought even after reading the web page that if I had a drawdown of 1000 then my trading would be liquidated but I did not realize it would mean I failed the combine. They call the trading requirements the combine.
3. Immediately after hitting my 1000 level of loss and getting force liquidated the company had a pop up to buy back in and reset my account. Think about this. They wanted me to pay 99 dollars in order to resecure another 1000 dollar loss level reset and a 2000 dollar total loss over numerous days that would cause you to fail! That is about 10% of the total demo loss and 5% of the 2000 total loss.
Then even if you do pass and get funded there are new restrictive rules to keep you from trading the way you may want too. The actual idea behind it all is that it is way too restrictive and it is misleading because they could give you a 10 million dollar account but you still can only lose less than 2000 dollars over all and less than 1000 in a day overall in order to keep the account going.
Basically no matter what the account must stay above 48,000 or they close it. You fail.
Here is an example.
Day 1. You lose 500. Acct stays open -500
Day 2. You make 300 acct stays open it is at negative 200.
Day 3. You lose 800 acct stays open but is now negative - 1000
At this point you have 1000 dollars of cushion because you just chewed up 1000 of your 2000 loss cushion.
Day 4. Let's say You make 1600;a big day. So now you are plus 600 overall.
And you have 2600 of cushion between failing and the acct going to 48,000.
Remember though the 1000 daily draw down fail is still Valid!
Day 5 you make 1000 and now you have 1600 in gains and you have 3,600 before hitting the 48k fail level.
Day 6. You are on a roll going with the flow and you put on a few more working with the profits but then boom the mkt turns against you and in a blink you are down 1000 dollars on the day. Your account is still 2,600 in profits but it will be closed because you hit the daily drawdown level or 1000 loss thesh hold. Bye acct closed.
It seems to me that you cannot really build much because they won't allow a normal mkt drawdown as you grow position size. It is more just always try and make x or lose x. Which is not a wrong way to trade but it is not my perfect way to trade.
I do not think anyone should try any of these funded scam programs because they want you to fail. They would rather keep earning 10% on rebuys etc than out up funds or pay out to decent traders. They always want to take their money and run.
Do not go this route to get funded you are better off opening up a 2000 dollar account and actually trading those funds in the micros and being able to do whatever you want with the money and trade deeply into a drawdown of you want too.
Now I do 100% believe these funded programs are excellent at testing your discipline. Inlaid 100 dollars and realized that my discipline after some decent wins was out the window as I dollar cost averaged into the big mini contracts versus the micros. If I could have traded more micros I would have and I tried but I hit the 5 lot micro threshold!! Very rapidly because I am accustomed to trading my own kive accounts with larger size. It was taxing to me to sit and watch and scalp micros and 1 lots in crude and the nasdaq when those gains where demo! It would have been better if they were real gains. But my fatal mistake was not understanding or really even reading the parameters for the combine. It is a very good exercise in discipline and you must make sure you follow their rules. I kind of want to do it again to test my discipline but that is not worth the usual 169 dollar cost for a 50k acct. 99 bucks to test your discipline on their parameters is steep but it's really not that bad.
You shouldn't look at these get funded offers as prop firms. Prop firms encourage new ideas and out of the box systems that have edge. Yes they will give you some risk parameters but on 50k they would never limit you to 1000 and tell you to hit the pavement because they understand that if you are a good trader you will most likely dig your way out or your move may happen by the end of the day and they want you to make money. The cme Chicago merc has a rule about prop firms. The prop firms cannot charge more than 20% of profits that the trader makes. That is a bylaw of the exchange. However the prop firm can also charge desk fees technology fees and commissions.
Again these funded programs are not worth it because they are only funding you 2000 dollars of total loss or negative on your fake account. But they are great at testing your discipline to trade their parameters which are static. These static parameters are being forced on traders who must deal with dynamic fluctuations and instantaneous volatility surges at times when having only a1000 dollar daily loss threshold is not optimal for short time frames. But discipline testing it is good. It is expensive at full price for sure.
Ibfailed in my discipline of trading their set loss parameters not in my personal style of trading. Butbibcannot sugar cost it. I failed the combine.
Now I will leave my next step up to the users of this site. I have 2 choices.
1. I can do a small account challenge live say with 1200 dollars and post daily results or
2. I can try another get funded program and actually study the rules and parameter and trade accordingly in order to passm actually map out a strategy to beat the combine not the market l. Now that I fully understand you do not have a 50k acct. You have a 1000 dollar daily drawdown. That's what you are buying. You do not pay more for a bigger acct. You pay more for allowing you have a bigger drawdown.
So live small acct challenge or another get funded program ? I will only do the get funded program if it is at a discount. Opinions and questions wanted.
P. S. These funded programs should only be traded from a momentum strategy with set lot sizes on every trade. Any kind of dca or reversion strategy will never work due to the narrow loss allowed before failing. So momentum only which means enter late and exit early!!! Good luck
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
You don't have to reset of course, one can carry on trading the "broken" Combine for the rest of the month. You also have a practice account included so if still in the Combine one can try other trading ideas.
On the Topstep Facebook page there are occasionally people talking about how they have reset multiple times in a day which is great for Topstep but expensive for the idiots.
If breaking a rule and wanting to save money one could wait till the next automatic billing date in a month's time and if the Combine is ineligible for funding on that re-bill date it gets reset at the same time without the reset fee. You only need to pay that if you want to reset inbetween billing dates instead of potentially spending the rest of the month practicing.
For new traders I see no real problem with the Topstep rules, as everybody should use a DLL, max drawdown and max number of contracts on an account, and for most new people that happens automatically due to their own small account size. If they are successful and build their own account they can then scale up gradually, as you can with Topstep and adjust your risk limits.
On the other hand, for people who have traded for a long time profitably already, as you say you have, and are used to trading their size their style, being forced back in to a much more limited risk environment will probably be difficult.
It sounds like you are stopping the Topstep test. Make sure you log in to the Topstep Dashboard which shows your progress and account details then go to the account settings Billing page and cancel the automatic renewal or you will charged the monthly fee again on Sept 11.
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 tend to agree, they are looking for traders making "base hits" and growing profit consistently with little volatility, cutting losses quickly, not traders swinging for the fences. So growth/momentum trading/going with flow, rather than value trading building a position with a lower win rate and holding losses or taking a few losses before getting the winning trade to cover those back.
Their companies though so they choose a rule set that suits them and their funding partners best.
People should read the rules of these companies carefully as they all sound similar but are quite different in detail, then decide whether the offer suits them. Or as like you say, they would actually be better off opening a small account and trading Micros.
My opinion is one can still lose a lot of money on the Micros for people with loss aversion who add down rather than cutting a loss. With a funding company you can "cap your loss" at $100/month or whatever and have one funding tray a month and practice if failed. A guaranteed small loss/expense can be a lot better than an account blowing loss and then putting more money in.
These companies aren't scams, the rules are clearly available to read on all their sites. Some people's trading style won't fit those rules, and lot of people won't be good enough or be prepared to spend the time improving to make money whether they use a funding company or their own account.
At the bottom of the E2T website page it has the disclaimer that only 18.5% of Gauntlet and Gauntlet Mini exams were passed.
Topstep have been going ten years, considering how many people will have failed to pass in that time, I am always surprised how few complaints there actually are on line, and rarely any for any company that appear to have any substance.
The Topstep newsletter has recaps of the year, I think it for 2021 when they said their traders had withdrawn $3million, or maybe it was so far in 2022, I forget, either way you can bet that none of them think funding is a scam.
Just my thoughts. Good luck with the small account challenge.
ps. How long one chooses to stay funded once one can trade consistently for a few months is a different matter as it doesn't require a great deal of volume to be traded per day before it will become much more sensible to move over to one's own brokerage account and reduce commissions and start a seat lease application.
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'll take [1] for 500 Alex ................
Don't feed the beast, it's obvious that their business model is actually different then they portray it to be.
It's not a scam, they lay out the rules ........ but my point is they really couldn't give 2 craps if you 'pass' and get funded ............. they make their profits by people stroking their own egos and trying to prove their point.
Save your money, trade, post .........................
Great write up and I appreciate the time you took to respond. I agree there are benefits to trading and using the top step parameters. My biggest problem was that i did not trade based on the foundation of these top step rules are the rules period but most of all I did not understand that a 1000 draw down in one day fails the funding combine. Yes it is stayed clearly but I rushed into it all in the middle of the night.
I just did some trades in my top step demo account. I followed my bias of shorting the stock indexes and I averaged into my full 5 lot allowance on a sell in the nasdaq mini futures. Account is now back above my 50k initial start point.
It is at 50,309
It took me 5 minutes to get back my 1000 loss from yesterday and get into profits. This is the problem with being kicked out of funding based on a 1 time daily drawdown amount imo.
Here are my executions from today. I may do some more by the end of the day. I will state clearly that these get funded companies do not really find or show good traders they find and show people with good discipline who will play their game and work to beat it. Out of top steps 8,000 funded accounts they only paid out 3 million dollars!! That's it.
Here are my results of my last trade shorting the nq.
