Great,
I will keep you updated on whether it worked with Leeloo at the end of November without problems with the payment of the total capital. I'm curious to see if they come up with something else to avoid having to pay.

MR79

Since i signed up i’ve essentially stepped in one pile of crap to the next. Equal parts it being my own haste and not doing my due dilligence, and Apex’s either willful or ignorant omission of key portions of the program.

I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt since they’re so new. I’ve been getting the feeling that a lot of the questions i’ve asked and been ignorant to they’ve assumed were common knowledge, like the “live trailing drawdown” or whatever it was. And, in their defense i was ignorant to it and didn’t do my own due diligence.

But the “sim live” portion was in my opinion another strike as it says absolutely nowhere that when you get “funded” you’re going to still be trading sim. But, also it says nowhere on the site you’ll be trading a live account and they call it a “performance account”. So again, willful ignorance or..?

It does look as if the program is a copy/paste of Leeloo’s. All the way down to some of the verbiage on the FAQ. I had 0 prior experience with leeloo before i took the dive into Apex so it’s all new to me.

The funding rules, particularly the schedule of payouts is something they’ve added post me signing up. But can be countered with the fact they let you trade as many accounts as you want.

Do we have any proof that this company ever paid a penny to their profitable traders?

The good thing to come out of this is that I've adopted a scalping approach which have been working really well for me as I had to adopt to the trailing drawdown. So I'll continue trading that in my live account.

For transparency - I blew my evaluation account with Apex on Tuesday.

I actually hit my target on Tuesday with $9500 in my account after 7 trading days. At that point I had zero losing days and only 2 small losing trades over 7 days trading 5 contracts. I settled on a scalping method which worked really well for me with a 96 % win rate.

By then, I should have scaled down or just stopped trading, but I took another trade next which was a loss. Down $1250. I then doubled down with 10 contracts on the next trade and my account was liquidated for a $3.5K loss on that day, but since it's a trailing drawdown on unrealized profits, I was down $5K on the day from that peak.

So, the account balance was around + $6K when I got liquidated.

The obvious mistake I did was to double down on 10 contracts, but truth be told I became a bit reckless and careless after I learned about the withdrawal policy. If I knew I had $10K in sight by end of next month I would probably have acted wiser. If I thought Apex is a great deal I would sign up again or reset, but I'm done with these firms once and for all now. I jumped on the Apex offer as it seemed really great, but I missed the part about withdrawals.

The good thing to come out of this is that I've adopted a scalping approach which have been working really well for me as I had to adopt to the trailing drawdown. So I'll continue trading that in my live account.

So that's something good from the experience, and from the whole funding company experience from start to finish, if this new scalping method holds up for you.

I am by no means negative on these companies, but I've said a couple of times that one of the issues that might suggest staying away is "their rules and not my rules."

For instance, while this had a good outcome in terms of finding the new method, the fact that you had to alter your trading "to adapt to the trailing drawdown," might generally be a negative. That is, assuming your normal trading behavior is working for you, I would hesitate to suggest trying to squeeze yourself into someone else's ideas of how you should trade.

This could be thought of the other way too, because a lot of traders do need some discipline and some control of risk and loss.... in fact, just about everyone can use more of these. So the companies argue that they are teaching good trading practices, and I think often this is correct. But it's still someone else's rules, and having to change what is natural to you, and what you have devised in your trading (always assuming that it is working), can make it a bad fit and can be a cause for a rule fail.

Aside from that, glad you got something out of this, and that your mind is now settled on Apex and perhaps on all of them.

Bob.

That's not nice to hear from you, but the good thing is that you know what the problem was and you can work on it to make it better in the future.

MR79