Funding Programs for Futures Traders

I hope all you beauties, thugs, gamblers, victims are doing well. Today I wanted to discuss some funding programs that are available for future traders.

Trading futures is exceptionally tough job and after learning some price action basics , majority of your success will depend upon your mindset, how you think about money in general. Funding is an important part of trading (duh). After diving head first in the trading game with all in mentality and getting face-fuc*ed countless times , I decided that going forward I will try to contribute whatever I can to help folks learn this challenging game with minimal cost in the beginning.

Out of whatever reason you decided to pursue trading as a part-time or full-time thing. You follow a couple of people you think know this art and then after watching a few videos on YouTube, you think this is not that hard. You are going to overestimate your ability to do well in this profession. After maybe first few weeks where you might do well , you are going to face a challenge where you have a significant drawdown. This is where things start to go wrong. Most people do not handle drawdowns well and end up chasing and eventually losing all their funds. Depending on your self-belief, competency you may choose to keep going and having cracks at it again in hope that things will get better or eventually after 6-12-18 months you call it quits. My message to folks who are struggling in trading is to not use their own funds and practice the art using some funding programs.

Here are some funding programs that I have tried and got funded in at some point in time during the last year of discovering them.

1. Apex Trader Funding

2. Topstep Trader

3. Oneup Trader

4. Leeloo Trading

5. uProfit

6. Bulenox

7. Earn2Trade (nor personally tried but reputed company)

There are Pros & Cons of each programs and it can be tricky to understand some of their rules and I will try to explain them in simple ways. This is a brief post, but I may do a detailed one for each of the above mentioned programs if their is interest in this type of information.

Now all these programs and their different offering can be confusing. They all market their accounts as 50k, 100k , 150k some even 300k but the true funding you truly get is drawdown that they allow before they close your account down. The most important thing in any program to look at becomes the total drawdown they offer, that is your risk and true account size. For eg. 50k account at most programs allows $2500 of drawdown , so they are actually risking $2500 on you and not 50k.

99% of the these programs use a trailing drawdown to further minimize their risk on your non-existent trading ability ( ;p). So what does that mean. Lets say you purchase a 150k account. You follow all the rules and get funded. The account has a $5000 trailing drawdown.

Trailing Drawdown Explained

Day 1 - $150,000 and Trailing Drawdown $5000 so 145,000 or below your account blows up

Lets say you make some gains in the first day and end up with $1000 and $1000 being your highest profit on day. Lets say you shorted this POS index ES yesterday at 3950 on 2 lots and your take profit is 3940 and you call it a day, exit the trade and watch the shit collapse to 0 all day. You end up with $1000

Day 2 - $151,000 and TR is fixed $5000 now that moves up to 146,000

Now next day you make another $0 but this time you were unable to close it for your target as you wanted to see if you can get more from the trade and you move your stop to breakeven and it comes and hits your stop. Assuming you again did a 10 point trade on ES . For. eg. You bot 3900 with 3910( 2 lots ES) target and as trade moves in your favor around 3905 you decide you will put a breakeven stop. It turns back and stops you out. Now the issue is the trailing drawdown is calculated even from your highest unrealized profit so it effects your trailing drawdown even if your account at the same number. You lost $500 of additional risk from your $5000 trailing drawdown.

Day 3 - $151,000 and TR is 4500 but as your account hit 151,500 with that trade which you did not realize but it ended up stopping you out at breakeven, So your account high 151,500 - 5000 = 146,500

Now the good part , after couple week of good trading you have grown your account to 158,000

Day 11 - $158,000 , Trailing drawdown still 5000 ? Nope. Your drawdown now stops at 150,000 or whatever your account starting balance is. Now you have actually increased your risk from $5000 to $8000 , meaning you can buy a 2 lot ES on a down trend day and blow up at 80 points of drawdown vs 50 points of drawdown. ;p

There are two types of trailing drawdowns

1. Trailing Drawdown from Unrealized Intraday Gains ( Apex, Leeloo, One Up )

2. Trailing Drawdown from End of Day Gains ( Topstep , uProfit, Earn2trade )

Bulenox offers both kinds.

I have explained the unrealized one above and that is about that but the second one is interesting. It is end of day drawdown. So whatever highest balance you close at by market close is what your trailing drawdown will be calculated on. For eg. You bot 50k account from uProfit and they have a 2000 trailing drawdown EOD.

Day 1 - $50,000 and TD - $2000 - Account Blown level is 48,000

You make 1000 on that day but during the day lets say you were up $2000 but you moved your stop and got $1000 on the trade

Day 2 - $51,000 and TD - $2000 - Account Blown level is 49,000

To compare with unrealized drawdown method if you were up 2000 on that day and close at 1000 , it will affect your TD and instead of blowing up at 49,000 you would be screwed at 50,000. So your account risk become just 1000 because you had that unrealized gain gone from account which increased your TD to 50,000

Now EOD obviously sounds better but these companies take something away for that as well. These types of EOD account usually have cap on maximum number of contracts traded have a daily loss limit. To compare a 50k account on Unrealized TD would allow 8-10 max contracts vs 2 contract limit on EOD TD type account and they allow more contracts as you grown your account & EOD would have a $1,100 loss limit for the day when if you scale your account to 60,000 it will still be at $1,100. There is no daily loss limit on Unrealized type account so you can go ahead and blow it up in first minute of trading session if you would like.

Trading Days

Most of the companies require 10 minimum trading days. You can absolutely hit the profit target in 1 day and rest of the 9 days you can click in and out of micros to pass the program. Oneup trader and E2T have consistency rules which you may wanna read if you do get into it , basically there to make you didn’t yolo your evaluation in 1 trade when Powell started speaking.

Apex Trader Funding

Link : https://bit.ly/33CiJwj

• 1 Step Funding , 10 7 Minimum Trading days, no maximum.

• 90% Profit Split after first $10,000 $25,000 with 100% profit for the trader

• Request Payout after 10 trading days vs 25 days before

• Payout for first three month is capped to $2000 per payout ( 2x a month max) and then uncapped withdrawals from fourth month onwards. Requesting a payout out of either two payout windows counts as a payout month

• Added consistency rule in funded accts where gain of any one day cannot be more than 30% of total account balance ( flexible on this meaning they will payout if you can one day where its 40-50% of balance but on other trading days it shows that you traded properly and not got lucky windfall that one session then just trade a micro to request payouts)

• Competent commissions vs competition

• Awesome customer support

• 50k , 150k, 250k programs are all worth a look offering 2500, 5000 & 6500 drawdown

• Good Sale Promotions

• $85 a month fees after funding ( Includes monthly wire transfer, Ninja platform fees)

• They added a one time fees which is account dependent. for.eg 1 time fee for 50k Account is $140 and the you pay them nothing as long as you keep the account

• Negative : Unrealized TD does not stop in evaluation till target is met but stops trailing at starting balance in funded mode.

• Can trade upto 20 accounts together with a trade copier

  

Topstep Trader

Link: https://bit.ly/39X5BFz

• Reputed Company

• Best Dashboard includes Trading Stats and trading resources

• Good for new traders

• 2 Step funding , 5 minimum days( reduced from 10) for Step 1 and no minimum days for Step 2

• 50k and 150k account are worth a look offering $2000 and $4500 Drawdown

• Drawdown Method is End of Day

• One funded account at a time

• Moved to 90% profit split from 80%.

• Need 5 winning days to request a payout, Can request 50% of entire balance at any time at any payout request but need 5 winning days to do so.

  

Leeloo Trader

Link: https://bit.ly/3xYoXls

• 1 Step Funding , 10 Minimum Trading days

• 80% Profit Split after first $10,000 with 100% profit for the trader, moves up to 90% after first year

• Great customer support

• 50k , 150k, 250k programs are all worth a look offering 2500, 5000 & 6500 drawdown

• Good Sale Promotions

• Leeloo and Apex are like twins in terms offerings

• $88 a month fees after funding ( Includes monthly wire transfer, Ninja platform fees)

• Negative : Unrealized TD does not stop in evaluation till target is met but stops trailing at starting balance in funded mode.

• Can trade upto 20 accounts together with a trade copier

  

Oneup Trader

Link: https://bit.ly/3ntdndo

• 1 Step Funding , 15 Minimum Trading days

• 90% Profit Split after first $8,000 with 100% profit for the trader

• Awesome customer support

• 50k ,100k, 150k programs are all worth a look offering 2500, 3500 & 5000

• No monthly fees at all , they even provide level 2 data for free but rarely any promotions

• Trailing drawdown works the same in funded and evaluation mode

• No multiple accounts

  

Bulenox

Link: https://bit.ly/3y2XY8q

• 1 Step Funding , 10 Minimum Trading days

• 80% Profit Split after first $10,000 with 100% profit for the trader, moves up to 90% after $40,000 withdrawals

• Decent customer support

• 50k , 150k programs are all worth a look offering 2500 & 5000 drawdown

• Good Sale Promotions

• Leeloo and Apex are like twins in terms offerings

• $88 a month fees after funding ( Includes monthly wire transfer, Ninja platform fees)

• Negative : Unrealized TD does not stop in evaluation till target is met but stops trailing at starting balance in funded mode.

• Can trade upto 20 accounts together with a trade copier

Payouts : All companies have different methods but theme is similar, They require you to trade 20-40trade session before first payout and first 3 payout are generally capped upto $2000 depending on account size and from 4th payout there is no limit.

Good luck to all you folks who purchase an evaluation. Remember to use the link if you did decide to purchase the program for a little commission for jingles. You can reach out to me if you have questions.

Sincerely,

jingles