Don’t Know What to Do to Improve Your Trading? Try This…

I want to bring forth a question that a friend of mine brought to me.

He’s an options trader who just got started trading this past year.

He asked me a question that I’ve asked myself, too, and that you may be asking yourself, as well.

He looked at me and said:

“How do you keep going?”

Like, it’s tough when you’re first starting out.

You’ve probably made some great wins, which is why you’re like really into trading now, because you know there’s money to be made. It’s possible that you’ve experienced this, but then you’ve also experienced losses. You’ve experienced days where you had an idea of how you were going to trade that day and you made a plan to yourself that you were going to follow all your rules…But then in front of the markets, you just lose it.

This happens. Over and over again.

This is the point on your journey that I want to address.

<<Want to read a FREE excerpt from “The Seven Habits of Successful Day Traders” on how to fix 8 Common trading mistakes? CLICK HERE>>

How do you keep going?

There are going to be plenty of times in your trading career where, because you either made mistakes or because your strategy is failing, you’re going to question whether this was even a good choice to get into the market in the first place. Usually, this question comes with feelings behind it – there’s a lot of shame, maybe guilt. And fear that, “what if I just wasted a couple of thousand bucks for on something that’s just never going to happen?”

I want to share some research on leadership that I just read for one of my courses in my Ph.D. program. The study was on optimism, as it is experienced by business leaders, CEOs, and entrepreneurs.

It turns out that – no surprise, here – business leaders tend to be far more optimistic than those who work for them.

This can be frustrating when you’re working for someone who may think very highly of where the business can go and yet if you’re the one doing the work and crunching the numbers you know the reality is far more unpredictable and messy than anything that person can envision.

The text talked about how sometimes having an optimistic leader is very important because that optimism can help pull the business along, especially during tough times. fix your day trading

So if you think about your trading as your business – you’re the CEO! You’re also the CFO, the Chief Financial Officer, you are the technician – you’re kind of a little bit of everybody wrapped into one.

But most importantly, you lead your own trading business. No one else.

I want you to stay optimistic.

That’s the answer I gave my friend. I told him that, basically, you have to be a little bit delusional to keep going and to assume that you’re going to make it.

I bring up the leadership studies because I see this in other areas of leadership, too – people who are religious leaders, people who are politicians, they kind of need a little bit of ego and a little bit of self-certainty despite the evidence, in order to plow through, keep going and not lose faith when things go wrong.

Try This Instead

So my recommendation is to keep returning to the part of you that believes in yourself – that part of you said, “I’m doing this! I’m going to make this happen!” which was so enthusiastic when you first started trading.

I want you to return to that mindset, but with a caveat – I want you to also keep asking yourself, “How do I improve? how can I learn more? what are the people who have what I want – the traders who are passing challenges, running big accounts- what did they do to get to that place?

Of those things, what can I also do as well?

So have confidence in your ability to learn. Have confidence, trust, and faith in your ability to figure it out over the long run. You might not get immediate results tomorrow on your next trade – you might not even get immediate results by next month. Instead, think big picture and trust in your ability to keep going.

Lastly, I’ll say that I don’t have faith without action – I’m not going to believe in myself as becoming a better trader if I just keep doing the same things over and over and over again. I want to do research, I want to learn more, I want to always be reflecting and learning from myself and my own experiences, too.

Don’t lose hope – you’re going to have a mixed range of feelings about your trades and this process, the whole way through. Even now, a couple of years in, I still have some days when I just want to have a steady paycheck, but, in the end, it’s worth it.

I have faith in you, I encourage you to keep trying, to go learn something new if you’re feeling bad about your trading (right now!)

Go out and learn something new that can give evidence to yourself that you’ll be a different trader next time with this new knowledge.

<<Want to read a FREE excerpt from “The Seven Habits of Successful Day Traders” on how to fix 8 Common trading mistakes? CLICK HERE>>

Learn to Be Okay with Your Losses

Did you click on this post because you just experienced a string of losses?

Don’t worry, I got you!

Today we’re going to talk about a really important topic on how to shift your paradigm of what loss in trading means so that you can become comfortable with losses and go on to become a profitable trader. now I want to begin this with a little demonstration

So let’s say I’m holding a d20 dice. (Because, yes, I do play dungeons and dragons)

I’m gonna take this dice and I’m gonna put it in one of my hands – I want you to guess which hand it’s in.

All right. Ready?

Which hand am I holding the d20?

Did you guess right?

Did you guess left?

If you said left, you’re correct!

Okay so if you lost that guess, how did it feel?

I’m guessing it didn’t matter – you might not have even guessed! You probably didn’t really care whether you would win or lose. There was no real incentive.

So we take bets on life all the time that have maybe have dual outcomes – a yes or a no answer.

Sometimes, it’s easy to make those guesses. Sometimes, it’s not. When there’s something at risk that’s valuable to you, that’s when it becomes more difficult to take a loss on a bad guess or a bad bet.

The Truth About Risk

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See, when we’re trading in markets we’re always approaching this with some kind of risk. If you’re putting money on the line, even if there’s a chance to return more money, there’s also a chance to lose.

It doesn’t matter if you have a high win rate strategy. It doesn’t matter if you have all the market knowledge that you could possibly need – except for telling the future. Because you’re always going to be risking, you’re not going to be placing bets with certainty. There is no certainty in markets.

So in order to show up for the wins, we have to be there for the losses. What professional traders and smart traders do is risk only what we’re comfortable losing. If you want to get technical, this turns into a certain percent risked per trade so that we’re always trading an amount that reflects the value of the account (such as 0.3%-2%per trade). If it goes higher, you risk a little more because it’s a percentage, and if you start losing money, you risk a little less because again it’s going to be relative to your account size.

When you show up to trade markets you have to be comfortable with taking losses and it can take time to internalize this. It usually takes losing money – a lot of money – to finally accept that when you finesse with your strategy, like when you move a pre-planned stop loss, it’s a chaotic experience.

You’ll get to a point when you want things to be solid, standardized, and steady. Sometimes it takes a year or two to be rattled about in the markets enough to want to settle down, stick with a strategy, stick with a risk strategy, and see it through the long run.

I want to make a couple of recommendations to help you start looking at losses in a way that doesn’t scare you anymore.

1) See loss as part of the natural transaction of the markets

The first tip I want to give you is something I write about in my book the seven habits of successful day traders.

I want you to think about the various ways in life that there are transactions – for example, right now you’re probably breathing. (I hope!)

With every out-breath, there’s an in-breath. With every in-breath, there’s an out-breath.

You can’t just take oxygen – you also have to give back some carbon dioxide. There’s an exchange albeit a more equitable one. There’s a balance between the two.

Think about other transactions in your life, such as with relationships – you sometimes have to put in a lot of work into the relationship, even when you’re not getting much out of it. (For example, perhaps with parenting)

When one person is putting in all the work then usually there’s an imbalance and the relationship can get ruined.

Now, with trading, we do want to win over the long run, we do want to be more profitable more often than we lose. We achieve this by having a higher return on what we risk, or having a high win rate – these are variables that you can adjust and play with to find something comfy that works for you.

2) Risk only what you’re comfortable losing

The second thing I’ll mention is that it’s important to risk only what you’re comfortable losing.

Money is very much a psychological concept.

It’s something that we all agree upon in society to use to measure value – it’s ideally a fair trade of value.

If I just bartered with you and I only had eggs and you had apples which I want but you don’t want eggs, then I’m not going to be able to get apples.

So money stands in to offer an exchange in a way where we can then use that note to go get the goods and things we need somewhere else. But it’s something we all agree upon in order for it to work.

if I had a little island and you brought your dollars to me and I said we exchanged only seashells here, I don’t want your dollars, then it’s just paper. It’s useless.

So when you think about money as something that’s psychological, you also have to think about the ways your emotions are tied to different ranges of money.

something like “too much money” is different from person to person. Same for losing money.

Take paying for dinner – for example – for some people, paying for a $30 dinner is not a problem. For others, that’s way too much, that could be a day’s worth of wages.

So remember that you’re going to have your own comfort level of what amount feels appropriate for you to risk,

Maybe it means starting out with a very small account as you learn your way through the markets, where it’s okay for you to lose 20 bucks on a trade. Maybe that’s where you need to start and over time your conception of money will change, especially if you’re in the markets (you’re going to learn a lot about how money works, how it moves, and how prices change). Later on, you may be able to get comfortable risking like $4k on a trade because you have a $400k account – that doesn’t feel like a lot of money anymore compared to what you have in store.

Remember that money is psychological by working on your psychology. Read personal development books!

Using personal development as part of your trading strategy is really important because a lot of trading comes down to managing what you’re thinking, what your beliefs are, what your fears are, and what your expectations are.

3) Learn From Those Who Came Before You

That leads me to the last suggestion – find out what professional traders lose each year. Even if they win on the year, find out how much they’re actually losing in order to get that exchange.

Keep learning about the role of loss. Look up other YouTubers, hear about their experiences – what kinds of losses they have on a day or a week.

Once you can accept loss as a contingent aspect of trading, you can become comfortable with it.

You can take your stop losses and stick around long enough to also return gains.

I wish you all the best of strength and luck in the markets! Take Care!

I Passed the FTMO Challenge – Again!

I’m excited to share with you all today that it happened again!

I passed a second FTMO challenge – this time with a 100k account, using only the Discipline FX Scalping Strategy as taught in the Disciplined FX Scalping Strategy Course.

I was able to pass a challenge with 10 trades over 7 days using a mechanical strategy. This strategy had an 80% win rate and returns 1.4 times your risk for each winning trade.

This challenge was a free retry after deciding to wait on last month’s challenge as my strategy took an unexpected dip and with the holidays approaching, I didn’t want to chance it turning around.

So let’s go over some stats of this experience:

There were 10 trades one of which was a mistake trade that got a little profit on another was just to capture a trading day – so really there were eight trades.
The average profit was about $1672 and the average loss was $1588
I took a couple of trades with E/J but basically, almost every single trade was with the A/U

Now, these were all scalping trades. I don’t think there was a single trade that returned more than maybe 16 pips – and while that may seem like nothing, and it may seem like that it must be on a 1m chart or 5m chart, this was actually on a 15m chart and these trades could sometimes last as few as 10 minutes or as long as a couple of hours.

That’s actually why I like Forex – it’s a slower-paced market compared to waking up and scalping stocks

Let’s talk about risk

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As with my last challenge that I passed, I used a variation in risk as the account increased.

So I started out with a 1.4 percent risk per trade. Once I hit that three percent gain mark, I bumped it up to two percent, and then for one trade, I took a 2.5 percent risk for that trade. since that got me up close to the profit target, I then decided to dial it back down to 1.4 risk in case there would be losses so that I can stay up in this profit range.

And then for my last trade, I took 1.1 percent risk on that trade where if I hadn’t won that trade I could go back to risking maybe something up to 2% where I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable in taking that risk because I had already risked those percentages before.

So it kept me in a comfy zone where, knowing my stats about this trade, I know it’s has a higher win rate than a higher return so I was willing to take a bet that within three trades I’d be able to hit the profit target so by risking less as I got closer I would just keep re-measuring how much money do I need to hit target and risk according to that 1.4 ratio return.

Prop Trading Psychology

This is a huge part of what will lead you able to stick with a risk management strategy or your trading strategy and I will say every time I take a challenge, while my discipline’s rock-solid, I have my moments. It is so easy to want to move take profit targets or take out a trade early to be sure to capture a win. That’s the one inconsistency that I run into when prop trading, although it didn’t happen this time.

I think going in with a strategy that has a high win rate helped to appease some of the anxiety around trading for a challenge that has a time limit.

Now if I was trading something like five percenters or a new firm which I’m going to tell you all about, called funded traders plus, these two have very realistic time limits on taking the challenge, I’d have stuck to a certain risk percent, like 0.5 or 0.75%. These longer-term challenge models are less stressful.

Let’s Talk About Risk Management Models

So I have 3 that I want to share with you. I’ve used them all before for different accounts, strategies, and challenges.

Steady

it’s basically as it sounds – you’re using the same percent risk per trade on every trade. if you’re trading something more short-term, like FTMO, you might have to bump this up a bit to make sure you hit that profit target – it could be taking 1% per trade or 1.5% per trade, or 2% per trade.

It helps to know the stats of your strategy. This is why I like mechanical strategies because I can pull so much data from them than discretionary ones. Because with discretionary trading, you never know if you’re not going to take the trade when it comes down to game time.

So at least with mechanical strategies, I can run many different stats on them (What days of the week perform better than others, what % likelihood a trade will turn around and profit after starting out in deficit, etc.)- I think some of you guys know I’m a Ph.D. student (so researching variables is my bread and butter)!

So if you know your drawdown, as well as an average return for the month, you can adjust your risk per trade to fit your strategy, while also being mindful of the 5% daily drawdown, 10% total drawdown, and the 10% target that you need to hit so that could end up being 1-2% risk per trade.

Scaled

The second approach is a scaled model – this is what I use for this challenge where you might want to designate something like a low, medium, and high risk.

I started out with what I consider medium: 1.4% per trade.

Once I hit that 3% target getting into this profitable zone, I bumped it up to two percent and I was willing, if the balance went down, to go back to 1.4% risk per trade.

And if it went under, such as going into a significant drawdown, like down 5%, I would consider going down to 1% risk per trade or less.

Such was not the case – Instead, the count continued to grow. Once I got into that middle zone of over 5% return, I was willing to take a 2.5% risk on that next trade – it ended up being a win and that bumped me up close to the profit target.

That’s when I moved down to a low risk, so that was back to 1.4% and then after that trade, I just kept measuring how much money I needed to hit the profit target. Then I would risk accordingly. (Target – current balance –> divide by 1.4, and that’s what I’d risk on the next trade [this was usually under 1.4%])

<< WANT TO TRY IT FOR YOURSELF? Feel free to use my FTMO affiliate link >>

Market Dependent Model

The last model I’ll name here is what I’m going to call the market-dependent model of risking according to what you see.

So this would be better for someone who is using a discretionary strategy or knows enough about their mechanical strategy to say how it performs in different types of markets.

If it’s a more volatile market you may want to risk more or less depending on what you see and how your strategy performs in that kind of market.

I think this last approach is what professional traders usually use, (but then again they aren’t necessarily trading for a challenge)

So any of these three models can work – there’s no one good choice.

you have to know what works for your strategy – this is why I highly recommend backtesting to really get to know what your strategy is. Define the parameters of your strategy instead of saying you’ll just trade triangles. Get to know stats by backtesting.

To sum this up, the next step for me is verification. That has a 5% target instead of 10%. I’ll probably risk the same way I’m risking now with the scaled model – but maybe dial it back a bit. I could also take the full 60 days and just take a steady, small percent risk per trade.

If I pass that too, then going into a funded account I am planning on risking tiny and I’m expecting tiny targets.

I will be happy to stop trading for the month once I hit a 3% return.

but that will be for a later post. For now, I’m happy to celebrate this win and share it with you!

What Squid Game Can Teach Us About Day Trading

Okay, I have a question for you.

Let me preface this by reminding you of the kinds of risks you probably take just to make it in the markets.

Maybe you’ve already lost hundreds of dollars through day trading, or even thousands of dollars. Or maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars. My guess is that you’re trading for a purpose since no one intentionally seeks to lose money for no good reason.

Whoever said money can’t buy happiness has probably never had to pay 6 figures in student loans, raise kids as a single parent, or try to make ends meet below the poverty line.

A lot of us got interested in trading because we’re looking for a way out of financial struggles.

We’re willing to put up with drawdowns because we believe we’ll be able to make it over the long run.

But let me ask you this – Would you wagger your life to pay off all of your debts?

While you may automatically say no, the characters of the 2021 South Korean drama Squid Game beg to differ. In this blood bath of a psychological thriller, Squid Game follows the story of contestants who are so desperate to pay off significant debt that they are willing to sign up to play children’s games in order to win their freedom. The catch, though, is that if they break any rules of each game, they are automatically killed on the spot.

This is by far one of the most jaw-dropping and binge-worthy shows I’ve watched all year, and if you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend checking it out on Netflix. Also, if you haven’t seen this show yet, I recommend that you pause this video now, and go see the entire first season because there are some mega spoilers in this post.

Repeat, this is a spoiler alert, please stop now if you want to enjoy the suspense of watching this show without knowing what’s going to happen next.

The element of curiosity and surprise is what makes this show so enticing.

5 Lessons from Squid Game That Apply to Day Trading

Okay, now that you’ve been thoroughly forewarned, let’s go over some of the most important lessons from Squid Game, a game with the odds against them, that can help us become smart and savvy traders as we attempt to survive a game where the odds are against us.

I’m going to draw connections from five different aspects and moments from this show and will explain how they relate to day trading situations, while also pointing out practical applications for your own trading.

Let’s get started.

1) General Tactics and Strategies

So I want to begin with a very general observation of the kinds of tactics and strategies that competitive players use to survive from game to game.

This was apparent in the first game of red-light greenlight but confirmed with the second Dalgona sugar cookie game.

As long as you’re following the rules, you can get creative by using other players or tricks and uncommon strategies to beat the game. A mix of creative strategy and luck often kept a player alive. Brute force alone left one doom to the fate of a black box. Other traits, such as being cunning, creative, connecting with one another, and always, always staying alert of opportunities helped the main characters make it to the final rounds.

Squid Game Day Trading Day trading can be similar.

Just showing up and putting on a trade without a plan and thinking you’ll be okay if you just watch it and hold through is going to drain your account fast. If you want to survive as a day trader, you need to have a plan, that is, a strategy and a system for reflecting on your trades, such as the one I teach in the Disciplined FX Scalping Strategy Course, and you’ll need to think on your feet in case that plan fails.

Thus, you need to be diligent about your risk management. This means that you should focus on a strategy that uses a specific set-up or combination of indicators to highlight high probability trades. You don’t need to catch every move, you just need to focus on performing that strategy right.

You can’t take twenty trades a day in order to brute force your way to profit. You have to prepare a creative plan and be willing to choose risk management over impulse, predefining how much you’ll risk per trade, as well as where you’ll set up your stop loss and take profit targets.

2) Be Mindful of Who Influences You

It’s also beneficial to have a community you can connect with while you trade, so long as those traders aren’t bullies and actually know how to learn from mistakes with humility.

Speaking of good connections, the second trading lesson comes from witnessing the wackadoo audacity of Han Minyeo.

This intense gal is coy and abrasive, she hooks up with the big gang bully Jang Deok-Su, who thinks he can use her as a pawn but ultimately ends up losing his life when she gets her revenge during the glass bridge game.

From this experience, we can reflect on the importance of not getting mixed up with untrustworthy brokers, toxic forums, scammy social media traders, or too-good-to-be-true offers from unreputable prop firms and signal providers.

Be choicey about who and what influences you.

It’s important to have high standards for the resources you seek to learn to trade from.

You should be able to trust that a person or a firm genuinely wants to help you, especially if you’re looking to do business with them.

Furthermore, be mindful of the people you choose to tell about your trading experiences. There are some friends and family that may not be supportive of your choice to learn to trade and will feed you demotivating discouragement that can trip up your trading psychology during a drawdown.

Ideally, after you explain the learning curve that comes with developing trading skills, you’ll have people in your inner circle who trust you and support you in your decision, but this isn’t always realistic.

Again, it’s better to share your experiences with a few chosen people who are positive and supportive rather than shout it across your personal social media platforms and hope someone will care.

3) Wait for Confirmation

Next, our third example is from the glass bridge challenge.

This is more of a technical analysis axiom than general trading advice, but the point is that you don’t want to be the first person on the glass bridge.

The more people who test the steps, the more likely you’ll make it across because the path will be shown to you. This can be a metaphor for following a trend or a breakout area.

You don’t want to be the first one in there – you should wait for confirmation before entering a trade.

Whether it comes from breaking and retesting a support zone in a trend or waiting for a confluence of multiple indicators with price action, you’ll likely want to have a few tools that can test the pattern and tell you if it’s clear to go.

Responsible traders are patient and will wait for the perfect setup before entering a trade.

4) Don’t Forget Who Runs The Show

Fourth, we couldn’t run this video without talking about some of the bigger picture structures that control the games in the first place.

You should know, that if you are involved with any financial market, be it stocks, forex, crypto, real estate, you can assume that somewhere some very rich men are betting on your failure.

So it comes as no surprise in Squid Game that the entire system of games runs on the desire of rich sociopaths who are so disconnected from society in their own self-grandeur and disregard for the care of living people, that they find amusement and joy out of betting on who will live and who will die through playing a series of children’s games.

Squid Game Investors As retail day traders, we should never forget that we are merely Remora fish swinging alongside great big sharks who control where we are heading.

There are big banks and investment firms that have large stakes in every single market and it’s basically up to them to decide which direction the market is going. As retail day traders who trade in a whole year a very small fraction of what those institutions trade in a single hour, we do not want to go against their choice of direction.

It’s often advised that new and novice traders stick with a trend as these are high probability moments where all the big players are in agreement.

We also need to be mindful of black boxes, the algorithmic trading that these big players use to make automatic trades based on the other positions in a market, and therefore stay away from ranging and low volume markets.

Okay, now for our last comparison. I’m giving you one final warning that this is the ultimate of ultimate spoiler alerts for this show.

If you haven’t seen the series, stop right now, because I’m going to give away the ending to the first season of squid game.

This is your last chance to stop now!

Okay, you’ve been warned!

5) Know Your Goals

So I think this one is a bit more meta than the others and involves genuinely reflecting on why you want to make money in the first place.

At the end of this first season of Squid Game, the big reveal is that the jovial, light-hearted, likeable old man in the game is actually the number one sociopath who put the whole kitten-kaboodle pay-per-murder-view show together in the first place.

Squid game old man (I mean, we should have seen this coming, he did a pretty good job position sizing his way through the marble game, that sly ol’ fox. )

He explains that after making so much money, he lost joy in life and couldn’t find excitement in the risk and reward of common experiences. It took having his life on the line to actually feel something again.

And I think this is a great reminder to us as traders to have an end-game in mind.

You need to routinely ask yourself why are you trading and what amount of money do you need in life to meet basic needs, to finally get out of debt, to have a comfortable lifestyle, to be able to invest in the future of humankind, to leave a legacy, and to live out your dreams.

By actually sitting down and calculating the cost of your dream life, you may discover that you don’t need millions of dollars to be happy. A lot of people can live what they believe to be a millionaires lifestyle with under $300k a year.

Achieving your financial goals to get to a place of security and comfort requires even less.

I recommend setting targets for account size and profit targets that reflect your budget and goals while risking conservative amounts per trade.

But that’s not even the point. My purpose in bringing up this comparison is to draw attention to the moral failing of pursuing money just to have more money.

There’s a saying that money makes you more of who you already are.

If you’ve resented people your whole life, you’re going to feel more comfortable openly resenting people and being disrespectful to others. Those who stick around for you will likely only do so because you now have money.

However, if you are a considerate and nurturing person, you can use your wealth to solve your own problems and help people solve their problems too. You can also use your money to influence change so that systemic issues can be properly addressed.

My point is that money should serve a purpose in your life and the life of others, and not be pursued just for the sake of hitting a higher and higher networth status.

Making this distinction can help you make better risk management choices since the end goal isn’t to constantly be making more and more money but rather hit a healthy and reasonable target.

Using targets like this can help you create a trading system that fits your needs.

We’ve now reached the end of this quirky little review of what are really risk-taking skills that were employed in the plot of squid game but are also highly relevant to our experience as day traders. Life involves making decisions based on probability and risk every single day. This is true all the more so for day trading.

Never forget that the lessons you learn from movies, stories, and your own life can teach you about behavior and markets. You can always develop yourself as a trader by maintaining a mindset of endless learning.

I wish you nothing but the best of strength and luck in your own trading. I’ll see you in the markets. Take care!

Why You Should Use cTrader For Your FTMO Challenge

Welcome back to the Disciplined FX blog – my name is Andrew Bloom and if you haven’t met me before, I am a Ph.D. student in the field of business with a concentration in entrepreneurship and I’ve been a day trader for about four to five years and a day trader of forex markets for about 2-3 years. I also started Disciplined FX last year to help teach traders from all walks of life how to become profitable in forex markets while focusing on building habits that support discipline and using mechanical trading in order to develop that routine mindset when you’re actually in front of the charts.

[This post contains FTMO affiliate links]

So I’m going to make a guess as to why you’re here today – I’m going to wager that you’re looking for a good reason for either cTrader or mt4 mt5 and you’re hanging out on the fence there. You’re not really sure which one to go for as you’re submitting your FTMO application.

Personally, I believe there’s one very good reason why you should pick cTrader (See my post on their best features, here) instead of mt4 mt5 , the typical gold standard platforms for day trading any market, but the reason why isn’t gonna be why you think it should be.

Hear me out on this.

What Traders Look for in a Platform

Let’s quickly talk about what people are looking for in a platform.

So you might be looking for things like the ability to program your own strategies using expert advisors, or the ability to set alarms to use a variety of indicators. Now, these are all worthwhile elements of a good platform but something that I think really takes the cake is the ability to easily and intuitively place a trade at any given moment and ensure that your order will be submitted the way you want it to.

Ultimately, we want to make quick orders, especially if you’re a scalper like me or a day trader who is waiting for a very fine and precise moment to enter the trade.

Regardless of what platform you use you’re going to want to have an order form that you are comfortable with and able to use on the spot to put in your stop loss, take profit targets, as well, and you can trust that that order will be placed correctly.

Why Do You Need a Great Order Form?

So why am I focusing on orders?

The reason is that I don’t think you actually need to be deciding on a platform for your FTMO challenge because I don’t think you should be using FTMO‘s platforms.

Instead, I think it’s really useful – and this is true also in professional day trading – to use either your own broker’s charts or a charting software that you trust, such as Trading View, where you’ve done proficient backtesting.

You’re going to want to use another chart for making your decisions for your prop trading orders.

For me, I use Oanda‘s trading charts.

Why cTrader FTMO

It means I’m also using their prices which are relatively close enough to the kinds you’ll find on the FTMO platforms but what’s important for me is that I’ve backtested my mechanical strategy on these charts many, many times and I’m using that data to inform the kinds of risk percent per trade as well as statistical components to help me make decisions as to when, for example, I should maybe stop trading on a challenge and look for a retry if something unusual occurs.

I want to use Oanda‘s charts to figure this out because that’s going to be where that information is consistent.

What I do when I trade with FTMO or any other prop firm is just use their platforms as order forms.

I just want to set up the stop loss, take profit, put in the position size, and set it, forget it. Let it unravel on its own.

This is the reason why I think cTrader is the better option than mt4 mt5 – it’s because their order forms are so intuitive. They let you calculate how much you want to risk on your trade based on your account size. They do the math for you and most importantly they let you select your take profit and your stop loss based on pips – you don’t have to know the price ahead of time. cTrader

It takes out that step of having to measure your trade and figure out the price levels, which is such a boon when you’re a scalper like me and you’re thinking in pips.

Some Downsides to Selecting cTrader

Now, the one downside though to using cTrader is that you can’t use their mobile app for your challenge.

If you want to do more mobile trading you’re going to have to use mt4 mt5. However, mt4 and mt5’s mobile order form is like a risk management nightmare in and of itself. I do use it for my own trading because I’ve grown accustomed to it but I don’t recommend starting out on mobile trading with mt4 or mt5 if you’re just getting started with them for the first time.

As you take your challenge, however, let’s assume you’re able to sit in front of a computer. You’re able to use multiple charts. You can easily set your brokerage’s chart as your analysis chart, if you will, on one screen and use cTrader on the other where you can easily submit orders. The one thing i will recommend though is to be careful of jumping across different currency pairs as those orders will switch – they will go back to some kind of default order such as the last trade you took.

There might be settings to change this, but so far my experience has been to be sure you know what your orders are so that in case you’re jumping around, looking for a pair to trade with, you can change that order form again if it gets clicked out.

The Ideal Set-Up

So here’s the ideal outcome: you signed up for your prop trading challenge you clicked cTrader as your platform of choice. You’re using your brokerage’s charts on one screen and you have c Trader on another. You make your decisions on your own broker’s charts – those were the ones you use to backtest – and you just submit your position size you use your stop loss and take profit to calculate how much you want to risk for this trade. Lastly, you fill out your position size accordingly. They do the math for you right there and when you see the signal to go on your broker’s charts, you submit the order on cTrader and that’s it.

You don’t touch anything else. You don’t use their charts to trade with and it’s a very simple, quick process.

So that’s the number one reason why I suggest cTrader over mt4/mt5 is that you’re not actually going to use them as a platform. Instead, you’re just using them as ordering services where you can set up your trade position very quickly, easily, with the math calculated out for you and get on with your trading day or your day in general.

Overall, I like cTrader. (See my post on their best features, here) They have nice charts. But for the purpose of trading like a professional, I believe it’s best to use prop firm’s platforms only as places where you enter your orders – not where you analyze charts.

How to Create Day Trading Goals for 2022

If you’re the disciplined and organized trader I think you are or at least aspire to be, then you may be getting excited for the ultimate goals planning event celebrated around the world. While the New Year is a time for parties, celebration, and reflection, we, as traders, are eager to do better or maintain our profitability from last year by sitting down and making some serious trading goals for the year ahead.

If you like to read personal development books as much as I do, you’ll notice a trend among authors like Brendon Burchard, Marie Forleo, Brian Tracey, and Napoleon Hill, that they all encourage you to make serious goals.

Why?

Because when we put a goal down on paper, our brain gets to work on making a vision happen.

By setting an intention, we have an idea of what we want and give ourselves the time frame, that is, the year ahead, to make it happen.

However, not all goals are created equal.

The method with which you use to form your goal can increase or decrease your likelihood of achieving it.

A Research Study on New Year’s Resolutions and Goal Setting

A group of researchers in Sweden did a study on new year’s resolutions by taking three groups of people and giving them various levels of support, instructions, and extra guidance on goal creation to see which one would be most likely to not only achieve their goals but also sustain commitment over the long term.

The first group was given no instruction or support apart from being asked to write down their new year’s resolution. The second group was given a bit more support and was told how to find an accountability buddy. They also received check in’s from the research group and were given a little bit of written advice on how to maintain goal commitment. The third group was given the same support as group two but was also taught how to create SMART goals, as well as what they called interim goals, which were smaller goals that could be completed immediately in order to make early progress towards longer-term goals. They also received a couple more reminders and check-ins with the research team, scheduled once per quarter.

Now, be prepared to be surprised, because this study’s outcome is not what you think. So it turned out, by the end of the year, when asked if the participants felt like they had achieved their goals, Group 2 was the most likely to report feeling successful, while Group 1 came next and Group 3 had the lowest success rate of them all.

Having clear goals and a regular support system didn’t necessarily make the third group more likely to achieve their goals over the others.

Now, let’s deconstruct this a bit.

First of all, the researchers noted that the individuals in group 3 had to create very clear goals with specific measurements, while group 1 could write whatever they want.

So someone from group 3 could say they want to lose 25lbs by the end of the year while someone from group 1 could have made a vague resolution to lose weight.

For all we know, that group 1 person didn’t even step on a scale all year, they could have gone with just a felt sense that wasn’t accurate. Group 3 was better able to say whether a specific goal was achieved or not, while group 1 and 2 could give an answer to make themselves look better even if they had no evidence to support the claim.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the main difference between Group 2 and Group 3 was the additional instructions for making smart goals.

Group 2 could make the same vague goals as group 1, but they were given check-ins and added instructions for maintenance along the way. There was a lot more wiggle room for reflection and course correction.

Ultimately, like many research studies, another study and further research are needed to work out some of the underlying variables at play.

2022 Day Trading Goals

However, the reason why this study is still interesting for us as traders is that when we sit down to create our goals, we shouldn’t think of goal setting as a one-and-done event, but instead as the beginning of a new routine.

The most important aspect of goal setting isn’t necessarily the goal itself, but the routine act of checking in with your goals and needing to course correct in the face of unexpected setbacks.

What you do with them over the long run is more important than how you start.

So I’m going to share with you all 5 steps you can take to make an effective plan for goal-setting this new year.

We’ll talk about the kinds of goals you should set as a day trader and the system you’ll need to create in order to make continuous progress over the year.

5 Steps to Creating Day Trading Goals for 2022

Step 1) Make Clear General Goals

For the first step, you’re going to make some clear yet general goals, such as wanting to learn how to day trade Forex, passing a prop trading challenge, or finally achieving consistent profit over a series of months.

List no more than 5.

It can also be useful to include goals that tell you how much you want to make per month to hit a budget or lifestyle target, but I recommend giving yourself a range, such as returning 4-6% of your account per month, because markets and the best of strategies can change with more profitable and less profitable months. I don’t want you to be tempted to trash a decent strategy if it’s not hitting your exact target every month.

I also recommend including at least 1 goal that isn’t based on money.

This could be making a goal to commit to the same exact strategy for 60 days, or reading three books from my recommended disciplined trading reading syllabus.

Here’s an example of a list of goals you could have for 2022:

1) Get consistently profitable on a quarter-to-quarter basis

2) Learn and trade only the Disciplined FX Scalping strategy for at least three months

3) Read “Trading in the Zone”, “High Probability Trading”, and “High-Performance Habits”

4) Pass the FTMO challenge

5) Grow personal account to $25k

Step 2) Know Your Why

For the second step, I want you to think deeply about why you chose each goal.

For example, getting consistently profitable on a quarter-to-quarter basis could mean that you’ve proven to yourself that you’re a disciplined trader and that you’re ready to go for a prop trading challenge.

Growing a $25k account could mean that you may be able to start returning enough money to start growing a hefty emergency fund for yourself.

Day Trading Goals 2022 By understanding why you are doing this thing, you will feel more committed to the challenge. And bringing that emotion to your goals is a big catalyst in helping you stay on track over the long run.

If you find yourself attached to your why you can more easily get back up after being knocked down.

It’s easy to change your mind about trading a certain strategy, but it’s not as easy to change your desperate desire for financial freedom.

Knowing why we are choosing a goal will help us stay committed.

Step 3) Make a Plan and Schedule the Months You’ll Achieve Your Goal

For the third step, you’re going to start to make a plan and give yourself an idea of when things should happen.

In the same study on new years resolutions that I mentioned earlier, the researchers also found that a common trait of participants who failed to achieve their goal often assumed that they would work on the goal later in the year and ended up procrastinating their way to failure.

It’s important to break down big goals into smaller parts that we can get started on now, so that we can begin to build momentum for the long-run.

If you’re familiar with any of my other content on discipline, you’ll know that I believe discipline has nothing to do with willpower and everything to do with building smart habits.

If you can break your goals down into habits that you perform regularly, such as reading one of those trading books for ten minutes a day or following the same ruleset of a strategy each trading session, then you will be more likely to achieve your long term goal than if you aimed for some big, vague event.

So take your goals, break them down into smaller parts, and decide when you want to hit those smaller goals.

Don’t worry about when you’ll achieve the big year goals unless there is a specific date that the goals need to be completed by. 2022 Trading Goals

I often find that things don’t always go according to plan, and when I try to rush things with day trading, I could make costly mistakes.

So don’t worry about when you think you should pass your FTMO challenge. Instead, focus on when you want to perform a backtest for the strategy you’ll use and plan when you’d like to start your first challenge.

You can break the goal of passing the FTMO challenge down into five parts, such as researching both the challenge and tips for risk management and psychology for prop trading, deciding what strategy you’ll use, deciding what risk management strategy you’ll perform, signing up for the challenge, and completing a checklist of your rules for each trading challenge session. Then decide on what you can start on this month and write down what month you’ll work on the other steps.

Step 4) Understand What Will Change and What Is At Risk if You Fail

The fourth step in this goal-setting process is to look at each of your goals and write down what would be different in your life if you achieve them.

So if you pass a prop trading challenge you could have extra income to fund your hobbies or you could even consider leaving the job you hate.

If you read three good books on day trading then you can learn what to do to behave like a professional trader and make some solid money.

If you have more money you could finally take that international trip, go back to school, or move somewhere that feels safe and beautiful. You could afford a gym membership, organic food, and take care of yourself at an optimal level. Money tends to have a way of making other goals easier to achieve.

Similarly, after you finish this list of the ways your life could be made better by achieving the goal, I want you to write a list of what would happen if nothing changes.

Would your situation remain the same? Would it be worse?

Day trading is inherently risky, if you don’t commit to improving your trading discipline and skills, then you could end up losing hundreds or thousands of dollars by the end of the year.

There are always repercussions for not completing your goal, so you need to keep these in the back of your mind as motivation alongside the positive outcomes, too.

Step 5) Schedule Time to Review Your Goals

For the last step you need to schedule time to review your goals. This is the part of the process that will turn your goals into a system.

Napoleon Hill and other success writers like him recommend reviewing your goals every single day.

Researchers Locke and Latham (2006) from the University of Maryland and the University of Toronto found that goals are often only effective when they are used in combination with feedback.

You need to find a way to be able to tell whether you’re on target with your goal or not and check in on that progress regularly.

At the very least, I think you need to review your goals every week and make a check-in every month to see if you need to adjust any of the goals to meet new expectations, situations, or methods.

For myself, I have a list of annual goals that are broken down into quarterly goals, those quarterly goals are broken down into monthly goals. Each week I review my monthly and quarterly goals to make my weekly goals. Every day I review my weekly goals in the morning and plan my daily tasks so that I’m always doing something to get closer to accomplishment each day.

The theme of this tutorial is that clarity of your vision alone won’t ensure success.

You need to actively and regularly work your goals and your goal-setting system in order to stay focused, on track, and agile in the face of unexpected changes. 2022 Day Trading Goals

I hope you found these five steps useful, be sure to take notes if you want to implement this process for yourself this new year and let me know in the comments section below what you’re eager to achieve in the next 12 months.

I wish you all the best of strength and luck, and I’ll see you in the markets, take care.

Interview with the 5%ers Head of Trading and Risk Management Desk

I have a very special treat for you today!

This past week I had the opportunity to interview Rubin, one of the team members of the 5%ers, who has both run their marketing and is now involved in heading their risk management and trading desk.

Rubin came to the 5%ers from trading options with a group in Tel Aviv, and is very knowledgeable and experienced in risk management practices and trading psychology.

So why am I interviewing the 5%ers?

After hearing about a few of my students in the Disciplined FX Scalping Course either taking or preparing to take a challenge with this firm, I decided to do some research.

Even though there’s a lot of information about the 5%ers advice for passing their prop trading challenges on their own blog, I wanted to talk to someone, face to face, to find out what separates the traders who pass and stay with the firm for the long term from those who are stuck in a cycle of challenge failure and retries.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that this interview with Rubin completely hit home for me on some of the key risk management principles and by the time we were down chatting, I felt so much clarity on what successful risk management looks like for their specific prop trading model. (Hint, it has nothing to do with whether you’re a scalper or a day trader). But I’m going to stop right here and let Rubin’s ideas tell the story.

Hope you enjoy!

Productive Relaxation

With the holidays upon us, tis’ the time for our usual routines to get a little..jumbled!

Whether traveling for family or friends, dealing with setbacks to diet intentions or drinking limits, or fighting some of the winter blues, life can feel both exciting and overwhelming right now.

Nonetheless, unusual schedules and plans can sometimes offer atypical opportunities to carve out some space for yourself. Many folks are able to get some time off work during the next week, and even if your social life is about to get ramped up, it’s possible to make time to take a break and do some personal development work.

As day traders, this means we get to take a few days off of trading, or even a whole week or two, while markets are lower in volume and volatility.

However, just because we’re not trading, doesn’t mean we can’t use this opportunity to reflect on where we are on the learning curve and do something to educate ourselves on new trading tactics and discipline skills.

Learning can be a very joyful and enriching experience! It’s far easier to get engrossed in learning a skill when you know you have time and space to go as deep as you like! Activities like reading and watching YouTube videos about trading (like those on the Disciplined FX YouTube channel) can be relaxing and inspiring with the right mindset and environment.

Thus, here are some ways you can develop yourself as a trader this week while also giving yourself some respite and rest!

<< WANT A LIST OF RESOURCES TO USE FOR ANY OF THE FOLLOWING ACTIVITIES? CHECK OUT OUR FREE STUDY GUIDE! >>

5 Activities for Productive and Relaxing Ways to Develop Yourself as a Day Trader

Grab a trading book or personal development book (great for developing discipline!) and go to your favorite coffee shop, cafe, or even a pub. Get your favorite holiday drink. Sit down with your book, a notebook, and pen, as well as headphones for playing a soothing playlist (I recommend calm jazz!), and allow yourself the time and space to enjoy the experience of reading and learning for an hour or more.
Grab your favorite holiday treat (or drink), go somewhere you can wrap up in a blanket and get cozy, like your couch or bed, and watch trading videos on your phone, tv, or computer. Keep a notebook nearby to jot down good ideas!
Take a soothing bath, with music, bath bubbles, and spend at least fifteen minutes visualizing your trading goals for the coming year. Imagine what it would feel like to make money from prop trading or build your account to a size that lets you quit your day job. Think about what you need to do to get there. After the bath, write some of your ideas down in a journal or electronic note.
If you’re flying for the holidays, be sure to bring a trading resource or download a video you can study during your flight. This is one of the best environments to focus on with less distractions! Some of my most powerful insights and journaling experiences were from reading during international flights. This is prime learning time!
Similar to #3, you can go for a long walk, jog, or run, and listen to audiobooks, YouTube videos, or just reflect on your trading goals while getting fresh air and moving oxygenated blood throughout your body!

productive relaxation trading Almost all of these activities can be performed even if you’re not at home for the holidays. If you need to, make a hard boundary with family and friends for at least ONE HOUR of time for yourself! (#1 and #5 are particularly good for “getting away”)

If you’re as determined to succeed with day trading as I think you are, you’re going to want to make the most of your time, even when you’re on break from trading or from work.

Furthering your personal development and trading education are prime activities during periods of rest and reflection. I hope you can use these sample experiences to make time for yourself this week and prepare for a new trading year ahead! I want this to be the year for you when you accelerate and make it in the markets!

Happy Holidays, everyone!

If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to the Disciplined FX newsletter to get posts like these sent to your inbox each week!

3 BEST Books on Day Trading

I wonder how you’re feeling as you dive deeper and deeper down this rabbit hole of day trading for profit.

You may be feeling anxious, disappointed that you’re not where you thought you’d be by now, perhaps overwhelmed by all the information that’s out there, or maybe just eager and thirsty for knowledge that can help you focus on what you need to do to achieve your goals.

I want to share with you some resources that can help appease all of these feelings and leave you with a more structured conception of what it takes to become a profitable trader.

–But first – If you don’t know my story, I’m a Ph.D. student in the field of business and entrepreneurship, and I first taught myself how to day trade after developing a chronic illness and needing to look for ways to make money from home. After two years of lots of failure, persistence, and reflection on what I was doing, I was able to achieve profitability with day trading Forex. So a big part of what helped me break gravity and get into a streak of profitability involved consuming a ton of content on day trading and performance mindset.

Now, while I definitely learned a lot from YouTube, a big portion of what actually helped me to organize my own trading system and strategies involved reading copious books on these subjects. I believe that reading books helped me understand trading in a structured way and watching youtube was useful for filling any holes in that education and also finding inspiration in others’ stories of success.

So today, I’m going to share with you three of the most powerful and enlightening books about how to day trade, be it with Forex, Stocks, or Crypto – and become profitable by creating your own system and honing your discipline.

What all of these books have in common is that they’re written for beginners, they’re very well structured by breaking each component down into bite-sized bits, and tend to be all-encompassing in their discussion of what makes for profitability.

I’m also going to share with you a bonus book that has been the greatest catalyst in not only my trading progress but other roles in my life, such as pursuing a Ph.D. and starting a business, so be sure to stick around to the end to find out more.

Alright, let’s dive in!

3 BEST Beginner Books on Day Trading

1) “Come Into My Trading Room” – Alexander Elder

The first book on this list is actually the first book I ever read about day trading.

At the time, I was looking to learn to day trade stocks, but I managed to find some good books that outline a generalized approach to trading any market, including Forex. So Alexander Elder’s “Come Into My Trading Room,” was the best possible resource for my virgin day trader brain to become intimate with and develop an idea of what a well-structured routine and system could look like.

In this book, Elder talks about the 3 crucial elements of day trading success which involve what he calls the 3 M’s: Mind. Method, and Money Management.

Notice that Elder first discusses your trading mindset before even talking about strategies and risk management. Elder and I both encourage you to take your trading psychology and discipline very seriously and treat this aspect of your trading with the same level of interest and study as you would technical analysis or building a strategy.

In this book, he also talks about practical elements of trading, such as selecting the right equipment, how to keep a trading journal and equity log, and matters of position sizing and technical analysis. This book was such a boon to creating a map in my mind as to what I needed to do to get started and create an organized system to a trading routine and learning how to develop my own discipline.

2) “High Probability Trading” – Marcel Link

The second book on this list is similar to the first, as it’s also a general guide to trading, but spends more time focusing on basic technical analysis and important components of a strategy, such as determining entry and exits.

“High Probability Trading” by Marcel Link is a fantastic read if you want to learn more about technical analysis without getting overwhelmed, as many other traditional recommendations for books on technical analysis tend to be very dense and written in somewhat droll language.

He also explains what makes for high probability trades, such as with having a good reason for the trade when you see a confluence of positive signals and being able to identify what are bad reasons for a trade, such as with feeding an impulsive desire to jump in on a fast movement in the market. Like Elder, he also talks about the crucial components of trading with discipline, keeping an organized trading routine, and how to manage your funds.

3) “The Daily Trading Coach” – Brett N. Steenbarger

The third book on this list is specifically about trading psychology. “The Daily Trading Coach” by Brett N. Steenbarger is a useful resource that can be read like a day-by-day book since it’s broken down into 101 lessons about developing your discipline and managing your emotions.

I read this by reading two lessons a day, and it was incredibly useful for developing a better awareness of what I was doing that was causing so much failure and how I could turn that around by implementing specific habits and exercises to locate and correct the bad behavior.

The Daily Trading Coach Brett Steenbarger So these three books are a great place to start if you’re looking to either begin your day trading career or finally achieve some of your long-standing trading goals. I can’t emphasize enough that reading is a trading edge if you can make it a habit. You’re going to find much more thoughtful and well-structured advice from a book than a mishmash of youtube videos you find online.

Trust me, regularly reading a book on day trading is a necessary part of your trading education and long-term success. If you’d like a list of trading books I recommend every day trader to read in order to get profitable and build the life of your dreams, be sure to download my FREE list of study resources!

Now, before we go, I want to mention one more book that gets ~a little meta~ and can help you think about how structuring your trading system is part of a bigger plan for your overall life goals and success.

BONUS: High Performance Habits – Brendon Burchard

The book “High Performance Habits” by Brendon Burchard is probably the most high-leveraging book I’ve ever read and re-read time and again.

When I read this book and implement its advice and exercises, my entire life improves for the better, including my trading progress. Burchard talks about habits involved with six key areas of clarity, energy, productivity, necessity, influence, and courage, which combined make for a life that is effective, efficient, and meaningful.

I imagine day trading for you isn’t the end goal. There are powerful things you want to do with the discipline and confidence you develop, as well as the money you make. Reading the “High Performance Habits” can help you discover what that looks like and how to use your trading to get to a new level.

So I hope you found value in this lesson – please let me know by commenting below if there’s anything you’d like to learn more about these books and what I’ve learned by reading them. I hope you all have a successful trading week ahead, and I wish the best of strength and luck. Take care!

Don’t Take a Prop Firm Challenge Until You Do This

Okay traders, shotgun question.

Do you or do you not believe you understand all of the rules and stipulations involved with your next prop trading challenge?

Just reading the sign-up page isn’t good enough. While it would be ideal to have all of the rules regarding a prop firm challenge clearly written with language that’s simple enough for someone without a college education to understand, found all in one web page, such is not the reality.

I’ll begin this tutorial by saying that it’s important that you do not select a prop firm based on an advertisement or product page alone! You must read all of the FAQ sections first and then reach out to customer support to clarify anything that doesn’t seem 100% certain.

Assumptions alone can fail your challenge, even if you have a profitable strategy and exhibit good risk management. I’m going to repeat myself because it’s so important: If you want to find out every detail about what you can and cannot do in a challenge, you have to ask customer support.

Don’t be shy, just get on the prop firm’s home page and use the chatbox to connect with a representative.

Questions to Ask the Firm Before You Take a Prop Firm Challenge

So today I’m going to help you make sure you have correct and complete information before you even begin to choose the appropriate firm.

While standard information like expected take profit targets and daily drawdown limits are easily figured out by looking at most FAQ pages, You’re going to need to ask questions that might not even occur to you unless you’ve already traded a challenge. Furthermore, there are other types of questions you should ask that won’t even cross your mind until you’ve had a funded account.

So let me give you these questions now so you can prepare yourself ahead of time even if you’ve never traded with a prop firm before.

To help organize these different questions, we’re going to cover what you should ask about the trading challenge, the funded account, and regulations around failure and retry.

Questions About the Challenge

To properly analyze and select your challenge, your first step is to read the faq pages and product descriptions of any challenge you want to take. Once you’re clear on the basic information of the challenge, your next step is to contact customer support to clarify all the details that are and are not written publicly. Be sure to reword the answer through your own understanding and repeat it back to them for validation. If you don’t get a straight answer about something, don’t be afraid to push and ask again. Now here’s what you need to ask that person.

First, let’s go over a few questions you should ask about the prop trading challenge. I’m going to list them here one by one

Are there any consistency rules for lot sizes or amount risked?
Are stop loss and take profit orders required when setting a trade?
Once you hit the take profit amount are you allowed to take small micro trades to complete the rest of the trading days?
Are holidays included in the maximum number of days?
Do traders need to stay in trades for a certain amount of time?

Your questions should also include clarifying anything that’s oddly worded on a FAQ page (show example of Lux)

For example, I had to clarify with Lux Trading as to what they meant by saying 29 traded days for both the evaluation and advanced stage. Does that mean 29 for the total of the two stages or 29 for each one? It turns out they have a minimum trading day of 29 for each phase. So it could take at least two months longer to trade with a full account when using Lux as compared to say, FTMO. Lux also fails to explicitly describe their consistency rules for their challenges.

I had to find out in a chat that a trader has to more or less trade the exact position size with stop loss and take profit targets for pretty much every single trade. Even going from say 0.75% risked per trade to 0.5% risked per trade could discount some of those trading days.

Traders Central is a good example of firms that require consistency rules – they’ve changed what this implies over the last few months, but as of right now, it’s possible to decrease your position size by up to 75% once you hit the profit target. Luckily, they share this in the FAQ, so I didn’t need to hound them as hard about it.

Questions About Funded Accounts

Next, you’ll want to know about the rules regarding funded accounts as well. Just because your strategy and trading style works for a challenge doesn’t mean you can trade the same way with a funded account. For example, FTMO requires funded day trading accounts to close trades by the end of their business day in Prague and doesn’t allow trading 2 minutes before and after news releases. So your questions about the funded account should include:

Are there any additional rules for funded accounts? If so, what are they?
Do funded accounts require a minimum number of days traded each month?
If a trader ends the month with less than the initial balance but doesn’t break drawdown and maximum loss rules, does the account balance reset or do they need to continue to trade the same amount?
Can I get paid in my own country’s currency? If so, are there fees?
Can I ever freeze the account in order to take a break from trading?

Questions About Failure/Retry

Lastly, you’ll want to be sure about what happens should you fail your account. Some firms are willing to offer a discount for a second attempt even though it’s not listed on their page. Others are firm on their prices. Consider asking

Do you offer discounts on challenge retries?
If I pass the challenge but fail verification, can I get a free retry or discounted retry?

These questions merely touch the surface. If you can think of others that I haven’t listed here, please be sure to share below.

Again, assume nothing about your challenge and prop firm.

You need to gather as much information first before signing up because there may be rules that will prevent you from passing or staying with the prop firm over the long run.

There are also prop firms that are designed to fail even the best of traders, since there’s so much money to be made in selling challenges with the promise of making bank.

Above all keep your wits about you, be responsible, disciplined, and patient about the process.

wish you all the best of strength and luck, and I’ll see you in the markets. Take care.

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Disciplined FX LLC provides general information, educational courses, and material only. Disciplined FX LLC is not offering to Buy/Sell futures, stocks, commodities cryptocurrencies, or forex. Futures, stocks, spot currency, cryptocurrencies, commodities, and bonds come with significant potential risk. You must be aware of the risks and be willing to accept them in order to invest in the futures, stocks, commodities, cryptocurrencies, and forex markets. Do not trade with money you can't afford to lose. There is no guarantee that anyone will achieve profits or losses similar to those discussed on this website or in the educational products Disciplined FX LLC offers. Past performance of indicators or methodology is not indicative of future results. Andrew Bloom is not a licensed financial advisor. The results of your trading are your responsibility alone and no one else’s.

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