We are told that about 90% of all new traders fail, when they are trading their own accounts. Why would it be a surprise that the same group of traders fail at the same rate when they try for a funded account?
There is a variety of blame-shifting that we often see, where responsibility for not trading successfully in one of these things is attributed to the rules and not to the fact that the trader lost more than the rules allow. I think that if the rules allowed more losses, the losing traders would in the main just lose more, until they hit the new limits.
If a trader doesn't find the rules to be suitable for his/her trading, which certainly is possible, then the best thing is to just walk away and try something else. But the statistics for traders dropping out of funding evaluations are not terribly different from statistics of traders losing their own accounts.
I don't mean to be harsh, and I have had my share of trading failures also. But if traders do not accept that they took the trades that lost them money, and figure out what to do instead, progress will be slow. Even if a rule is a bad rule, the trader did read it and did decide to trade under it.
Continual complaining about how someone else is responsible does not advance anything, and does not make anyone any better. If someone does not want to trade these kinds of evaluations, then they should find something else. There is always just trading the micros with very small positions, which probably is a better idea anyway, since there is real money at stake in the real market.
My concern is that people who are looking to it being someone else's fault are not looking where they need to look in order to improve. By all means, if someone finds the rules of a funding company to not suit them, they should leave, and quickly. But finding the cause of anyone's lack of trading success in someone else's rules is not going to move anything forward.
The trader who looks to what he/she is doing will be better able to fix it.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
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This and the rest of the post. Not everything is a conspiracy against the little retail trader. The majority of the time they fail because they aren't good enough at that moment.
Some will work on improving and others won't and will simply blame somebody/something else. A high percentage won't be successful, but it will be very few that haven't made it due to anything other than their own choices or failings.
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
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If they really cared about funding traders they would:
- connect you with pro traders for daily or at least weekly mentoring
- because pro traders time is expensive, have a way higher monthly fee, it should be $500 o $1k easily
- at least 6 months of evaluation period, the 20 days period is laughable, not even close to get a statistically significant idea of a trader's expectancy
- no trailing drawdown, a trader with a yearly positive expectancy will hit a trailing drawdown from time to time, it is almost statistically impossible not hit it
Lowering so much the barrier of entry to one of the most difficult disciplines in the world should be illegal.
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I would say that if you have a different idea of how a company could do business, that may be completely valid. It might be a better way.
It is also true that a consistently profitable trader will hit a big drawdown at some point, inevitably. Of course, so will a consistently unprofitable one.
It is not wrong to point out how things could be done differently, or even better. Perhaps you should start a company to do this. I don't know if it would succeed commercially, putting out this much effort to train up beginning traders, but it might. Another view would be that after going to this extent to develop traders, it still would face the 90% - 95% failure statistic anyway: it would have traders who went through their program, but unless the attrition rate is severe -- unless they flunked out the ones who didn't get it -- they would not have a high percentage of profitable traders in the end. Essentially, they would have traders who had spent a lot of money and still not changed much. But hope springs eternal, and maybe that enterprise would be successful. The size of the effort would be large in terms of the amount of resources put toward it, as would the cost. It certainly would be different.
So if your criticism is that the existing companies don't do anything much to develop their customers as traders, that should be obvious. They aren't trying to. If you succeed as a trader with them, it's because you were already a good trader, but you just were short of cash (how this would happen is another matter, but it could happen), or you were able to benefit from the external enforcement of rules, or you were a very good learner, mostly on your own.
A trader who does well in these programs will be a statistical outlier. The rest will face the 90% rule, or whatever it actually is.
I believe that traders do not go into these programs with their eyes as open as they need to be. Generally, from reading their accounts of their experiences, they have the same unrealistic ideas of their trading expertise that we all do when starting out, and soon reality intrudes. Then the complaints about the unfairness tend to come in. This exact same phenomenon is seen again and again from traders who never try their hand at getting funded, but just flame out on their own, in their own accounts, and are convinced that "someone" is out to get them, that the markets are rigged, specifically against them, or whatever. It's never that they don't trade well enough, or that they need to change something. This just means that they don't have an avenue for improvement, because they aren't going to look at what they need to change.
I don't care one way or another about these funding companies, and I wish anyone well who tries them out. There are successes, which do get reported here. But they aren't as vocal as the ones who do not succeed, and of course, there are many fewer successes than failures. This is in the nature of trading. Mostly, people simply run into the same emotional issues, loss control issues, risk control issues, overtrading issues, and just plain no-edge issues that we see anywhere, with the same outcomes.
I can't be negative toward those who are honestly trying, but not succeeding. The fact is that this is the road every beginning trader is on, and some who have been around for some time and are still plugging. This is not changed if they choose to enter a funding program.
But both the over-rosy, "I'm going to be a millionaire" belief and the "It's not my fault, they did it to me" belief are delusional, and will hold a trader back. If you can get something out of these programs, do it. If not, don't. Complaints about them are just wasting time.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
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