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80% 90% off Funded Acct. why they keep offering huge discount?
Bulenox, Apex and more are keep offering 80 to 90% off evaluation account. but why? do they make most of their money through evaluation accounts or funded accounts? I don't understand I mean Apex say keep 100% of the first $25,000 you make but wouldn't you rather take $25K and close account? for $25,000 thats 50 mini contracts
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
Yes, they make their money off of eval resets or monthly renewals. They also make money once you past their phase one, in phase two you have to pay for either a monthly or a one time lifetime (sort of true, 10 years) fee.
The reality is very few make it to 25k, I believe the numbers put out is some where between 3-4% of those who pass the eval and trade through 4 months (with withdrawals) on their PA account.
Its a business, they do promos whenever their is opportunities for them.
I'm no different blew up many accounts already. I'm just an undiscipline trader, and they farm off of traders like me. I do it because I lack self discipline, and hopefully it will help me.
My take; is that a customer successful in achieving that target will gladly stay with the 90/10 split. After even having perhaps added other (up to 19 more) performance accounts (in the parlance of APEX) while achieving said goal. Why move to an account to take on a new class of monetary risk; your own...? Those 25,000 are your, actually, and the mindset of trading them is indeed different that trading with their money.
Even for tax reasons? Being a contractor for APEX, any income gathered under this scheme, is not capital gains but income; and taxable as such.
There may be many reasons why people would choose to stay with APEX; or any other prop firm, but I think they will not be very different from the reasons one would have to try to pass any of their programs, to begin with...
Most fail due to lack of discipline and consistent strategy and they benefit greatly from funded traders showing consistency. Also many new companies are using the funding model so its a battle to keep people signing up. Competition lowers prices.
I see. I am just curious the expenses involved in Funded account business, do they buy Ninja license key in bulks and distribute them to evaluates and funded acct holders? APEX has a business address which is actually a PO box. They must be selling lots of eval accts to be able to afford 80-90% off sale. How many Future trading evaluates are out there? thanks.
I dont know about NT license and prop firms, maybe @NinjaTrader could chime in and say a few words how this works as it is a very common thing between NT and lots of prop firms out there..
About the numbers I dont know exactly but I guess before pandemic there were mainly 2 of them, TopStep and Earn2Trade.. actually, TopStep used to be named/called TopStepTrader and was a sponsor of this forum (BigMikeTrading era) and because of this sponsorship I was introduced to this business/opportunity/topic..
So, after pandemic we can say it multiplied..
Apex, Bulenox, TradeDay, TakeProfit, TickTickTrader, BluSky, LeeLoo, UProfit, OneUp among others joined the party of futures prop firm.
Disclosure: This communication is sent to you by NinjaTrader, LLC, a software development company which owns and supports all proprietary technology relating to and including the NinjaTrader trading platform.
It's a question that only they can answer factually: all the rest of us can do is guess.
My own guess is that there are two main reasons.
Firstly, the market is now so competitive and their own reputations so "not-quite-first-class" that very few people would pay their full price.
Secondly, it costs them very little to attract customers that way because so very few qualify for funding at the first attempt, although many renew their subscriptions, so they're not really giving away 80-90% of their potential income as much as attracting some additional customers they would never otherwise get signing up with them.
Again, we can only guess.
My own guess is that almost all of these funding companies (they're not really "prop firms" at all) make the great majority of their income from evaluation fees.
I would, yes (if I were ever willing to do business with Apex at all, which is a far-fetched possibility, in my case).
That alone means I wouldn't touch them, but clearly not everyone shares my attitudes (especially when their marketing is offering an 80-90% discount).
It's only doable of you're already consistent. Most will get annoyed and not maintain discipline even after passing eval, which is not that easy considering tight drawdowns. You do have to know what you're doing. But for beginners, it beats losing your own money as opposed to $35 for a 150k account. And if you pass, trade it like you're trading a $5k account, which is the drawdown.
What I do is go very large only on super high quality setups, and have fixed risk. So I can afford 3 mistakes per eval , but I can take large enough size to pass it quickly if it works. It's also not a great deal of you're taking 3-4 months just to pass eval, then pay another $250 for the license fee.
They also push trade copier, which are a pricy disaster in times of volatility. I trade each account manually..
