The Goal I Am Focused Most On
Passing my The Futures Desk evaluation and ending my accounts at other firms (hopefully with payouts before I move on!)
Highlights / Wins To Celebrate
- Escaped the drawdown in my Tradeify funded account from last week. It was a great feeling to get out of it. I’ll have more on this below in the Top Lesson section.
- Winning week overall. My weekly profit is $2,397.05 between my two funded accounts (one at Topstep and one at Tradeify).
- Going forward, I’m going to focus more on the Tradeify account until I get another payout from it. My Topstep account might have a trade on it once every week or two. Their policy states that I need a trade every 30 days. I just worry their tech will trigger an inactivity closure on accident, because I’ve seen how their tech can fall short.
- I’m really happy with this profit considering the “balance” I had available and considering that it was over just three trading days. I didn’t trade on Monday due to the MLK holiday. I ended the week for my funded accounts after Thursday’s trading because I’m happy with what I made. No need to give any of it back to the market going into the weekend.
- Made good progress in my The Futures Desk evaluation. My weekly profit here is $2,676.25.
- I’m still far away from the profit target of $12,000, but getting closer to it base hit by base hit. I am 45% complete with my evaluation ($5,505 current profits / $12,000 Profit Target)
- In hindsight, I should have just gone with a smaller account. In the long run, all account sizes can scale up after being moved to Live Funded. The only benefit I have with the account size I chose is that I’ll start off with a large static drawdown in a funded account. I guess this argument is the same with all accounts at all firms that move to Live Funded. Choose your account size wisely. Sometimes it is not about the most you can take to Live Funded, but the plan that will get you there in the first place.
Lowlights / Things To Work On
- I still feel FOMO when I miss out on opportunities or don’t capture the entire move. On two separate occasions, I made the decision to lock out knowing that I was getting into FOMO. Locking out at FOMO is great, but letting myself get into FOMO is not.
- The first was on Wednesday when the market was up considerably and I thought “I really want to short this”. I fought that urge by locking out and walking away. The market did go down after of course, and I felt FOMO but at least couldn’t trade. By the end of the day the market recovered and then some, so who knows what would have happened if I continued to trade.
- On Thursday, I was trading the market open and was doing well. A major news release was around the corner (PCE) so I decided to close my position so I don’t get caught in a bad move. I’ve seen news releases stop out both longs and shorts at the time of release. I even gave myself a 15 minute lockout just in case. The market continued to go in my favor and I was watching it go. I decided to fully lock out my funded accounts once I realized I was fighting FOMO. I took one more winning trade at The Futures Desk afterwards, but still felt like I had missed out on a great move. I ended my trading day completely afterwards just to cut myself off.
- Even though I feel like I did the right things by preventing myself from trading through FOMO, I wish I just didn’t feel FOMO at all. I want to reach a point to where I view everything through an objective lens.
- The prop firm industry shift is kind of worrisome. One firm went down this past week and luckily I never traded with them. One firm I do trade with is having some issues. For various reasons, it is distracting. Choose your firm wisely! If you can, just stay with the one that fits you best. My suggestion is to think hard about where you think you can have a Live Funded Account and would like to share with this firm in exchange for their risk management.
Top Lesson
SURVIVE THE DRAWDOWN
They happen. It’s up to us to stop ourselves from it getting excessively deep. That is risk management. Last week I did a poor job of that by losing $4k in a single day. My account balance is not sufficient to sustain that kind of losing day. Mentally, it sucked. Historically, I would allow myself to burn the account and start over with that kind of drawdown (it was two-thirds of my balance). Getting out of it was rewarding, both financially and mentally.
I showed myself that I can survive the drawdown. It wasn’t the first time I did this. However, this one felt different to me. In the past, I would get out of drawdown with the mentality of “either this trade kills my account or pulls me out of drawdown”. That’s not the right approach in the long run. This time, I wanted to get out of drawdown steadily. I was forced to by the rules of the firm, since Tradeify Lightning Funded Accounts have a consistency target right now. That mentality of pulling myself out with steady gains made all the difference.
When my next drawdown occurs (unavoidable), at least I know I am capable of pulling myself out and that I can do it slowly. I could have even done it more slowly. The key is that it is possible.
Trading Week Grade
I give my week an A.
I wouldn’t mind having weeks like this every week. For the funded accounts, I only traded 3 days and made more than enough. On a percentage return basis relative to my available balance, making $2k with around $10k in available balance (just going off of distance to maximum loss limit) is a 20% return. In a single week!
In the future I will be happy with even less on a percentage return basis when I plan to scale either a single Live Funded account at a prop firm or my own personal account. Honestly, I think realizing this would bring success to other traders I have interacted with. They could do 0 – 20% weeks easily, but they try to do 100% in a day.
Trading Performance
Since last week I said I don’t want to do a bunch of screenshots/images, I’m just not going to! You’ll either take my word for it that the below is accurate or you won’t. I am still thinking about a good way to show my performance without it being cumbersome to my non-tech savvy web skills, but also being transparent.
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Week Total | |
| Topstep Funded | $230.28 | $230.28 | ||||
| Tradeify Funded | $686.37 | $1,043.49 | $436.91 | $2,166.77 | ||
| TFD Eval | $706.35 | $606.45 | $715.70 | $647.75 | $2,676.25 |
P.S. the above table isn’t going to stay next week. I hated making it. Making a table in wordpress is cumbersome for me at the moment. There are plugins for wordpress that could solve it, but I don’t want to pay for anything for now.
